Archives Summer 2010 From the Education Director Words and Images live side by side in our mind. Like the two sexes, they share the same home—fundamentally different yet powerfully attracted to each other. (Andrew Rush) My memories of childhood growing up in the late 1930s and 40s in St. Louis had a lot of word-learning, but I remember almost no images, except the plaster statues of the Virgin and St. Sebastian (with arrows) at my Catholic Church. Other than a calendar or an occasional floral print from the furniture store, interior walls of most houses were bare or wallpapered. The local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, showed only an occasional blurry war photo among its columns of type. Even ads were mostly words. There were no art classes in the public schools, nor even in my Catholic high school. There were no locally available art supplies or art supply stores, other than bad crayons in the dime stores (as we called them then). I was in high school before anyone in our family owned a camera. Yet even without TV, I recall an appetite for images as strong as that among children today. I would walk the eight blocks to the public library once a week in order to look at Life magazine, the one photographic magazine of that era that made the world’s events visually real outside of the occasional ‘newsreel’ in the movies. And on Saturdays we kids would stand in line for hours at the one local movie house to pay ten cents to see Gene Autry or Tom Mix fighting off the bad guys. Comic books were few, but passed around until they were dog-eared pulp. As I have said in my many essays, the last fifty years have witnessed the biggest shift in communication in the history of man, moving from the verbal-based written languages, to the nonverbal, largely visual languages provided by a media network that dominates almost every public and private space of our lives. Gigantic large-screen televisions fill our homes, businesses and airports. Images also stream into our mailboxes and computers and cell phones without end, in forms like Netflix, You Tube, and jpegs of everyone’s grandchildren, vacations, and weddings. So it is mind-bogglingly tragic that modern children still arrive at adulthood without the slightest training in the skills of visual communication. Notwithstanding this historic image revolution, there is still little, if any, interest in our schools in visual education as an integral part of general education than there was in my childhood, sixty years ago. * Not long ago I visited a friend who is the chairperson of a large science department at Columbia University. She showed me her current research on her computer, a fantastic array of visual models of microscopic protein particles, which she could rotate for me as if we were walking around a sculpture from all sides. I asked her about how these new visual tools were changing scientific communication. She answered that, while it is still customary to write scientific papers, in practical terms scientists often now say to each other “Show me the images,” meaning that the authenticity of the research is quickly evident in the images, for which the written or mathematical record is at best a support. So even in the sciences, it is clear that visual languages are now coming ‘on-line’ to join the literal languages of words and symbols in a more balanced and working relationship, not unlike the two hemispheres of our brain. In this sense I sometimes jokingly call The Drawing Studio ‘a right brain university’, because art learning adds new capacities that bring the spatial modes of our intelligence up to speed with the left-brain. For people who are learning to ‘see’ through drawing, in the euphoria of awakening the visual channels of right-brain seeing, it can often seem as if we have forgotten or even discredited the left-brain linear skills of language, logic, or time. Now that we have a growing community of TDS artists on the road to mastery as image-makers, last fall I decided that we were ready to open this deeper look at the complexities of perception by reconnecting special relationship that words and images have when they are used together to communicate. In this spirit, I invited a few advanced students to explore with me the interaction of images and language. ** Traditionally we think of words and images as collaboration between a writer and an artist, in the manner of illustrated books. But our group chose to work in both domains more like the poet/artist William Blake, or Saul Steinberg, or Ben Shahn, who all combined both visual and linguistic form in one person. Our projects were varied but very personal explorations. One artist developed an extraordinary mixed media composition honoring a significant spiritual teacher in her life. Another revisited the history of a Montana town, drawing portraits of murderous vigilantes and adding his commentary on how they became the town fathers under the cleansing brush of history. Yet another artist delved into the dysfunctional role of money that strangled love in her family by turning decades of cancelled checks into luminous art works that closed past wounds. One artist made a book of her life-long annoyance with road construction. Another of our group produced a series of small drawings celebrating the tiniest daily moments of daily life, like brushing one’s teeth or feeding the dog. One artist, recovering from a serious bout of cancer, began to rebuild her confidence in life by a series of jewel-like self-portraits that revealed many of her own ancestors. An Hispanic artist discovered how to use some ancient Mayan ornament in a