Published in TRACEY | journal
Drawing Across Boundaries
Sep 1998
Drawing and Visualisation Research
www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/
sota/tracey/
tracey@lboro.ac.uk
Proceedings of a
symposium held at
Loughborough University
in September 1998
HOW TO DRAW A PIGEON
Stephen Farthing a
a
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford
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Drawings can be about anything, but they are all records of measurement. A drawing is a
field where line, tone and colour have been introduced as individual players or made to
congregate in order to generate abstractions or illusions of forms, spaces and movement.
The point of drawing is this collection of measurement, which can be done either by
estimation, as for example in a drawing of Celia by David Hockney, or by mechanical
measurement, an example of which might be a wall drawing by Sol Lewitt. This distinction
is articulated by Martin Kemp whilst discussing Donatellos' relief of St George and the
Dragon, in his book The Science of Art. Kemp views Donatello's approach to perspective as
'inventive rather than geometrically precise' and describes the work thus:
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'The receding lines of the arcade, in front of which the princess glides, do converge to a
definite point behind the saint's back, but most of the other architectural features seem to
be judged by eye rather than measurement.'
Although Kemp draws attention to the difference between judgement and measurement, I
believe that within the traditions of Western fine art, judgement is in fact, a not so rough
means of making measurements and that fine judgements will produce fine
measurements. This theory is supported by a fact that we are all familiar with, which is that
provided the target is within range the longbowman has always been just as able to hit the
bull's eye as the operator of a guided missile.
Drawing classes for fine artists tend to be organised with a view towards developing the
pupils' estimating skills, not their ability to measure with instruments. Students are taught
to estimate where, how big, what tone or which colour a mark should be when it is placed
into 'the field', which for them is usually a sheet of white paper. This activity Ruskin called,
'dirtying the paper delicately', and is an idea that Brice Marden added to when he said,
'the hand touches more delicately in drawing. There is less between the hand and the
image than in any other media.'
Understanding this process of dirtying the paper in order to record the measurements
'internal' to a drawing is central to the looking at, learning and teaching of drawing, but is of
secondary importance to the need for a draftsman or woman to measure where they stand
in relation to their subject, as it is only when this point is fixed - or it is decided that the
position cannot be fixed - that the making of measurements internal to a drawing becomes
possible. So the priority for someone learning to draw is for them to work on establishing
both a physical and conceptual position for themselves. Once this is done internal
measurements can be worked out with relative ease, and so they become 'able to draw'.
To illustrate this I would like to look at two examples.
The famous woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros drawn in profile by Dürer that was taken from
two sources of information: a sketch of the animal and an accompanying letter about it,
and a drawing by Stubbs of a lemur. Dürer had never seen a rhino, his model in fact had
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been recently lost at sea whilst in transit between the King of Portugal and the Pope in
Rome, an incident which triggered the need for the drawing. Some two-hundred and fifty
years later, George Stubbs drew, from what appears to be life, the first Mouse Lemur to
have been brought from Madagascar to Europe. This drawing shows six images, from
different angles, of what is probably the same animal. The difference in the treatment in
these drawings is staggering. Whilst Dürer produced a robust medieval map of the beast,
Stubbs' fine pencil drawing has more in common with an early cubist film. What they have
in common, apart from the fact that they can both be found in the Print Room of the British
Museum is that they aim to be accurate records of the appearance of rare quadrupeds.
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Dürer and Stubbs each established, either by choice or force of circumstances, a different
physical and conceptual position from which to view their subject, but it is clear from the
evidence of the drawings that once they had established their 'ground', the internal
measurements of the drawing that were required in order to build a picture of their
respective animals appear to have been effortlessly achieved.
This simple theory works as a perfectly serviceable underpinning principle for designing a
drawing course today, but becomes slightly more complex when applied to an
understanding of modern and contemporary professional fine art practice, as I consider
that there is a fundamental difference between, on one hand, innocently learning to draw
and, on the other, learning to draw as an artist for the modern and contemporary art
market. This idea, Tony Godfrey inadvertently turns our attention to in his book Drawing
Today whilst putting to one side Philip Rawson's view, that drawing is a language, and
presenting a powerful alternative which is that contemporary drawing exists simply as
evidence of 'a residue of activity'. A residue which he compares to the footprint left by a
dancer in sand or the black rubber left on a road by a car when it has skidded.
