Realistic drawing

A problem:

We think using what we notice, but we notice very little. In fact, we're terrible at noticing things. We walk around believing that we see what's around us, but that's an illusion.

If only students could notice what's around them, they'd be much better learners.

There is a method to train people to notice what's around them: teach them to draw realistically. Drawing realistically (that is, representing what you're seeing onto paper) turns out to be a skill that human brains aren't designed to do, but it can be learned, using tried-and-true methods.

But most schools assume drawing to be an innate skill — one that some kids have, and most don't. Because of that, they treat art class as optional, and fill it with a smattering of media (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography) in hopes that at least one medium will connect with students' innate skills.

But in truth, everyone can become competent at drawing.

Our basic plan:

All kids can learn to draw what they see, and in our schools, all kids will. We'll use a combination of two tried-and-true curricula — the Monart method and the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain method — to help kids do this with a minimum of frustration and a maximum of joy.

Many methods of teaching drawing focus on the subject — "how to draw a face" or "how to draw a cat" — or on the media — "how to shade with charcoal" or "how to draw three dimensional objects". Both of these methods, however, focus on perception: they train you how to see.

As someone who's gone through the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain materials, I can testify that this is mind-bending. As Kimon Nicolaides writes, in The Natural Way to Draw, "Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see—to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye."

Our goals:

Ultimately, we want kids who can draw, and who take joy in drawing. The ability to really see what's in front of them, however, will lead to much better abilities in science (where observation is crucial). It may also help students think visually more generally, and help them in math.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

Kids intensively focused on something: the jagged edge of a leaf, the membrane of a skin cell (seen through a microscope), or a face.

Some specific questions:

• "All students will." Is that too strong?
• Is it enough, for the first year, to have a non-artistic teacher go through the curriculum by themselves, and then lead students through the same? Or should we look into having a community volunteer? What would you like me to do to help with this?
• How often do we need students to engage in this? Daily? Every-other-day-ly?
• What's the role of critique and micro-adjustments in practicing drawing?
• I'd want to digitize all student art, so we can (1) send the real work home with them, and (2) make it easy for them to see their progress. What's the easiest way to do that? Have we a scanner?

Art immersion

A problem:

So much great human history, emotion, and beauty has been distilled into painting and sculpture — but schools leave this mostly untapped. Most of us, indeed, have a hard time spending much time in an art gallery — we stare, we squint, at the works trying to somehow… somehow… experience them. Typically we fail, and move onto the next work.

There are worlds to be entered in works of art, but we feel shut off from them.

Our basic plan:

We make "engaging art" a regular part of the curriculum.

We do so, in large part, by employing a method of immersing ourselves in a painting or sculpture that's explained in the book Touching the Art: A Guide to Enjoying Art at a Museum, by Luc Travers.

One of the pieces of art he uses in the book is Pygmalion, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Here's the full work:

The teacher puts out a piece of art for all to see. (Preferably, we'll be able to do this with a projector, a large screen, and a darkened room.) The teacher then leads the students through the following steps:

1. Create your own title for the work (for example, using the painting above, "Guy kisses statue"). The purpose is to get them to try to make sense of the work as a whole.
2. Take turns listing off lots of details. (For example: "The statue is turning pink." "There are freaky masks on the wall." "There's a fish at her feet." "Hey — some angel is about to shoot him with an arrow!" and so on.) This helps the students focus on the dozens of details the artist put in.
3. See if you can agree on a basic story as to what's basically going on. (For example: "The statue is so beautiful that it's coming alive, and it's kissing its sculptor, and this is all so wonderful that lightly-armed angels are joining in the party.")
4. Imagine being one of the characters — imagine seeing what the character is seeing; imagine hearing what they're hearing; imagine feeling in your fingers and arms and face and body what they're feeling; imagine smelling and tasting what they're smelling and tasting.
5. Now pretend to be that character — move your body so you're in the same position as they are!
6. Imagine that each character has a thought bubble coming from their head. What does it say?
7. Imagine that this painting/sculpture is just one frame of a 60-second video. Imagine watching the previous 30 seconds — what happened? Now imagine watching the next 30 seconds. What happens?
8. Describe the specific situation the characters are in. ("She's coming alive, and they're falling in love.")
9. Describe the general situation they're in. ("Falling in love.")
10. Call to mind a specific time in your life, if any, that you've been in the same general situation. What did you do? How did it compare to what they characters have done?

Finally, the actual information of the work of art — the artist, the real title, the real explanation — can be shared.

The goal:

Students regularly get out of themselves, and into a piece of art. There's something joyous about falling into another world.

Students also develop a love of art, and want to create art themselves.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

You might find an entire class peering attentively at a painting or statue, scratching their heads, arguing happily, and possibly contorting their bodies into silly positions!

You might also see a single small group of students doing this during their independent time, peering at a painting in an art book.

Some specific questions:

• I've found that this method is wonderful for works of art that feature fairly realistic images of people. But lots of art doesn't have that at all. What other methods can we use to engage other sorts of art?
• Any recommendations for books that are full of representational paintings? (Preferably large ones.)
• At what age should we introduce nudity? Is it wiser to hold it back until later, or to normalize it earlier?

What if a school could destroy the thought/feeling divide?

Susan Sontag proclaimed, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1978 —

One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment... and I don’t believe it’s true... I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.

I've gone over this quote a dozen or more times now (it's in my spaced repetition system), and think I've just now glimpsed its importance to our coming school.

Is this the mistake that elite schools (college-prep and hippie-dippie alike!) are making: drawing a distinction between thought and feeling?

And is this the first step toward creating a vibrantly intellectual school: saying that "thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking"?

This is one of my hopes for our school — that we can encompass math and art, philosophy and music, science and dance — all these things which are usually thought of as opposite poles of experience. That we can explore how knowledge flows from stories, and how stories flow from physical reality. And that by incorporating these two extremes, we can show how joyous both can be.

We can be more STEM than a STEM school, and more artsy-fartsy than an arts academy.

Such, at least, is my notion.

(I'll be back from my vacation next week! The photo above is from the book-length compilation of those Rolling Stone interviews, from which the above quote is taken.)