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Originally Posted by Anthony Emmolo
I remember hearing a teacher in a drawing class make a comment to a young 18 year old know it all, that her peach was not drawn well. Her angry response, "That's the way II see it!? just made the teacher walk away. Can you teacher her in that moment? Of course not.
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Anthony,
Thankfully I had lots to learn when I signed up for multi-year studio training, and thankfully I knew that I knew nothing. So when an indelicate appraisal came along, and the suggestion made that my drawing wasn't even salvageable and that I had to start over, I knew what the score was. Twenty years earlier I had blundered out into freelance writing with the attitude that every self-referential filler I wrote was God's gift to Gutenberg, but I was proved to be wrong, and the lesson was not lost on me.
Your recounting this young student's attitude is instructional. In the New Conceit, now that so many are going for formal training, we have the "my guru/studio is more classically pure than yours" comparisons going on all over the place. Though one of the most iconic images of the artist is one with the arm extended, thumb gauging a proportional measurement along a vertical or horizontal pencil or brush, the business of measuring is now being regarded as a crutch of some sort, an impediment to pure "seeing."
This misinterprets the value of the tool. It confuses the wooden rocking chair with the hand planes that shaped the seat and the arms.
One of the benefits of the sight-size work that I was required to begin with was that another pair of eyes, looking through the same reference plumb lines to the subject that I had been looking through, could say with near absolute conviction, "The distance from the top of the kneecap to the ankle bone is too long," and there was almost no way to dispute it. If you said, "Well, that's the way I see it," a kindly instructor might reply, "In a couple of years, maybe you won't be making those kinds of mistakes anymore, but for now you need to re-measure," and he'd hand the thread back to you and move on to the next student. A less kindly instructor would have a different response prepared.
Point being, the instruction can range from measurable standards on one end, to "play it like you feel it" on the other. If a student wants to be able to execute work accurately, including not just drawing but deftly judging values and hues and compositional sight lines, it's useful at least in the early training to have an objective standard by which the student's effort can be measured. Then nobody gets away with peaches that look like deflated basketballs.
I wonder if art schools weren't being driven for about four or more decades there by an anything-goes generation (or two or three), students who didn't want "the man" telling them how to express themselves, rules-are-for-squares, let it all hang out, morphing in the later stages to "how can I make money off of this with the least effort?" -- and when we got to the other side of those years and looked back, we realized we couldn't draw a human face or figure with correct proportions.
But A LOT of people did learn, the ones with inquisitiveness and drive and talent and, yes, good fortune to find themselves in the right places, in spite of what was going on up on the ivy hills. Now they're teaching the rest of us. That's a pretty nice turn of events.
Still, not everyone is ready to have their peaches dissed. And still, walking away is the proper response.
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