Leon Kossoff gives further weight to this argument when he says of his own practice that
'drawing is making an image which expresses commitment and involvement'.
Although I don't believe that what Godfrey or Kossoff say on the subject detracts from my
view that measurement is what drawing is about, what is clear is that the image which may
at first appear to be the subject of a particular drawing is not necessarily the subject of the
artist's measurement. So, using a parallel example, when Frank Auerbach draws Catherine
Lampert's head, he is not so much measuring 'it', as using 'it' as a reflective object from
which to measure his own commitment to being an artist, and as a result the drawing
becomes a measured record of his commitment to that issue at that time.
What I have tried to do so far is present a fairly straightforward picture of how students of
drawing might need to look at the subject if they want to make good drawings. By
introducing modern and contemporary art practice and the notion of 'the artist', I have
made the picture a little more complex and warped it, but for the time being I would like to
pursue the simple route.
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Every year I look through about 300 portfolios of drawings which are the product of GCSE, A
Level and Foundation courses. Most of them have one thing in common, which is that
however well the student has learned to control the medium and measure their external or
internal world and record it, the subject matter they have worked with is usually boring,
both to them and me. Looking like nineteenth-century rubbish tips, most portfolios contain
a sea of images of old boots, bottles, decaying vegetables, dead fish and the occasional
half-dead naked human. It is as though the students are learning a skill that is already in
their hearts and their teachers' minds redundant. In a bid to deal with this problem in the
short term and for the purpose of this essay I want Jemima, my imaginary student, who is
considering what kind of drawing education she needs, to have no interest in becoming an
artist, but to be very keen on pigeons. Why she needs to be keen on pigeons you may see
later, but more important than her interest in pigeons is the fact that she needs to have an
enthusiasm if not an obsession for something - the landscape, people, history, even art.
With this basic enthusiasm in place she can then set about learning to draw; without it, I
think she is lost.
She probably has three options: teach herself, join a class or just go for it. The second
option, the class, will almost certainly involve her in attending a considerable number of life
drawing classes and it could take her years before she is let loose on or has the confidence
to deal with a more esoteric subject like pigeons. The reason for this heavy emphasis on
the life class is that there is a shared assumption amongst some artists and most
organisers of drawing classes that if you can learn to draw the nude in a studio, surrounded
by easels and electric fires, you can then draw anything.
Why this is true - if in fact it is - is another essay. So for now, you will need to suspend your
disbelief. If on the other hand Jemima just wants to draw pigeons and have nothing to do
with nudes, a teach-yourself drawing book like Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing may
provide a useful platform from which to start, even if it only provides a philosophical
position to kick against. Interestingly, his course totally excludes the use of the human
figure as subject matter, but advocates not less than three years developing the art of
'seeing'. So unless she sees no urgency, she should probably exclude the idea of following
Ruskin's course, although she may stumble upon a chapter in a book entitled How to Draw
a Pigeon and it sets her on the road. But I would advocate my third option which is for her
to just go for it.
In developing my case for Jemima, simply shooting from the hip, I would like you to
consider three books: Addled Art by Lionel Lindsay; Pigeon Shooting by Archie Coats and
The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin.
Lets start with Archie Coats and Pigeon Shooting. This is a book of ten chapters which
takes readers through just about everything they will ever need to know about pigeons.
From the nest to the gun shop, from the sky to the field, and from the dog's mouth to the
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dinner table, the book adopts a measured approach which, towards the end, deals with
drawing a pigeon - not as I first thought a diversion from the shooting stick to the sketching
stool, but instruction on preparing the bird for the oven. The word 'draw' is used in this
context as it is in drawing a sword from a scabbard, which means to pull and on this
occasion to pull the guts out of a bird.
I will come back to this but it struck me that pulling the guts out of something, as opposed
to copying its surface appearance, may be an important aspect of drawing and so this
chapter may give a lead to Jemima.
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The second book, Addled Art by Lionel Lindsay was published in 1946 by Hollis and Carter,
and raises the question of who does the drawing, and embedded within this question is the
question of quality. The book's eleven reactionary chapters attack modernism, abstraction
and women and Jewish artists, but one chapter is dedicated to drawing and entitled
Drawing - Bad and Good. Like a great deal of writing on this theme, it amounts to nothing
more than a proclamation of the author's belief that, in the past, artists drew better than
they do today. No explanation is offered for this, other than that in his view the world is
becoming an addled or rotten place. Starting with the Altimara caves, he applauds the
realism achieved by early artists when picturing bison and wild boar, then goes on to
wrestle with the identity of the first artists.
