Learning to Draw: A Creative Approach

index

preface

The publication of Robert Kaupelis’ important new text, Learning to Draw, is a major event in the art education profession. Not since Kimon Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw have we been offered a drawing text which not only updates, but extends that master-teacher’s unique and highly effective method of teaching.

Learning to Draw is indeed a cause célèbre for art education, not only because it meets the urgent professional need, but also because it combines artistic, aesthetic, and instructional considerations in a way which is significantly different from any other text. Yet it is different in a way which incorporates many of Nicolaides’ best teaching methods. Another feature of great importance in this new book is Kaupelis’ inclusion of choice examples and highly perceptive analyses of drawings by artists of the past and present. This feature incorporates some of the best aspects of Bryan Holme’s Master Drawings and Robert Beverly Hale’s Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters. To these illustrations, Kaupelis has added many splendidly reproduced works by college art students.

Learning to Draw is bound to be enthusiastically received and widely used; but even more important, it will help point the way for an art teaching profession which, inadvertently or otherwise, has neglected the development of its own, as well as its students’ aesthetic awareness and art historical knowledge, and has continued to use outmoded methods in the teaching of drawing and other means of creative expression.

Both in his text, and in the illustrative material which accompanies it, Kaupelis reveals a level of style and degree of aesthetic judgment which is entirely consistent with his own truly original method of teaching. The text is as orderly, but as flexible and adaptable to change, as is his own teaching. He strongly encourages both instructors and students to use his suggestions in ways they feel most appropriate. He would be disappointed if the reader were to follow his suggestions in a step-by-step fashion.

Among other significant, unusual, and commendable features of Learning to Draw is Kaupelis’ careful attention to captions for the works he has chosen to reproduce, captions in which he provides specific, pertinent, thorough, and profoundly useful analyses of the underlying aesthetic qualities of the drawings. He speaks directly and unequivocally, yet sensitively, about the artistic qualities of line, texture, rhythm, balance, and composition, from the reliable and insightful viewpoint of a successful, practicing artist and teacher.

If enough teachers and individual readers would permit it to do so, Learning to Draw could have a revolutionary effect upon both artistic expression and aesthetic understanding. It is my sincere hope that this long-awaited approach to the solution of two of art education’s most important and persistent problems will be given the fullest possible application.

Howard Conant

Professor and Chairman, Department of Art Education

Head, Division of Creative Arts, New York University

LARRY RIVERS

Portrait of Edwin Denby

Pencil

16-3/8″ x 19-3/4″

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I am a political man. I am affected by what other men do & say & think & how they respond to what I do & say & think. Putting aside the surface manipulation of subject & style, what I have painted is my relationship to other men & that relationship points out our differences & our similarities. I see in my work every art from Rembrandt to the man who presents a No Smoking sign to us as art. — Larry Rivers

introduction

Essentially, Learning to Draw contains the exercises and methods I have used over the years in teaching Fundamentals of Drawing at New York University. My approach in this book grows out of the classroom procedures, but I have modified these procedures and explained them in a manner which should make them useful to the student working by himself as well as to the student working in a class with a qualified teacher.

No book, including this one, can replace the motivation and knowledge you can receive from a teacher passionately involved with art. I hope, however, that the present volume will provide some direction to the student working alone and will supplement the drawing experiences of those students working with a teacher.

THE METHOD

If you glance quickly through the pages of this book, you will see immediately that I have a definite viewpoint about teaching drawing, but one which is extremely flexible and open-ended. I certainly do not expect students or other teachers to accept my views in toto. You can accept, reject, or reinterpret any number of the possibilities and suggestions contained in the text and reproductions (in terms of your individual needs and/or specific classroom situation) yet still benefit from the approach to drawing described in this book. There is nothing sacred about the order of problems I have suggested and I frequently present them to my classes in a variety of other sequences.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The careful and extended study of old and modern master drawings is extremely important to your development as an artist and you should devote a good portion of your time to the examples illustrated in this book and in the books listed in the bibliography. The master drawings — reproduced full-page — are in no way intended to present a history of drawing. I have selected them to show the range of expressive intentions possible, because they have profound aesthetic qualities, or because they illustrate the problems I present in the text.

Study the master drawings especially to see the way in which all the elements are organized to create a unified drawing — a drawing in which all parts appear coherent, contributing to an over-all structure. For this reason, the master drawings are distributed throughout the text, even when they do not relate directly to the topic or problem under discussion.

