The Drawing Lesson
Idly turning the television on this morning to find a good programme to do the ironing to, I came across Saturday-morning children’s television, and a man giving a drawing lesson. He was rather over-enthusiastic in the way most children’s presenters feel they have to be, but what he said was interesting.
If you get a water-based felt tip pen, he said, and a paintbrush, and a glass of water, you can draw a ball, rather than just a circle. Firstly, you draw a circle like this, using the felt tip pen. Now, if you imagine the light coming from the top right-hand corner of the paper, the bottom left-hand side of the ball will be in darkness, won’t it? So if you get the paintbrush, and dip it in the water, and paint over the felt-tip pen line with the wet brush, it will smudge the ink and put shading on that side of the circle. And look! Because it has shading, the circle now looks like a ball, rather than just a circle. And now let’s try this cylinder - - and now this dinosaur - -
Well, it wasn’t rocket science, as they say, but I bet that seven-year-olds throughout the land (and many older, too) will have been grabbing their water-based felt tip pens and giving it a try: because many – perhaps most – children like drawing, and he had just taught them a simple technique to make their drawing better. And knowing you can draw better than you did yesterday is very satisfying.
That never happened when I was at school. The art teachers who “taught” me – the inverted commas are because they didn’t, really – believed that Art was Free Expression. All they did was provide us with sugar paper and poster paint and a topic (“The Jungle”, say) and let us get on with it.
Now that would have been considered a strange approach in any other subject (“Here are some numbers. Do what you like with them”) but that’s what they thought Art was, certainly at below-O-level age. And if you were good at other subjects, you were strongly discouraged from doing Art O-level, because it wasn’t really considered a Proper Subject – and actually, they way it was taught in the school I went to, it wasn’t.
Perhaps because of this “Art is Self-Expression” approach, the world – and especially the internet - is full of people who think that is the absolute truth. If they get a bit of paint and splash it about to express their anger, or their love, then that, they reason, is Art.
But it’s not, generally: because they lack the skill and/or the talent to communicate their passion to others. And I don’t think it’s art until you can do that.
If you get a water-based felt tip pen, he said, and a paintbrush, and a glass of water, you can draw a ball, rather than just a circle. Firstly, you draw a circle like this, using the felt tip pen. Now, if you imagine the light coming from the top right-hand corner of the paper, the bottom left-hand side of the ball will be in darkness, won’t it? So if you get the paintbrush, and dip it in the water, and paint over the felt-tip pen line with the wet brush, it will smudge the ink and put shading on that side of the circle. And look! Because it has shading, the circle now looks like a ball, rather than just a circle. And now let’s try this cylinder - - and now this dinosaur - -
Well, it wasn’t rocket science, as they say, but I bet that seven-year-olds throughout the land (and many older, too) will have been grabbing their water-based felt tip pens and giving it a try: because many – perhaps most – children like drawing, and he had just taught them a simple technique to make their drawing better. And knowing you can draw better than you did yesterday is very satisfying.
That never happened when I was at school. The art teachers who “taught” me – the inverted commas are because they didn’t, really – believed that Art was Free Expression. All they did was provide us with sugar paper and poster paint and a topic (“The Jungle”, say) and let us get on with it.
Now that would have been considered a strange approach in any other subject (“Here are some numbers. Do what you like with them”) but that’s what they thought Art was, certainly at below-O-level age. And if you were good at other subjects, you were strongly discouraged from doing Art O-level, because it wasn’t really considered a Proper Subject – and actually, they way it was taught in the school I went to, it wasn’t.
Perhaps because of this “Art is Self-Expression” approach, the world – and especially the internet - is full of people who think that is the absolute truth. If they get a bit of paint and splash it about to express their anger, or their love, then that, they reason, is Art.
But it’s not, generally: because they lack the skill and/or the talent to communicate their passion to others. And I don’t think it’s art until you can do that.
posted by Daphne at 5:16 pm
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