Drawing as Experience

"....there's something that's very intense about the experience of sitting down and having to look at something in the way that you do in order to make a drawing or a painting of it.  By the time you've done that you feel that you've really understood what you were looking at...and somehow it becomes a method of possessing the experience in a unique way."  -- Robert Bechtle

I came across that quote recently in a book about drawing.  Because I have been teaching a beginning drawing class at the Main Line Art Center it really resonated with me and what my students are finding.  In their drawings I can see them thinking and re-seeing and trying to translate it onto paper, a quality I think is always important in a good drawing. 

As a result of trying to help them along, I looked for examples online of student work that seemed achievable (I always found master drawings too hard to grasp when I started out drawing myself.)  So the images here are some of my personal favorite finds by anonymous students, not mine.  I didn't show them these pieces because I don't think they would like them as they are after a more elegant look at this point -- but I find these and some of their in class drawings to be outstanding in the way they embrace intense looking at their subject.