About Learning to Draw

I've been reading articles recently about students not being taught to draw.

One article in the Sunday Herald, an independent newspaper in Scotland quotes former director of Glasgow School of Art, Dugald Cameron: "the future of art education in Scotland is now in crisis because of the failure of art schools to properly teach fundamentals such as drawing, painting and sculpture."

"The point of an art school is to pass on skills. And skills have been depreciated. Drawing is called mere hand skills. When you get heads of fine art boasting they cannot draw you know there is something corrupt in the system. If you don't do it, don't teach it, and put over the view it's not valuable, then you get some students shoving a piece of glass on some wood, giving it a pretentious title and believing it is some kind of creative comment on the human condition. And it is b------t. Much of contemporary fine art practice is inevitably that."

Mr. Cameron blames art schools for cutting back on teaching drawing because it takes time, difficulty and expense.

In another article in the Architects' Journal, a British publication, quoted Prince Charles: "I don't trust any architect who can't draw, and who doesn't submit a drawing, or a measured drawing from which I can judge what the building is going to be like."

"Speaking at the Georgian Group's Measured Architectural Drawing Prize held in honor of his 60th birthday, the Prince said he believed the basics of architecture had been lost 'with disasterous consequences.' He condemned what he saw as an over reliance on technology. However useful computers are, and they are very useful, they should be the servant, the slave, not the master."

In Steven Leckart's recent interview with the San Francisco-based architect Donald MacDonald for Boing Boing Gadgets website, Mr. MacDonald says that "a lot of young architects can't draw anymore. Universities are going back to teaching drawing. He lectured at Notre Dame where they are having students focus on drawing by hand for the first few years and then go on to computers after that...There's a real demand for drawing because no one wants to make a presentation with a computer rendering. Mr. MacDonald says that you can't understand how an architect thinks when everything is done inside a computer."

Drawing is foundational for an artist--any artist. To be better at any other medium, you've got to be able to draw first, and draw well. Most abstract and expressionist artists were excellent draftsmen. Picasso, for instance, could draw the human form accurately and well before he started re-arranging body parts in his work.

I suggest that whatever type of art you want to produce, learning to draw well is the best thing that you can do for yourself as well as those who view your work.