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Spring Quarter Essay — March 2009   Here Comes Everybody by Andrew Rush   ©2009

Quote shown above..."I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree." Giorgio Morandi

One day as a young artist studying in Florence Italy in 1958, I happened into a gallery that was showing some small modest paintings of bottles and other little table objects by an artist from Bologna. As I contemplated each work, something seemed clearer in my personal search for my own art path. Not long after, I found a newspaper photo of the artist that I pinned to my studio wall, where it lived for years as a kind of private talisman that re-oriented me whenever I lost heart or direction.

So now, fifty years later, I happen to read about the first American retrospective exhibition of Giorgio Morandi (1889-1964), loaned for only a brief showing at the Metropolitan Museum. Without another thought, I cleared a long weekend out of my busy life and flew to New York, where I spent hours contemplating the journey of his life’s work, full of appreciation for the clarity he slowly earned for himself. Later as I flew back to Arizona I realized for the first time that while I had long known of Morandi’s influence on my own art life, I had not realized how his work had contributed to bringing The Drawing Studio into being.

And what exactly did Morandi’s images inspire in me? Simply put, he showed me that the quiet practice of looking into the humblest corners of one’s daily life was totally sufficient as a pathway to manifest one’s inner vision. In a way, my entire certainty about the central importance of the skills of observation began on that day in Italy when I first saw Morandi’s small, intelligent and elegant paintings and etchings.

The Drawing Studio is simply an extension of his influence as relevant not only to the special field of art, but to all of us living in this era of relentless mass visual media that is the central transformation of our century. For the first time, a rigorous practical education in how we see is an obvious need for every one of us who intend to participate in the conversations of our time, artist or not -- and is as practical to modern life as reading and writing.

The student drawings in this issue of the TDS Newsletter show this process in action. They are randomly selected from recent Drawing Fundamentals sessions taught by Paul Mohr, one of our master teaching artists, and are produced by a wide range of ‘lay’ people--active and retired nurses and lawyers, teachers and carpenters, office workers and ranchers—all just a few weeks into their very first drawing studies.

Equally relevant to this discussion about the growing interest in studio art learning by ‘everyone’ is that their teacher, Paul Mohr, like his most of his students, is not an art-school product either. His formal education was in the sciences, and his later work experience was in construction and property management. But through the years Paul also developed on his own a rigorous drawing practice from observation. He tells me that along the way he could not help but notice that his ‘awakening eye’ also brought fresh vision to every other activity of his work life. Paul’s clarity about the broad value of drawing for anyone is not a theory, but comes from his own life in a way that resonates with his students through his teaching. Paul is a living human demonstration of what the composer Igor Stravinsky once noted, “The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.”

Drawing as it is practiced at TDS goes far beyond the conventional stereotype of something one does with a pencil. The deceptively simple first assignments address how we see only what we are prepared to see. These assignments often rattle one’s comfort zone in the early stages, but also expose the much richer adventure that lies waiting.

For example, we discover that the marks we make to record what we see do not work like a camera. Drawing is very physical and carries our physical DNA into the process. Even from the time we were happily scribbling as a child, the feeling of doing it is primitive and deep in an inside-nourishing way. We are not just looking when we draw, we are literally participating, one may even say we are creating what we are looking at. This can be an unsettling sensation at first because it challenges the notion of drawing as only representation in favor of a process of personal engagement with our subject that is much more intimate, more hands on, and involves our feelings, our ‘inner’ eye as it were.

As with learning anything new, it is natural to start with small steps, using simple objects, often painted white to help isolate their form and shape.  Later, as students acquire wider familiarity with tool and measurement skills, we expand into working in different ways, inspired by a variety of different kinds of ‘things’, both natural and man-made (Most of the drawings presented here are examples of this phase). Along the way we are also broadening our vocabulary of mark-making and experimenting with different tools with which to look.

Then one day, the ante goes up. Instead of more ‘things’ to draw, students arrive at a session where a small 12” square mirror is propped up at each work station. The assignment: to make a self portrait, working for accuracy, and taking two hours to do it. After an initial stunned silence often comes a kind of helpless panic, in the form of joking (‘you’re not serious, are you?’), tears (‘god, those wrinkles’), etc. But with some encouragement, the room quiets down to confront the task, to see if we can indeed address the reality of that face in the mirror with the same skills we have been exploring with small objects.

Still, something is different. As we draw from our own face, we recognize we are stepping over a threshold into a new level of how seeing works because for the first time we are presenting ourself to ourself as our subject. Even through the filter of our self-consciousness ego, a human being is making a courageous thrust to penetrate one’s personal frontier to a new level of perception.  The conversation we now can call ‘art’ starts here, where the inner eye and outer eye begin to meet each other.

The good news is that we are now armed with some new skills that help us look with a new objectivity. We are also joined together in a shared community of learners all developing an expanded ability to observe our world, even willing to challenge that ‘self’ in the mirror in service of a broader understanding of life itself. 

This is the power of creation-in-action. Are we up for it? Because as the song says “Here Comes Everybody”.

Andrew Rush © 2009

 

 

©2008 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission