Learning to draw and seeing Surbiton

To the shops on a nice autumn morning and decided to extend my outing as far as my wrecked hip would allow. So I went down to Maple Road and past its lovely plane trees, fine houses and a leafy Victorian Square till I heard organ music from St Andrew’s Church. St Andrews I've always thought as a forbidding dirty brick pile with Victorian ornament that’s trapped generations of soot. I’d never been in -- in fact had never noticed it was open.

I went inside: just a verger or functionary was there, busy, and the organist practising his Bach, nicely. I was very surprised by the building: I was in a huge light space with beautiful new oak pews, fine glass and spectacular brickwork -- the same as outside but clean. There had been a big restoration job, well done. The uncluttered floor invited movement and the seats sitting -- which I did for a listen and a look. A brochure explained it was 1870s and named the architect and stained glass artists, all unfamiliar to me but then they would be as I know little about Victorian churches. I looked around, at the story of Noah on the ceiling of a circular apse, at the brass plaques of commemorated and thanked Victorians and at the stained glass, for which you have to learn to ignore the thick black grid of window bars -- not difficult.

My main pleasures were in the vast, intricately textured volume of the building and the pictures, on the ceiling and in the stained glass. I'm strongly aware how experience of a few drawing classes, in which I'm the least competent student, has made me appreciate both the appearance of, particularly, people (I enjoyed sketching in the Royal Festival Hall concourse the other night) and the drawings of professionals. Going out through the porch I inspected a group of small stained glass windows at eye height. I could see they were essentially coloured drawings and admired the lines and the arrangements of shapes and spaces. No camera with me, sorry.

So everyone at school ought to be taught to draw properly. Perhaps they now are.

Ability to draw

I've always been struck by 19th and early 20th century writers were always doing sketches of each other and of the places they were staying in. Almost every writer whose biographies you look has been drawn by one of his friends or siblings, few of whom are known as artists. I’ve noticed it in English and Russian writers, and none of the drawings I've seen are bad. I’d be proud to have done any of them.
How did they learn? in the sorts of schools these writers went to -- the men anyway -- they wouldn’t have taught drawingl, would they? not in any serious way that would yield the sort of results we see.
I did O level art by going to the Art Club after school and though I wasn’t much good at drawing, I did make a start. But I've made no effort since and now I want to learn. I’d like to put drawings on (blank) postcards from my trips abroad as so many people used to, and do animals and scenes for the kids on letters, birthday cards and the like. And amuse myself in boring meetings or when telly’s boring...
So I've had a look online at evening classes that are offered round my way. There are indeed a few but I don’t think they’re what I need. I know what I need: it’s lots of practice in front of things, scenes and people, with other people so we can motivate each other and with a helpful tutor who’ll set the tasks and give advice.
Instead what I find is the usual course description bollocks that’s perhaps the effect of having to meet government vocational criteria to teach anything at all -- the idea of education for leisure or self-improvement having been expunged from the purposes of colleges and institutes. Thus:

Skills will be developed step by step through a series of carefully designed exercises.
We will start with the basics - how to hold a pencil - and progress at the end of six weeks to drawing a portrait with a difference!

A topic for each lesson follows, with objectives. The first is


Edges
Aim:  To realise the importance of objective observation in drawing.

Following an introduction to the course and basic studio craft, students will experiment with the mark making possibilities of different materials.

Then we have Relationships, Negative Spaces, Light and Shade, Making Plans and finally


A Drawing !
Aim:  For students to produce a rewarding drawing using all skills practised to date and testing their skills of objective observation.

Well, it might work -- much depends on the tutor and, as I say, the reality may be much more flexible.

But my instincts and educational experience are all against this approach. I disagree with the philosophy of starting with component sub-skills and only in lesson 6 putting them together. It’s fifty years since we realised that you don’t develop writing ability by first teaching words, then sentences, then connections, then paragraphs, but by having the kids writing a complete piece, even if only a sentence as long as it’s real writing and not a ‘carefully designed exercise’ -- from Day 1.

(Actually art teachers, too, knew this, as long ago as the 1870s, including one Thomas Ablett at Bradford Grammar School -- and they organised to resist the government’s prescriptions -- on which schools’ funding depended then too -- of exercises in drawing cubes, spheres and pyramids. I'll do a separate posting on Ablett.)

I want to be in a group that sits by the Thames and draws the ash tree opposite, or the bridge and buildings down the river or an old chap on a bench -- and myself, that too, as included in the exercises on the course. As for mark-making and how to hold a pencil, let the tutor show me the possibilities when I'm struggling with the foliage or the hairy surface of a coat. Knowledge at point of need, is the slogan for this sort of practical learning, not ‘front-end-loaded’ as David Layton used to say when talking at Leeds University about design and technology education.

I want to be able to sit down in front of something, or just with memory and imagination, and draw something that looks like it and is nice to look at.  How's that for sophisticated?

There’s another way to do it, one I was aware of in Carleton University (Ottawa) School of Architecture, where the standard of drawing was out of this world. But that calls for a separate post. Another separate post.

Comic artists and English

Foyles had an event with two of the biggest US comics / cartoon / graphic novel artists, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. The theatre it was held in (Cochrane Theatre by Central St Martins School of Art) was full so they clearly have a huge clientele over here -- including son Jim who took me along with his animator mate, Alex Potts.

Chris Ware in particular had things to say about drawing comics that struck me as consistent with my understanding of writing as they it be occurring in school English.

Kids want to draw/write fiction with exotic characters but can’t because they haven’t enough experience. Turn them therefore to their own real lives, and even away from fiction. An account of a gym lesson, according to Ware, could be far more exciting than anything from what we usually think of as imagination (and, I would add, would involve as much real imagination). This is what Harold Rosen and those who thought like him at Walworth School and elsewhere were onto in the mid-fifties, and it’s consistent with the advice and practice of, say, Ted Hughes.

As for process, if I got it right, neither is in favour of sketchbooks and rough versions (for writers that would be notebooks and drafts). For Clowes going out every day to sketch when he was learning to draw was a drag and brought no pleasure; similarly doing his strips in rough to work out the ideas. Both felt the final version lacked energy and drawing it was a chore, so they now go straight to the final paper (they specified the brand, size and gauge!). The experience is 100 per cent pleasure when you don’t know what’s going to happen two pages ahead. In English at certain times the orthodoxy drafts and revision and may still be. James Britton expressed the same objection to it as Clowes and Ware, and emphasised the value of what he called ‘shaping at the point of utterance’ (‘utterance’, obviously, being used to include written ‘speech’.)

Drawing/composition should above all be a process of discovery.

Ignore thoughts of your audience. You know in general the sort of people you’d like to read your stuff; beyond that just make sure it’s intelligible. The transaction is between you, your stuff and your medium, so concentrate on that.

Ignore form, don’t try to develop a distinctive style. Focus on the content and draw/write it whatever way you do.

When I have my own school I'll have these guys in to teach drawing comics (as Jim in fact does now), and I’d get the kids to speculate about the implications for writing.