Like drawing blood from a stone

More on “The Little Draw” drawing project.

My ego took a serious thrashing today as I rediscovered how poor my hand was with regards to what I was required to do. Having made what I considered to be some headway in the task on Sunday afternoon/evening I have perhaps taken todays short-comings to heart a little more than I should have. C'est la vie.

Now children, I want you to draw like good little boys and girls

The drawing project we have been given is pretty much an art 'Stars in their eyes'. Pairs of students have been given the name of an artist and have been instructed to copy said artist's drawing style, techniques and pieces faithfully imbuing your efforts with the same visual flavour as the original artist. Forget this being a life's-work, we have been given two weeks to do it. Last Monday was a painful anniversary for me and it pretty much crippled my work efforts when combined with a day on an assessment panel and a day preparing for and being assessed. To put it plainly I have one week to 'get' the drawings of Piranesi.

The Piranesi work I knew of wasn't exactly drawing. I have a small book of his etchings and engravings (which incidentally are beautiful) and when the name was called out I have to admit I felt a moment of what can only be described as the 'white noise' of glumness. Well... wouldn't you be a little apprehensive? :

I spent a few hours attempting to reproduce the looser etchings of prisons that Piranesi did in Biro, the results varied from extremely poor to mediocre. Last Friday afternoon, just as I had started really, one of my tutors noticed the pieces I was working from and swiftly admonished me for the selections. He procured a gorgeous book full of Old Master drawings and pointed to a lush pen and ink study by Piranesi (Which has since had a minor accident involving an ink spillage, no seals or swans were hurt). I felt relieved to the point of elation, not because of the task being any easier, but because it had gone from impossible (and, since the invention of the scanner/modern camera, quite pointless) activity of rendering something perspectively perfect and polished so as to give the illusion of being the most faithful record possible to being an exercise in drawing. Drawing I use here in a very traditional sense involving analytical studies of a subject where tonal, linear and compositional qualities are of the utmost importance. I enjoyed the challenge and no sooner had I started on Friday when I was forced to pack away my gear and head on home.

Ink drawing by Piranesi (again, apologies for the lack of scanner/camera)

After a Friday with the beer-monstrosity I'm proud to call my mother and a Saturday spent mastering the art of rising from the dead I sat down and began making a hard-nosed, full scale forgery of the drawing. Two hours yesterday, three hours this morning and three quarters of an F grade pencil later and the drawing has failed. The perspective and composition were completely off and the line quality just didn't match that of the original. I believe that he was using a much thicker nibbed pen (quill?) than I am. Attempting to restart the study as well as attempting to make studies of some of his other drawings all resulted similarly. Safe to say that by the end of this afternoon I was losing the will to live as well as my hair.

Though we've been basically ordered to only work on studies from the artist's drawings I'm more than a little tempted to disobey (what a shame eh?) tomorrow and work from people sat around the studio in the spirit and flavour of the Piranesi drawings. When questioned my reason would have to be that the original task, whilst not appearing so initially, is counterproductive and ill-thought through (or perhaps ill-executed on my part?) at least in the case of the drawings I am to study. This is because of the two fundamental goals of the project:

a) Reproduce a faithful and accurate copy of the original work.

b) Come to terms with the drawing and, via de constructing it/them, begin to master a control and understanding of the artist's style and methodology.

Even a novice like me can see that for anyone without a remarkable innate drawing/copying facility the two objectives should remain exclusive as one makes the other all but impossible. The Piranesi drawings are done in an extremely quick and intuitive manner with most of the forms being nothing but the very loosest illusionistic devices. There are figures made of two or three markings, occasionally just the one shape which are clearly done rapidly. On the one hand I am being instructed to copy this image before me so that the two could be lined up together and a clear reference made (and therefore a judgement of quality on the reproduction skill I [don't] posses) and, on the other hand, I am being instructed to work in a loose, experimental and intuitive manner very quickly. I am no forger but to make a convincing replica of anything requires nothing but the very hardest-nosed perfectionism with regards to recreating the original article, working in a loose way by its very definition negates this end result from being a possibility.

Thought you'd escaped the rant?

I forgot to mention in the outline of the brief that we have been told that we must have ten study sheets, including up to three full sized, large scale copies of the original drawings. Having spent two of the six days I have producing a mediocre and unfinished drawing doesn't fill me with confidence that I'll meet these requirements. What disturbs me however is the fervour with which the requirement will be thrust in my fact that despite that fact that (unlike most people without the valid excuse I have) I have been in the studio working for 9 hours a day as I should have been. How could I physically have produced more work? Staying up all night and not sleeping? If I am to be frank I think it would be grossly petty to enforce such rigorous requirements over a two week drawing project in the first year of a course at art-school. The demand simply isn't there. There are no clients who have paid for example.

I worry about how much these deadlines and requirements could be detracting from the progress a lot of us could be making. Clearly some people need strict guidelines as they aren't strict enough with themselves and, come the eleventh hour, are normally seen scrambling around cobbling together whatever bits of shit they can to scrape through. This, to my mind, has to be largely because the student isn't engaged with the subject they're pretending to study. I think scraping through shouldn't be an option and that these requirements shouldn't exist for people to hide the fact that they are completely uninterested in visual art despite whatever skill or talent they have. Getting a lot of these students who don't belong in study to admit that they're completely uninterested is the first step towards them being much more self-aware and much, MUCH more happier because of it. Again the national curriculum stigma attached to not being particularly interested in anything other than your creative home/social life and having a job to afford to dabble in it comes into play.

At the minute it seems that education is not providing fully for the people it should be because its too busy mentally crippling and breaking the other people who, without it. if we're honest, would have been perfectly happy by dogmatically shoving the “education:good – no education:you're a piece of turd” garbage down the student's throats. I wonder if people really think that the population of England is getting any smarter or happier because a lot more of us go to university than in decades gone by... I'm sure some middle-class suck ups would love to think so, but the bigwigs they're sucking up to can't be anything other than completely aware that all they're doing is making more OFSTED positions for their cronies.