The bibliography, though limited, offers some suggestions about where you can locate other reproductions of master drawings. Of course you should never miss an opportunity to study the masters in the original, at museums and galleries.

The pictures of student work — reproduced on a smaller scale — are intended to show you how other students have handled a number of the exercises, although not every exercise is illustrated. These illustrations are not the only way to handle the problems, and rather than inhibit you, they should point the direction to hundreds of other creative solutions. These examples come primarily from freshman classes in college, but I have effectively used many of the same problems in working with secondary and even elementary school children.

THE MODEL

The majority of problems presented in this text use the human figure as the motif. This reflects my own bias, since I do not believe there is any other subject which is as dynamic and visually compelling as the human figure.

Though drawing from a nude model is definitely an advantage, it is not absolutely necessary. Your family, friends, or classmates might volunteer to pose in leotards or bathing suits. Members of your family are probably relatively quiet while they watch television and you can find hundreds of models (in all sizes and shapes) in public places such as a park, bus terminal, or swimming pool. A large mirror will enable you to pose for yourself when you do many of the problems. Moreover, if it is absolutely impossible to use a posing model, most of the problems can be executed using still life materials.

THE FUNDAMENTALS

As a student beginning to draw, you are probably anxious to acquire what you consider to be the fundamentals of drawing. Exactly what the fundamentals of drawing are poses a difficult and even controversial question.

In western civilization (which eliminates the cultural traditions of about three-quarters of the earth’s population), we tend to consider the fundamentals those values, techniques, and skills which were developed during the Renaissance. Though there is much validity in this concept, a good deal of what has happened in the history of art since the Renaissance — particularly during the past hundred years — has challenged these values, pointing the way toward new and perhaps more basic fundamentals.

Rather than regarding the fundamentals of drawing in terms of such values as photographic realism, accurate perspective, smooth finish and technique, many of us now feel that the following factors — and related values — constitute the fundamentals and that all else will follow naturally.

Concepts By this I mean the richness of your aesthetic awareness; your willingness to accept and respond to a broad range of profound aesthetic expression and form in any form of artistic creation.

Confidence You must have confidence in yourself and be committed to your drawing — hopefully to every drawing you do. You must develop the confidence necessary to attack most any subject, turning it into a personal aesthetic statement.

Sensitivity This refers to your ability to respond, to feel the obvious, as well as the more subtle relationships between such things as form, content, subject matter, materials, and techniques.

Materials If you are ever to make your expressive intentions tangible, it is essential to have an understanding and sensitivity to materials, their potentials, and their limitations.

Art History André Malraux has noted that art is born of art. Familiarity with art history is an absolute necessity to understand what man has accomplished artistically in the past as well as the reasons for our present attitudes, knowledge, and values as related to art. This of course includes the art and the social and economic conditions of the present time as well as the past.

Flexibility This refers to your ability to adapt all of your skills and knowledge to any new or different artistic problems or judgments you might face. A flexible artist should be able to work loose, tight, big, small, from the parts, from the whole, fast, slow, carefully, carelessly; he should be able to work in line or without line, with or without erasers; he should be able to build in order to destroy and destroy in order to build.

Understanding Understanding develops through all of the senses, though for the artist sight is probably the most important. You must understand forms, events. experience and intentions (your own and others) on both an intellectual and an intuitive level. At times, we understand things which are inexplicable in terms of bodily sensations and feelings. Understanding, as it functions on many different levels, might be better understood if I cite an example: the non-artist who sails boats can probably draw a more complete, a better, more detailed picture of a sailing sloop than an artist. Although the result may be more complete as a picture of a sloop, I doubt that it would be as complete in terms of an aesthetic entity. The artist’s major asset is that his understanding is primarily aesthetic.

Originality If your work is to be your own — in its form and expressive content — it must be unique and personal. It’s possible to develop a facility for drawing stereotyped and hackneyed compositions which are slick, impersonal, and trite; but producing drawings which possess aesthetic significance demands responses and forms that are uncommon, unusual, and individual; that is, original.

It is certainly my hope that the following exercises and suggestions will help you master some, if not all of these fundamentals. Finally, since you cannot learn to draw simply by reading about it, and since no single book or classroom approach can possibly teach you