According to Lindsay, 'Whistler's notion that the first artist was a dreamer, who stayed by
the tents with the women and traced strange devises with a burn stick on a gourd is but
poetic fantasy. The first artist [he would have it], was a hunter.'
Let's pursue the identity of this first artist a little further. In Pliny's myth which considers
the origins of art, we find that, in common with many other inventions on the theme, the
author places a drawing at the beginning of art. For Pliny, the first artist was a woman; in
her story her lover is going off to war and in an inspired moment she captures his likeness
by drawing round his cast shadow on the walls of her home. To Pliny, this first drawn
likeness marked the beginning of art.
It is clear from these stories that none of our 'First' Artists embarked on their drawings with
the title 'Artist', as it were, in hand. They were instead 'awarded' the title as a result of their
good work - one for trying to capture love, another animals, and the other his own
imagination. With these issues and the notion of drawing being a way of capturing
something, I would now like to move to my third book, John Ruskin's The Elements of
Drawing.
Published in 1857, fourteen years before he founded the Ruskin School in Oxford, this
book was intended as a course in drawing, which could be followed chronologically over
what I suspect in Ruskin's mind was a time span somewhere between three years and the
rest of a student's life.
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George Landow sets the scene for this book in his essay, 'How to read Ruskin: the art critic
as Victorian sage': 'In Science and Technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of
invention - the notion, essentially, that one can create solutions to problems ...'. Within this
context, Ruskin's writings on Art convey the characteristic Victorian drive for selfimprovement and general reform.
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The Elements is structured around a preface and three letters addressed to the reader.
The preface sets out rather disappointingly by saying that Ruskin wants to waive any
discussion on why drawing should be learned because the book is too large already.
Unable to resist the temptation, a few pages later he declares his belief that students
should learn to draw so that they will 'see' and 'love' nature better. He then extends this
position by arguing that once this is done they will also 'see', which I take to mean
understand and love, the Masters, in particular Leonardo and Titian, better.
Towards the end of the preface he makes two apologies. One is that learning to draw may
require considerable practice and some monotonous or formal discipline, but he offers a
way out by suggesting that if the student finds it too irksome they should probably just give
up. The other apology on reflection is more of a confession. 'Of figure drawing nothing is
said in the following pages. Because I do not think figures, as chief subjects, can be drawn
to any good purpose by an amateur.' This is a statement that may have been driven more
by Ruskin's personal lack of success with the human figure, both in the studio and the
world at large, than his absolute ability as a designer of the curriculum. But this said, when
Ruskin gave his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor to Oxford University, he identified the
'amateur' rather than the aspiring artist as his target student and made it clear that he did
not intend his school to become like, or compete with, the Slade or Royal Academy schools.
Ruskin's main aim seems to have been to broaden, with the aid of a drawing master and a
collection of fine examples, the education of the undergraduate population of Oxford
University, whilst possibly firing a shot across the bows of the South Kensington System of
Art Education, which was the National Curriculum in Art of the day. Ruskin's aim was not to
train artists, and just how seriously he took this aim is made clear in a notice he issued to
the landscape class at the School in 1884. 'The teacher of landscape painting wishes it to
be generally understood by all his pupils that instruction given in his classes is not intended
to fit them for becoming artists, or to advance their skill in the occupation that they follow.
They are taught drawing primarily in order to direct their attention to the beauty at God's
work in the universe, and secondly that they may be able to record with some degree of
truth the forms and colours of objects when such recording is likely to be useful.'
Having established that 'The Elements of Drawing is not a training manual for artists but a
book for anyone who is interested in learning to draw, Ruskin develops his theme.
Letter one deals with the basic principles of the craft of drawing and emphasises the need
to practice copying. Letter two focuses on the landscape and takes the student away from
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the imitation of the surface appearance of solids, giving a strong feeling of the difference
between working in the studio and drawing in the open air, from nature. Letter two deals
with the landscape and describes a 'floating world' where torrents of water and billows of
cloud move freely between rocks and mountains and where nothing is still, let alone easily
grasped.