modern story telling of domestic life. A young Asian scientist created a panel love story of distance and misunderstanding, using beans and color and paper and paste to create a language of new symbols. One artist found a new energy in Phoenix downtown skyscrapers through his camera, drawing us into astonishing mirrored surfaces of light. Still in progress, a business-person artist started to produce a new kind of narrative to show the changes Tucson’s downtown streetcar project is about to have on our City center. Why do I enumerate these many projects? Because in our seminar we were all inspired to discover that, as we learn to combine these two powerful languages of communication, new territory opens in how we both look out upon our world and respond to it from our inner life. A new and rich vocabulary becomes available when taken on together. Recently, one of our OATS tutors has begun to combine art-making with life-stories from her senior students, and share that experience with other OATS tutors. I think we are barely starting to reveal the uses of visual languages to our lives, at any age, and how they might work with the verbal languages we have grown up in. © 2010, Andrew Rush * Our Art of Summer Youth immersion program is featured in a center insert to this newsletter issue. Please pass along the insert to parents, youth, and teens you know. ** This issue features some examples of their projects.From the Executive Director Many of you reading this may know that The Drawing Studio recently won the 2010 Governor’s Art Award in the category of “Community,” which focuses on the impact an organization’s work has on the community at large. The award especially recognizes our Art of Summer/Youth Program and OATS Senior Program for their work in serving people young and old who otherwise would have no access to studio art practice. The Drawing Studio was the only organization in southern Arizona to win one of the Governor’s Awards, from a field that included 13 nominees. The week prior to this award, we were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for our Art of Summer Youth Program. This is our third such award in five years—a demonstration of The Drawing Studio’s ability not just to develop innovative quality programming, but to sustain it. Last year we also received a Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant from NEA—one of only four awarded in Arizona—to help support the Youth and Senior Program Directors’ positions. In the same week as the NEA award—it was a good week—I found out I was one of 20 arts leaders nationwide selected to participate in a leadership institute in Oregon this summer, underwritten by the Andy Warhol Foundation. In part, my selection hinged on The Drawing Studio’s commitment to opening up the realm of studio art practice to everyone. And finally, it was only four months ago that TDS Founder and Education Director Andy Rush received the prestigious Buffalo Exchange Arts Award for his longstanding contributions to (surprise!) arts in the community. What do these awards have in common? They all recognize our work in taking art practice out beyond the “gated community” (as Andy calls it), beyond the traditional specialists called “artists,” beyond the moneyed, the educated, the leisured, the people “expected” to be involved in art. These awards acknowledge what TDS has been proclaiming and living for years: that the visual thinking skills developed through studio art practice have immeasurable value for everyone in the 21st century, and everyone should have access to them. What else do these awards have in common? They WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without the support of individuals like you making gifts through the annual fund, the gala, and the other special events The Drawing Studio hosts throughout the year. It is true that innovative program development was a necessary pre-condition to the awards, but lots of good ideas never see the light of day. It takes a source person building relationships in the community, training teachers, developing curriculum, providing quality art materials and engaging experiences—all over time. Modest grants and earned income have helped fund these kinds of expenses, but only a portion. Our ability to target underserved people and offer tuition and materials scholarships –that is, to actually serve the youth, adults, and seniors who most need us—and to sustain these efforts over time is directly the result of individual giving. Amid the congratulations that have come our way, I have heard some comments along the lines of “well, you can’t be hurting too badly [financially], you’re winning all these awards.” In the moment I was puzzled about how to respond (especially since only one—the NEA grant—involved actual money to TDS). It is true we’re not “hurting” in the sense of “we’re in danger of closing our doors.” AND it’s also true that we will be flat-out unable to do the kind of work that’s winning awards without your robust support of the annual fund. I am just as susceptible as anyone to the thinking “well, I haven’t contributed to [name of org] in the past, and they seem to be doing fine, so they don’t really need my contribution.” In addition to making the basic Statistics 101 error of confusing association with causality, this statement also (literally) passes the buck: the success and impact of the organization’s work is not my responsibility. “Somebody else” will take care of it. Here’s an antidote to that kind of thinking. Last week a mother and her teenage daughter came into the Studio. They had seen the Art of Summer banner hanging out