Monday, April 30, 2012

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.


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