In response to student and teacher feedback, we have revamped our curriculum (details below). To refl ect the changes, we have terminated our traditional quarterly newsletter and calendar (a free publication issued four times a year for over 10 years). In its place we will now produce a calendar of courses and special events as a separate publication, to be issued twice a year. The fall calendar (this one) will list offerings and events for the entire year. A second smaller calendar, to be published in winter, will include changes and additions for the remaining year, including the summer.

The newsletter will now be a separate entity available free to Associates and by subscription to everyone. (Watch for details about publication.) It will focus on TDS news and activities of students, Associates, faculty, and the community. It will feature personal and educational essays, as well as visual art. The newsletter will invite a wider range of contributions from our TDS and larger visual arts community.

Why these changes?

1. To respond to student requests for clearer course formatting that lets people plan their schedules more fl exibly and well in advance. Various ways to access course information will soon be available on our website.
2. To create a model curriculum that lays out pathways leading to mastery, along with offering many flexible routes to follow one’s personal goals through four levels of study.
3. To create opportunities to deepen mastery and ways to stay involved to greater and lesser degrees depending on personal life circumstances.
4. To recognize the fi nancial reality that, while TDS is healthy and growing, our annual fund fell short, and we must cut expenses. Our newsletter—free to thousands all these years—is our single largest marketing and communications expense.

What are the changes in this new curriculum model?

Andy’s new book, The Nature of Drawing, is a history not only of his thinking about bringing studio art to people from all walks of life, but of the ongoing evolution of one person’s vision to that of an entire community of master teaching artists. Using his earlier model of studio learning (published in the Winter 2009 Newsletter) as a radiating process emanating from core fundamentals, TDS faculty recently took on rethinking this concept in more concrete steps.

Through a weekend faculty retreat and subsequent series of meetings, faculty designed new Fundamentals 3 courses in two areas: Color and Composition. They also clarifi ed the content and sequencing of courses leading to mastery in a variety of media and subject areas. Andy noted that he doesn’t know of any other place where the curriculum is both co-created and constantly evolved by a teaching group interacting with each other every step of the way.

The conditions for learning at The Drawing Studio are as rigorous as any serious art institution, but uniquely designed to serve people who are not ‘only’ students, but people with life and work obligations, on-going commitments etc.

The Drawing Studio curriculum is ‘user friendly.’ Our meeting times offer options that accommodate people’s varying schedules as well as many levels of learning skills. While we have no diplomas or grades, our core studies are rigorously planned and coordinated by our experienced studio teaching artists to produce the kind of learning that steadily leads to mastery.

The TDS Curriculum could be described as a radiating set of circles of practice-based art learning (as distinct from intellectual knowledge). Practice-based learning relies heavily on engaging in a practice over time, with individualized guidance, to develop perceptual and kinesthetic skills. In short, the learning is in the doing. What does practice-based learning teach us? A few examples:

• Rigor in managing oneself and a schedule of work
• The importance of paying attention as a disciplined skill
• The physical foundation of perception (i.e. the kinesthetic skills of making/creating/inventing)
• Handling the ‘I already know that’ mind, the obstacle to new vision
• Patience and how to get out of the way of one’s own learning
• Tolerance for ambiguity and the ‘unfi nished’ nature of all art
• The validity of multiple viewpoints
• The unique vision of each person as an essential contribution to all
• The role of group learning and the importance of a relationship with a trusted teacher as the conditions leading to mastery

The first circle is our Drawing Fundamentals, Level 1 and 2, program. This core experience has been refi ned and tested over 20 years, and involve the skills of observation, presence, and tool skills necessary to produce a rich vocabulary of mark-making. The second circle Fundamentals 3 enlarges core drawing skills to two signifi cant and complex domains: color and composition. The two Fundamentals 3 courses (Composition through Drawing and Drawing with Color) retain the focus on drawing because Drawing Fundamentals students’ familiarity and skill with graphite and charcoal is easily extended to colored pencil and pastel.

The third circle includes introductory courses in various media, including a new sampler course in painting media for those interested in painting but undecided about a particular pathway. These intro courses ground students in foundational skills—for example, tools and technologies, markmaking, color theory (or value relationships for b/w media), color/pigment mixing, composition, and subject matter—as they are expressed in a particular medium.

Finally, the fourth circle is about mastery. Mastery involves longer periods of relationship with a teacher and multiple opportunities to practice. At the same time, these pathways need to be broken into affordable, fl exible, and repeatable “chunks” that together lead to mastery in one or more areas, such as a medium, a subject, or a way of working. Mastery classes presume a background in fundamentals and introductory courses.

The Drawing Studio curriculum continues to be a work in progress. We look forward to your engagement and feedback.