front and were curious. They had never heard of The Drawing Studio. The daughter had never had any formal art instruction in school, but her mother vouched for her interest and natural ability. I gave them a tour of the Studio, anchoring it in description of what goes on in the Art of Summer. Although the girl was quiet, her eyes got larger and livelier by the moment. A small smile flitted across her face, then stayed, and I could tell she desperately wanted to sign up then and there. Her mother, meanwhile, though quite warm and friendly, seemed to be getting tenser by the moment. Finally, and offhandedly, I mentioned that if money were an issue, we had a generous scholarship program funded wholely by gifts from individuals. I wish you could have seen how, in a fraction of a second, her body relaxed and a smile to match her daughter’s appeared. It was clear to me that here was a mother committed to doing her best by her daughter, to supporting her daughter’s passion, and she had just been handed a gift of the means to do so. The real difference my gift to the annual fund makes couldn’t have been clearer to me than if I had reached in my pocket and handed her an envelope of $20 bills. --Lynn FleischmanYou can make your gift to the annual fund through PayPal
Spring 2010 From the Education Director: Art Learning at Its Core About the working relationship between the teaching artist and the art student. In the very early years of public television, I had occasion to watch two extraordinary series of master classes for performing musicians. The first of the two series of one-hour seminars was taught by the great cellist, Pablo Casals, then in the last years of his life. The second featured Andres Segovia, working with aspiring classical guitarists. At the time I was a young, new, and very nervous teacher of drawing, and I avidly watched both series to learn anything I could about the great mystery of how to teach. To confuse me further, the contrast between Casals and Segovia could not have been more dramatic. Casals was impatient, and often interrupted the playing of his pupil with "No! no! no!.....like this, it goes like this!" Then he would play the whole piece, becoming lost in the music, overwhelming his pupil with the power of his playing, indeed, of his genius! On the other hand, Segovia, after assuring himself that the posture of the guitarist sitting before him was satisfactory, would indicate with a slight nod for him to begin his piece. Segovia would then cover his eyes with his hand, rest his elbow on the top of his guitar and listen. Sometimes he would interrupt only to reach over to adjust the student's right hand (from ‘hearing’ the notes struck), then nod for him to continue. On other occasions, he would stop his pupil to correct a short passage, often by demonstrating what he wanted and then having the student play it several times to be sure that the correction had been digested. From these two masters, I gradually came to understand an important distinction between teaching by demonstration (or example) and teaching by attending to what the student needs (or tutoring). In a way, Casals’ loyalty was to the music rather than the student, which left the student to get what he/she could from the experience of the master’s commitment to the music. Segovia, on the other hand, was committed to the person who happened to be his student, seeking to set up an exercise appropriate to the student's understanding at that moment. Unlike most academic subjects, art learning involves both modeling and tutoring, because what one needs to know has to be absorbed, literally like a sponge, into the body, from the practice of doing it. Some of the 'doing it' can be learned by watching, emulating or just ‘hanging out’ with those who have some mastery and willingness to share it with a novitiate as was the case with Casals’ master classes. However, for any really serious progress, the role of a teacher of art who will work in a close coaching relationship with the student is critical. It is critical because art is about ‘seeing’, and the history of how each person learns to ‘see’ is deeply rooted (one might even say ‘stuck’) in the dark forest of childhood, which is further camouflaged by the random images of one’s social upbringing. To extract oneself from that forest, one needs a guide who has the life experience and perception to penetrate his/her student’s background of assumptions in order to provide the catalyst that opens the space for learning. Not only is such teaching a skill, it also calls for a generosity of spirit and compassion not easily found in the world of artistic egos eager for their own personal success. It is for this reason I am surprised that even now most professional schools of art have little to say about teaching art seriously. We seem to assume that anyone skilled as an artist can teach if they want to, and not just to ‘specialists’, but now to an emerging broad spectrum of people newly interested in visual learning as a natural extension of their other interests or professions. And while art programs abound, they are often staffed by artists whose interest in teaching is slight, but who nonetheless teach as a way to support themselves, even though their real energy is often more engaged in developing their own talent. Not that this indentured teacher of art cannot provide valuable guidance, but their teaching tends to be confined to what interests them at the moment, as distinct from what the student may require. Such self-absorbed enthusiasm is often delightful, and indeed may serve the advanced art student, but it can be confusing