Formal art education, again

[Anthony Emmolo]

Hello all,

I am pro art school. I believe they get a bad rap. Here's my story. It was back in the 1980's:

I went to both the School of Visual Arts, and frequented The Art students League, both in New York City. Both were very very different experiences.

SVA was filled with a bunch of streetwise, kids who in many cases knew it all already. 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. Other students would leave the 6 hour studio classes for lunch, and not return for three hours. In classes that didn't't permit music, student's would be drawing and bopping their heads to their Sony Walkman's.

I asked myself, "Are medical students doing this? Are law students doing this? Of course not. At least not the successful ones.

I, at the age of 21, was three years older than my peers. The weaknesses I described in the students, were not my weaknesses. Mine were all based on vanity. I'd spend more time looking at other easels rather than the model, and then bang my head against the wall wondering why the drawings were better than mine. I'd often whip myself into a frenzy that would just get serve in getting in the way of anything sensitive coming out of my pencil or brush, depending on which class I was in.

At 21, I was intelligent enough to look carefully at the examples of work by the instructors, and choose well. However, my vanity got in the way o f my education, the same way childishness got in the way of many of the other students.

My vanity infected my time at the Art Student's League as well. I could never enjoy it because there you really did have some talented students to compare yourself to. Wow! anyone with my vanity would get clobbered there, looking at other easel's rather than the model.

Our culture isn't the type of culture that offers a lot of academic stye lifestyles with eight year olds spending an entire day drawing from plaster casts until they get it right. Would I have been able to sit around drawing plaster casts? Would I have valued them enough at such a young age? Ask yourself those questions having grown up in the USA.

THE REMEDY FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN ART TRAINING

Go to an art school. There are good ones. Look at the instructors artwork. Choose the most talented ones, and ask about reputation. Leave the music home. It would have gotten in the way of Leonardo at the formative years as well. Especially today's music. Along with the music, eave the ego home. YOU DON'T KNOW IT ALL AT THE AGE OF 18! Do like the law students, the nursing students, the business students. Attempt to learn something, not to express yourself. Then you will. I promise. Sorry to sound like your father, but your only 18. You don't have a whole lot to express anyway. Learn, and in time you'll have a lot of depth to express.

The problem is, how many 18 year olds do you know that don't think they know it all?

Anthony
I'm doing it now, at the age of 43 in China, with plaster busts and more humility, and I really enjoy it. I don't care about what is on other poeple's easels and I'm learning more now.

[Anthony Emmolo]

Just a little more...

By the way, I'm writing about people I've met in my life, not anyone here. Please understand that clearly.

Maybe I'm down on art students, but I liked the thought by Kimber's teacher. "...now you just need to do a couple of hundred paintings." I believe a lot of people aren't willing to do that. They'd rather blame the teachers.

[Steven Sweeney]

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.

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.