What are you going to do?

What would it be like to see like Rembrandt - to sense the gesture in all things, looking through to the ugliness and squalor and finding a harder beauty in that; what was that like? What was it like for him to walk down a street of an evening and how is it different for you today? Can we let him suggest to us the penetrating gaze, the love of everything alive and aging?






Rembrandt, black crayon on paper
 

Even if you're listening to pounding music in your headphones and everything is lit by street lamps and neon ads and the subway rumbles underneath you?



Are Rembrandt's experiences and his gaze - 350 years old, pre-industrial, pre-electrical, pre-mass-media - unrecoverable, anachronistic? Do we have entirely new eyes?





There's a saying in Torah study that if Moses were to come to a temple today he wouldn't understand Torah, for he's missed 2500 years of commentary.







You aren’t coming to this school to be competent or just about good enough – this is about bringing what’s inside you out so that is bursts in the sunlight. You are in training to be astonishing.



When I was in art school I had a classmate - older, a returning student in his 40's - who called me at night and asked me with a manic glee if I had started the homework for our drawing class with Wayne Thiebaud, which was to copy a drawing by Honore Daumier. Because he had - he had been drawing for hours, and it had pulled him into an altered state of consciousness, as he was eager to tell me.



"The way Daumier draws is mind-blowing," Ron said, for that was his name. "He just scribbles until finds an edge that he likes, until he Hits something, then he Follows it, and makes it the Thing, and you know he couldn't tell if he was drawing it or it was drawing him. I can just feel it in my pencil! I know how he felt!" Then he whispered intensely - "and I've been listening to Shakespeare, Richard Burton reading Hamlet, and I'm thinking that's what Shakespeare was doing too, godammit - he spun, he scribbled, in the meter and the rhythm, until he Found something, the word or three words and then just followed them." His fervor was extremely funny. "I'm thinking this is weeeeiiird, man, I liiiike it!"




 
The very drawing we copied in class

In class Ron brought in his copied drawing and about 20 other drawings he had done in the fit of Daumier inspiration. Professor Thiebaud looked at them all, nodded, said, 'Not what I asked you to do … but … it will do …’ and walked on (he was a man of few words).



This, I've felt since then, is what homework should be about. This isn't drudgery, but a path to ecstasy. We're not here to make you draw better - we're pushing an altered state of consciousness!



When I went on to NYU, my teachers were men and women of the theater of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They taught about designing for a world of entertainment that economically, artistically and technically doesn’t exist anymore - and yet their deeper lessons about design go through my mind every day. Even if I then turned their lessons on their heads.




For the next three years, remember this, lodge it in a protected place in your mind: It's going to feel at times like we're forcing you to draw, see, design in our way, the officially agreed-upon right way to be a designer, but it's really about surpassing and flying beyond, doing the confounding, fucked-up, most off-kilter and at the same time most profoundly appropriate thing in the world.




We're trying to train you to do the thing we don't understand and don't know yet is possible.



Camus said that no graduation ceremony is complete until the students consume the faculty.



I've been doing this for 20 odd years and I'm smart as hell and you should listen to me hard – and I want you to take everything I have, like a thief in the night, and misuse it all to your own ends.



Your Mission


Be astonishing.

Have a great year!

Fabric and Action

 

Have you looked at the drawings of the great masters of the past as well as amazing contemporary artists and felt like they all had some secret understanding that, despite all your art classes and hours of smudgy charcoal, no one had ever told you?


You're right, they did all have an intrinsic idea behind their work which I am now going to reveal to you, before you've even started class, and you can all thank me later.

In the seminal book 'The Natural Way to Draw,' the great teacher Kimon Nicolaides says it this way:

We don't draw what something looks like; we draw what it is doing.


We draw the action, the forces and gestures of things. Gravity pulling down, energy thrusting up, action twisting and turning.

We draw the verb and not the noun.

An excellent subject to apply this is fabric, an active fluid material that shows the effects of force and action even in repose.