and even harmful to the beginning pupil who needs to be connected, not just churned up by forces he does not understand as yet. Thus, I myself have little patience with teacher complaints about the ineptitude of students commonly heard around many art departments, because such laments are more often more revealing of the inability or the inexperience of an artist/teacher to connect with what his student actually needs. It is of course sometimes true that what is missing is a serious effort from a student; without such effort, no amount of either demonstration or tutoring will help because the level of commitment is too weak. Most often, however, what is needed and wanted is the inspiration of a personal teacher in Segovia’s tradition, a dedicated tutor who is committed to connecting his student with the learning process by first revealing and validating the student’s present level of understanding. Once that ground of relationship is established, the master teacher can construct appropriate exercises that encourage the next level of skill--and the student will respond because it just feels right. In this spirit, we hold it as essential to maintain a core of master teachers at The Drawing Studio, and I am very satisfied at the quality of the Teaching Artists who serve our students.* But as much as a student obviously benefits from great teaching, our teachers also know that the real beneficiary is the teacher, who discovers that in the act of passing on the core of one's own art experience to others, one actually completes one’s own understanding--which is the very definition of mastery. Andrew Rush c. 2010 ** * I invite interested artists to consider my upcoming Certification (CERTS) training program (offered in this newsletter), a six-month intensive we have developed to learn the new curriculum of teaching the skills of observation through drawing, to people of all ages and walks of life who are coming to us in ever larger numbers. ** This essay is a largely rewritten version of an earlier essay published in The Drawing Studio newsletter in 2003 under the title ‘On Teaching’.
From the Executive Director: Givers: People Like Us There is a truism in the fundraising world: a nonprofit organization doesn’t need people who are rich; it needs people who are givers. With that in mind, I set out to discover what makes The Drawing Studio’s current “givers” give. I interviewed several long-time donors who donate at all levels. They also participate in other ways—as students, volunteers in various capacities, and Associates. I asked them how they came to their own decision to make a financial gift and what they might say to a person considering one to The Drawing Studio’s annual fund campaign, which kicks off March 1 (see accompanying story). Sara Dobbis (student, Associate, Board member, special events volunteer chair): Clay Bacon (student, Associate, special events participant): Emilia Arana (student, Associate, exhibition volunteer, teaching artist): Bruce Cobb (student, Associate, front desk volunteer, past President of the Board): Four voices that speak for many more. I have been so inspired by my conversations with our donors that I’m going to have more of them even though I’ve finished this article. In the meantime, here is where I locate the bottom line for all of us: It’s personal. TDS givers have a messianic streak. We want to bring the thrill and joy of learning how to see through studio art practice to everyone. We need money to do so. We want you to give it to us. Now. --Lynn Fleischman The Power of 10: Annual Fund Campaign 2010 The Drawing Studio’s 2010 annual fund campaign, “The Power of 10,” kicks off March 1 and runs through June 30. Our goal is $80,000. The annual fund campaign is the cornerstone of individual giving at The Drawing Studio. In years past, it has been key to our core activities: starting and sustaining the youth and senior programs, developing the library and dedicated print and sculpture spaces, and renovating and operating the new studio. The annual fund has never been more important than it is in 2010. Interestingly, during times of economic contraction and uncertainty, people often become their most creative, inventive, and visionary. TDS is no different. I have been astounded to witness the teaching artists, the volunteers, the Associates, and the students come forward with new ideas, activities, and initiatives to strengthen and expand TDS’s value in the community. However, we are severely limited in our ability to respond because we lack the additional staff to shape and guide this new volunteer and participant energy. In particular, we need staff in the areas of communications, exhibition, volunteers, and membership. As in the past, it is to the annual fund we look to provide seed funding. Further, in the next fiscal year, The Drawing Studio, like other nonprofits, will lose a significant portion of its public support at the local, state, and national levels because of government cutbacks. So the annual fund, in addition to maintaining essential services and seeding the future, must also fill this gap. Therefore, we have an invitation to each of you: Think about “The Power of 10” …if the 5000+ people who receive this newsletter in their mail each gave $10 What Could We Accomplish Together? The annual fund is not about convincing a few rich individuals; the Power of 10 is about thousands of generous givers coming together to make tangible their commitment to the power of art to change lives. Thank you for the immense privilege the TDS community is. --Lynn Fleischman
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