The Drawing Studio - Artists' Cooperative providing student centered art instruction

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.

* 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.