Every single designer needs to understand the qualities of fabric, what it does and why, and costume designers become complete experts on every seam and weave and thread. In the kit of symbols we learn to draw with, however, we don't really have workable marks for drawing fabric

We must always draw fabric by drawing the pull of gravity, what keeps the cloth from falling to the ground, and how does it twist and fold around forms. The dress, for example, that hangs from the shoulders and gathers across the chest and cascades down the back - it really helps to think in terms of active verbs that give life and energy to the forms of fabric. The dress is not just There - so much is happening!


Think of verbs that can describe fabric; here's 15 off the top of my head:


Fall
Cascade
Drape
Spiral
Flow
Buckle
Stretch
Burst
Tear
Gather
Bunch
Pucker
Pinch
Drop
Twist

Can you add any?

George Bridgman, teaching at the Art Student's League a hundred years ago, broke down the different effects of fabric into the following five categories:






Now, even if fabric often acts like it never read any of Bridgman's books, these are a really helpful guide, and repay study.





Your Mission

Take a piece of fabric, drape it over a chair, and draw it in pencil. Simple as that!

It may be a dress, a sheet, a towel, 2 yards of China silk - it's up to you. It should be a solid color without any pattern, and it probably should be a lighter tone for simplicity's sake. Convey the sense of the fabric's fall to the ground being impeded by the hard form of the chair. Use shading simply and clearly. Use line weight to make the overall form clear, and don't let the lines of folds and wrinkles overwhelm the drawing - big forms first, details within.

And show me that rather than just doing an exercise, you are opening yourself to the miracle of actuality before your very eyes, the joy of perception! As Blake said, all movements and all sights contain the seed of ecstasy!






Fabric Study, Leonardo Da Vinci
Ox Gall ink wash on prepared paper,
heightened with lead white
circa 1470, Louvre

Reporting

This is really about how drawing works for designers. There are herds of drawing classes for the rest of humanity who are sadly not designers, where centuries of graphic tradition are heaped on people with no other point than to draw nice drawings. But we designers draw the way elephants use their trunks – it’s how we interact with the world, and how we communicate (so please picture an elephant trumpeting with his or her trunk when you are drawing).

             What makes a drawing a designer’s drawing? The point is not a display of skill or even to make a beautiful drawing (though both things are useful, in the background) - the point is  communicating.

            Design drawings are often covered in notes, the words and images combining to tell as much as possible - a costume sketch will note the silk trim and the distressed leather boots and in which act this character wears this, while set sketches note the glossy paint finish and where the wall moves between acts I and II, and so on.

            It is also about communicating with ourselves - we can argue that we don’t know how we see something until we draw it.

            The world is filled to bursting with surprising things, and it’s brilliant to keep a sketchbook to try to pin down fleeting appearances.  Some of the notes and sketches could later be extremely useful, as you use a scribbled space or person as the inspiration for a design, but many will be just for interest, to keep your eyes open and your drawing muscles limber.

            Here are examples of pages from my own sketchbook, including recent times in airports. I’m looking at people and trying to figure out what’s going on – recording appearances but also asking what their relationships are, what’s propelling them.






         

  Edward Hopper’s sketchbooks are filled with drawings that are so clearly for him, showing as much as he can with the pencil – form and shade – and using notes to record color and texture impressions, and reminders of the quality of light, the feeling of the shadows, etc.



            James Jean is a contemporary illustrator many of you may know of, who draws with an enviable freedom. Many of his sketchbooks are sold in reproduction, and many are online, like here.






            I still have my own sketchbooks from my time at NYU, 25 years ago. They’re there on a shelf with many more sketchbooks, filled with big and small ideas, all of them completely mine. By opening yourself to the strangeness and banality and beauty and boredom of the world, you can get a sense of who you are as an artist.



Your Mission

Grab your sketchbook, head to the coffee shop, and draw the people and the space. Or a bar or a park or a waiting room or wherever – if you are traveling, airports are perfect spaces to record humanity. Note details. Wildly speculate about whom these people are, what is happening in this space.

What are people doing or wearing that shows that it’s 2013? What signals are people putting out to the world? What signals are intentional, which are unintentional? You are doing research for the big picture.