From The Drawing Studio founder
“…it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living
human being. … we need to finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them.”
—Alvin Noe, "Arts and the Limits of Neuroscience", The Stone, NYT, Dec. 4, 2011.
With this publication of The Drawing Studio’s updated 2012 schedule, we enter our 20th year, a very different time from our beginning days in 1992.
Little did we know then that we had entered upon a cultural ‘wind-change’, driven by the velocity of a worldwide multi-media visual transformation that touches everyone, a phenomenon we are barely beginning to
understand.
Responding to a new imperative to awaken to the visual world, our learning community at TDS now includes many hundreds of extraordinary people from all ages and walks of life who are drawn to our
programs of visual learning, often with life-changing results far beyond their first expectations.
I have become very restless lately as I try to relearn how to talk about these expanded new waves of interest in art learning, because it is bluntly obvious to me that something is happening that is much deeper
and relevant to all of us that is not precisely or only about art anymore.
While I don’t quite have a handle on it, I can certainly note that the skills of art learning are no longer a specialist domain open only to professionals, nor are they even the casual avocation for people who have the leisure time to make art. What I can say for sure is that learning how to observe and communicate visually may now be one of the most critical new skills of our time. The people coming to TDS are some of the
most personally motivated individuals I know, and are looking to manifest their lives as a very new kind of alert, creative and energized human being. And we at TDS are deeply challenged to match their seriousness,
because I believe that we represent a generation of new life-long learners desperately needed at this moment of human history to help awaken us from a dangerous trance of self-consumption.
During this my 80th year, as I have churned through my own restlessness about all this, I had a personal wake up call in April, when I had a heart attack--one severe enough to jolt me awake from my own lifetrance.
I am of course grateful to be still here and given a margin of time to attend to life changes that might add quality to what remains of my life, such as reducing personal stress, giving new attention to diet
and exercise, and opening my heart to others more deeply. This last life change is especially important to me because I absolutely know now that my heart attack arose from failing to acknowledge and express
the grief and ongoing loss of the persons and other aspects of my life that are disappearing.
Oddly, the deepest grief that I had hidden from myself was not that of beloved people or even my personal death, but a crushing impacted anguish for the imminent end of our beautiful home, this earth
that is now in the throes of a deep illness, unattended by those in a blind trance of human ignorance and alienation—this planet Earth that is dying, our only essential inheritance worth leaving to our
grandchildren.
The most conservative calculations of recent hard science predict the end of most large species of fish, elephants, lions, and thousands of smaller species within ten years, driven by climate warming from our
atmospheric garbage, ocean pollution and the erosion of land, water and air quality. In the meantime, as our world-wide ecosystems unravel along with the quality of life for most people, we plod along in our trance of
consumer practices that presume our tomorrows will be like today.
I never thought I would risk sounding so naïvely annoying and manic, but I have had my wake-upcall, and I can’t deny this is the real situation. At the same time. I am very glad for The Drawing Studio
in my life because if ever there was a time for a massive infusion of awakened, creative and spiritually connected people, that time is now. We need no more rants of anger and frustration; what we really need are
real, home-grown and accessible ways to wake up and connect to our real life on this real earth. Otherwise, considering the massive environmental destruction in motion, our only individual choice is living a life over
the top of the numbness, cynicism or deep depression in one last miserable gesture of isolating oneself from such an unbearable truth as the collapse of our home and all that sustains our life.
So I invite you who are holding this Schedule Update in your hand to act. If you have never taken a drawing class, please start now. If you used to take classes, but haven’t lately, come back. If you are active at TDS,
keep going and share the value of your experience with others. Tell others The Drawing Studio is waiting for them, because what we offer is exactly in line with what people need right now. What we have at
The Drawing Studio are tested programs for people starting at any age or level of learning. We can deliver three practical skills we most need in our time:
1. The Practice of Paying Attention: Being more awake can be learned, especially when this skill is visually connected to the natural world. By introducing people to the
simplest practices of drawing at TDS, we also access the tactile and emotional skills of a much larger biological intelligence than just what the eye collects optically.
2. The Practices and Tools of Image-Making: The ability for clear personal visual expression grows from that core skill of knowing how to practice, using our hands, our spirit, and our mind. At TDS
we offer master teachers of art who are also well rooted in their own work, which means that learning includes not only the data, but the joys and deep satisfaction of creative visual expression.
3. The Support of a Visual Learning Community. TDS is a community of visual learners and a real place—as informal as it is, TDS is not just a friendly club of co-workers, but joins us to a
vastly broader shared creative spirit, expressed in conversations and interactions with our neighbors. From sharing the skills of art in the company of others comes new thought, new relationships, new
action and the joy of bringing fresh light and vision into being together.
I know TDS is not the only example of new kinds of
learning in action around the globe; I am encouraged
by many different signs of awakening, in people all
around me, from the trance that holds most of us in a
death grip of helplessness. I am grateful that we have
created in The Drawing Studio a way of passing the
powerful skills of visual communication into the hands
of the people who will certainly be on the frontier of
what must happen now to bring us back from the edge
of the roof.
In my 80th year, the clearest voice I hear is a greatgrandchild yet to be born, who is asking me: “Great Grandfather, did you not see what was coming? If you didn’t see, why not? And if you did, what did you do
about it to assure me the home you would want me to have? “
—Andrew Rush © 2011
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