What we are doing here:
In March 2020, the figure drawing class in the Art & Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University --like all the other classes-- had to go online because of the pandemic. We had been meeting Monday nights in a studio with tall, dirty windows looking out onto the darkening 121 street in Harlem. The floor and easels are stained with paint and charcoal from studio classes held continuously for over a century.
Drawing is not something you learn entirely by lecture, or by rules, or by articles, although those can be helpful. It is more like yoga, or meditation, or a relationship with a friend: you do it, and you learn from doing it. I try never to lecture for more than 6 minutes. I watch my students drawing, I watch where they watch, I watch who they are, and how frustrated or at ease they are, how they use all their strengths and habits and blindspots in concert, in action. I make small observations or suggestions. We have music on while we scribble, eyes on the model trying not to move.
We --and I as the teacher-- have had to learn how to draw figures in different ways than we set out to do. We draw now from our dorm rooms or apartments in NYC, or temporary homes across the world. Some of us have been alone for weeks, making bubble tea with an electric kettle each morning, silent with loneliness. Some of us are arguing for time to use the kitchen table, and bursting out in anger from too much constant, suffocating togetherness. We are all slightly losing our minds --at least some of the time. And we are all observing what is ok and good and beautiful when we can find it.
I don't know how to teach drawing online. But I know drawing can be useful in rough times. The work of it and the focus of it steers us towards calmness. If we can muscle ourselves into concentrating, drawing places its big, gentle arms around the racing worries, and can quiet them. We can figure out what our new world looks like by drawing it. And we will have a way to share all the varieties of shock and fear and boredom that we are going through now that is not just words. Because going online is, among other things, part of a general landslide towards funneling everything through language. The online world is strange also for not having a lot of images of real people, doing likely things, to draw from. It does not show the glorious mistakes and partial steps we are and make in learning. It seems to just show beautiful people, and finished things. So we will plow through all on our own and all together in a new way figuring this out. Trying not to loose our minds.
Each page is a different assignment or class.
Tara Geer
tarageer.com
In March 2020, the figure drawing class in the Art & Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University --like all the other classes-- had to go online because of the pandemic. We had been meeting Monday nights in a studio with tall, dirty windows looking out onto the darkening 121 street in Harlem. The floor and easels are stained with paint and charcoal from studio classes held continuously for over a century.
Drawing is not something you learn entirely by lecture, or by rules, or by articles, although those can be helpful. It is more like yoga, or meditation, or a relationship with a friend: you do it, and you learn from doing it. I try never to lecture for more than 6 minutes. I watch my students drawing, I watch where they watch, I watch who they are, and how frustrated or at ease they are, how they use all their strengths and habits and blindspots in concert, in action. I make small observations or suggestions. We have music on while we scribble, eyes on the model trying not to move.
We --and I as the teacher-- have had to learn how to draw figures in different ways than we set out to do. We draw now from our dorm rooms or apartments in NYC, or temporary homes across the world. Some of us have been alone for weeks, making bubble tea with an electric kettle each morning, silent with loneliness. Some of us are arguing for time to use the kitchen table, and bursting out in anger from too much constant, suffocating togetherness. We are all slightly losing our minds --at least some of the time. And we are all observing what is ok and good and beautiful when we can find it.
I don't know how to teach drawing online. But I know drawing can be useful in rough times. The work of it and the focus of it steers us towards calmness. If we can muscle ourselves into concentrating, drawing places its big, gentle arms around the racing worries, and can quiet them. We can figure out what our new world looks like by drawing it. And we will have a way to share all the varieties of shock and fear and boredom that we are going through now that is not just words. Because going online is, among other things, part of a general landslide towards funneling everything through language. The online world is strange also for not having a lot of images of real people, doing likely things, to draw from. It does not show the glorious mistakes and partial steps we are and make in learning. It seems to just show beautiful people, and finished things. So we will plow through all on our own and all together in a new way figuring this out. Trying not to loose our minds.
Each page is a different assignment or class.
Tara Geer
tarageer.com
Comments
Post a Comment