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Winter Quarter Essay — January 2004

The Artist and the Physical World
by Andrew Rush ©2003

Let's start with what 'physical' is.

As a 14 year old ranch chore boy in 1945, my day began in the dark at 4:30 AM, kicking the ribs of the grumpy wrangle horse out into the mountain pasture to look for the milk cows hiding in the wet willow bushes; 5:30, the milking pail clenched between my knees, head buried into a warm smelly cow's flank; 6:30, racing from the milk house to the kitchen with a large tin bucket full of freshly separated cream for Beulah the cook to add to the groaning breakfast table. The rest of the day would find me digging chunks of ice out of the sawdust in the ice house to load up the meat and food lockers for the day, splitting slab wood for a dozen fireplace wood boxes, oiling the leather harnesses for the next days haying teams, washing down the barn floor after the evening milking, scrubbing the big cooking pots after supper, then falling asleep like the dead, only to hear the 4:00 AM alarm announce another day to deal with that grumpy horse yet again. In those days life was, for all of us, all too physical.

Now, fifty plus years later, my day begins with the news on my radio alarm; turning off the electric blanket; switching on the coffeepot and the TV; turning up the thermostat, turning on the computer to check the e-mail , playing messages back on the answering machine, etc., all before breakfast.

Not that I would want to return to those grinding workdays of my youth. But that daily tactile experience of the physicality of the world is to a large extent in eclipse, hidden under the mesmerizing canned substitutes-an addictive diet of symbols and light projected imagery in all its magical multi-media forms, sometimes called 'virtual reality'.

So now I teach the fundamentals of drawing, not to the farm kids of America's past, like Thomas Hart Benton, but to urban dwellers of the 21st century's multi-media 'flatland'. Often, in my frustration to express the mystery of how to perceive a subject from both a two dimensional and a spatial understanding at the same time, I will invoke sculpture: "First", I say, "you must see like a sculptor, and then try to find a way to translate that experience into the two dimensional language of drawing".

I am not referring to the tricks of 'three dimensional effects' of chiaroscuro, etc., popular among those who work in arena of photo-realism. The drawing and painting of some modern masters, like Vincent Van Gogh or Georges Braque seem to me drenched in the physical, although the former we might call an 'expressionist', and the latter a 'cubist'.

My own interest in sculpture as an extension of my graphic work is inspired by important modern (and very tactile) y artists of the recent past, such as Picasso, Modigliani, and Matisse, who often turned to sculpture in order to reinvigorate the physicality of their own two dimensional work.

In that spirit we at The Drawing Studio have offered a basic sculpture course on several past occasions, knowing it to be not only an important part of developing the powers of observation in art, but a much needed antidote to the modern trance of virtual reality. Notwithstanding the ever-growing demand for our two dimensional studio courses, there has been almost no interest in the 3D classes. For the 'flatlanders' of our time, 3D physical art seems to be a curiously hard concept to activate .

Yet we persist, and once again this quarter present the opportunity of sculpture. Because I have come to realize that the moment our 21st century 'flatlander' student reconnects with the utter physicality of the world-the weight, smell, tactility and density of matter in all its richness and variety-his/her work takes on a permanent and personal authority that returns us to what indeed the whole planet has forgotten: that life's sacred mysteries, like most magic, are cleverly hidden out in the open, in the physical.

We invite you to find out for yourself what a course in sculpture may open up in your own artistic development.

©2003 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission