On Tuesday, June 25, Jay Noble taught the first drawing class of the program. As a Studio Seminar student I am not obliged to go to them all, but I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. He begins with what I would describe as a short lecture. Jay, a far less formal personality than myself, calls it his “lil’ pep talk.”
It truly is a short talk, but it covers an incredible amount of information. It ranges from the practical (blue tape or clips are visual distractions, and there are better ways to adhere your paper to the drawing board) to the abstract (seeing is not limited to the eyes and mind, but is rooted in the body.) He has us run our hands along the edges of our paper before we begin, to give us an awareness of the page.
I was in this drawing class four years ago, when I first attended the program as a core student. At the time, I was perplexed. This seemed a bit silly. Weren’t we going to talk about the figure? What about the relationship between the three major masses of pelvis, ribcage, and skull? After all, every drawing teacher I had known before had insisted that was really the key thing here. This time, I had no such hang-ups. I found myself anticipating what Jay would say. I remembered every word of my last go around, with the exception of a few new metaphors he has come up with in the years since. I have a deeply imperfect memory. If somebody says something to me once, four years prior, and I remember it verbatim, chances are it’s something I really needed to hear.
I might have been comfortable when Jay was talking, but that should not suggest I was comfortable while we worked. Truly perceptual drawing (drawing without relying on what you already know, or think you know, and actually putting down what you see) is hard. It requires an incredible amount of energy and focus. There is always a way to be better than you are. It is exhausting, even as it is fulfilling.
But in the time between the drawings, when all the work was up on the wall and it was time to talk about it, I was again in a place of confidence and comfort. Despite this, I do remember the confusion my former self experienced in this very room. We were looking at figure drawings. When I arrived four years ago, I expected to discuss the figure. Instead, we discussed the drawings.
Did you lock the motif into the edges of the rectangle and create a compelling totality? Do you see the way that combination of marks creates a pocket of space, but these marks feel forced? We discussed interstices, intervals, and rhythm. This time around, Jay makes a few offhand comments, the kind of thing I couldn’t anticipate from memories of past summers. Looking at a drawing that had some nice moments, but that failed to resolve itself into a unified whole, he reminded us that the Egyptians knew how to deal with the bottom edge. He casually mentioned that “poetry is often not in the things, but the spaces in between.” We had a conversation about democracy in drawing: treating the ground with equal consideration to the figure. These are big ideas. None of us will figure this stuff out in seven weeks. If we’re lucky, we’ll never figure it out. We will be wrestling with these ideas for the rest of our lives, and any resolution or conclusion we could come to would be a premature one.
For the most part, I am spending this summer on my own studio work, unassigned by a particular teacher. But that work is accompanied by a series of really rigorous conversations. Seminar students have weekly meetings, led this year by the painter and art writer John Goodrich. We have had two discussions so far, the first about Light and Gravity in Painting, using Bonnard as our lens, the second about the relationship between Painting and Motif, the question of mimesis, and the extent to which that may or may not be an appropriate framework for our practice. We also have critiques. Every week, sometimes more frequently, a rotating member of this summer’s faculty visits our studio and reacts to what is happening there. We take extensive notes. I still have some of mine from 2020. Seven weeks is not nearly enough time to process what we are told, and incorporate it into our work. But during a critique, the day before it was time to write this blog post one of my critics, looking at a landscape, thought a few of the marks I had made were the indications of a hothouse, an enclosed environment that is designed to provide a warm and protected space for plants to grow. They were wrong about the literal content of the painting, but the idea of a hothouse has entered the space of my imagination. It is an apt metaphor for what is happening here. Seeds are being planted. A nurturing environment is provided for their first sprouting. They will then be taken out, returning to homes as local as Lancaster, Pennsylvania and as distant as Perth, Australia, and put in the ground to take root.