Expressive Drawing Workshops
My favourite workshop to run is one based around drawing; people think of drawing as picking up a soft pencil and doing a lot of careful shading on a bit of cartridge paper but drawing should be approached in the same way as painting, with a plethora of different media and techniques. Below is the spiel I give at the start of a workshop.
Picasso is reputed to have said that he spent 80 years learning to draw like a child – many artists try to re-discover naïve expression, but painting often seems more open to experimentation than drawing.
Students
often decide drawing is not for them, once they have recognised that
the world they are attempting to draw looks a bit like a photograph,
their rational brain tends to value more, a drawing whose likeness to
what they see is photograhphic.
Education is structured to develop a rational a-b-c sequence of logic and reason. You are encouraged to look for the ‘right’ answer. But artists who like to use the right hemisphere of their brain use a layer of thinking that is less clear-cut, more playful and dreamy, able to tolerate information that is faint, fleeting, ephemeral or ambiguous an 'open’ place of mind. They are interested in the question as much as in the answer. “The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the the process. Ask different questions.” Bruce Mau.
Art
is a free-thinking shapeless subject where anything can happen. It
has no fixed boundaries and there are no 'right’ answers – only
interesting questions.
I
run creative drawing workshops that are aimed at being open-minded
and flexible. At freeing the mind from the interfering and
correcting influence of the left hemisphere.
Every drawing has something to offer, and no drawing or way of drawing will provide a permanent solution to what drawing is or should be.
Learning
to see:
“A photograph is static because it has stopped time – a drawing is static, but it encompasses time.” John Berger
“To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances, a drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at” John Berger
Drawing
can be a journey where you take a more lateral route, head off in the
general direction, but you don’t know quite where you’re going.
Our
perceived world is a marriage of what we know and what we see. When
we draw we must learn to use 'what we know’ selectively. Draw what
you see not what you know. Look at the object more than your pencil,
look at objects as if they are new and unfamiliar.
For
example: Blind drawing
Eye and hand should be working at the same speed, most drawings require a look draw look draw approach, if the gap between the drawing and looking is too big information is lost or changed. We are taking this idea to the extreme with your pencil being an extension of your eye.
The drawing will be an almost continuous line – draw until you have completed a circuit of looking at your object, work slowly, your eye will not trust your hand but do not look, take your pen off but only for very little gaps.