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By giving this area of study such prominence, it makes it difficult to ignore the fact that one
seldom sees evidence of this use of drawing on the curriculum in schools or art schools
today. The final letter, for the purist, may be surprising as it deals with colour and
composition. It opens with an apology to the student for preventing them from using colour
for so long, then offers considerable technical advice on colour mixing and some colour
theory. The letter concludes with a short and, by today's standards, unsurprising litany on
composition which encompasses nine rather mechanistic laws on the subject.
This last letter in the The Elements of Drawing reveals a surprising depth in Ruskin's
thinking on where the parameters of drawing lie. He makes it clear that it's not just, as he
starts out by saying, 'a language that sets down clearly and usefully such things you cannot
describe with words', but a communication tool with rather more power, with a capacity for
colour, and capable of being used as a means of visual planning. It is, in short, not just a
device for making records, but an intellectual and poetic tool for sifting and ordering facts.
An important step for Ruskin in discovering this bigger role for drawing came about through
his study of Turner, a study which resulted in him coining the phrase 'Turnerian
Topography'. Ruskin saw Turner's approach as being in stark contrast and superior to his
own attempts at recording 'pure' or 'simple' topography. His own way of seeing he
compared to reflecting the place in a mirror, whilst the Turnerian approach he realised
relied on the mobility of fact as a tool in the accumulation of drama and, in Ruskin's terms,
truth. A graphic example of this was when Ruskin realised whilst retracing Turner's
footsteps through the Pass of Faido in Switzerland that Turner had literally moved
mountains in what Ruskin had previously thought to be topographically accurate records.
To conclude, I should like to explore Ruskin's view on drawing in the context of the Ruskin
School in the 1990s, and tie this essay up with some final thoughts on drawing pigeons.
Today our course aims and curriculum contain at least three components that I suspect our
founder would not have approved of: life drawing, human anatomy and the aim of
educating students towards becoming artists.
Life drawing at the Ruskin made its first public appearance in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead
Revisited, when Charles Ryder, who was reading history at Wadham, returned for his
second year and signed on for classes at the School. His recollection was that the life
model was brought from London and returned there at the end of the class and during the
class she gradually went pink on her side nearest to the oil stove. Although Ruskin may
have approved of this young historian broadening his education, he would certainly not
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have approved of the subject matter on offer, nor the boy's base recollections - a view that
to some extent I share. There is, after all, something distinctly odd about twenty people
sitting around one naked soul and drawing him or her, especially when the 'image' of the
human figure can hardly be said to have remained central to a study of the visual arts.
Today, life drawing looks increasingly uncomfortable as the main focus of a drawing course.
Nonetheless the Ruskin School still does offer some life drawing, as it provides a
convenient common subject for formally taught classes, and students seem to gain a lot of
pleasure from drawing the nude.
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What looks more comfortable as a core subject in a drawing course is the study of Human
Anatomy, which Ruskin also disapproved of.
As a part of the curriculum today Human Anatomy forms a novel bridge between art and
science. It requires the understanding of a literally definable body of knowledge and offers
an opportunity for students to explore, through drawing and observation, the usually
unknown and mostly unseen. It has, in a way, replaced life drawing as the centre of our
drawing course and provides students with a close at hand, but unfamiliar field of
exploration.
Ruskin's aim, of offering classes in drawing to all, is something we continue in a small way,
but our undergraduate course is primarily geared towards preparing students to become
artists. This said, I remain very interested in the proposition, seeded in Ruskin's aim for the
School, which is that it should not set out to train artists, as I am convinced that in the
future only very few art schools will retain this as a goal. Instead, increasing numbers of
students in all subjects will seek to become more visually literate. This is already beginning
to happen and will continue apace as all subjects become more dependent on the visual.
Literature and modern language students are studying film and video, scientist are
modelling resolutions into digital images, and as artists become more hungry for and able
to use new technology, the skills they require become not so different from those of their
fellow students in science and engineering. This will result in students in all subjects
needing to acquire the skills to work creatively with the visual through observation and
measurement and form then to be able to sift and make sense of the visual as a matter of
course. What I am not arguing for as a way of meeting this need are modular courses, as I
believe that by the time a student is at university it is already too late to broaden their
educational base; what I am arguing for is change in the pre-matriculation curriculum.
Ruskin, I think, would have approved of Fine Art courses that displayed a mixture of new
and old methods. He would have condoned the use of photography, just as I suspect we
should embrace digital imaging as a part of drawing. Ruskin was not obsessed with the
skill, craft or materials of drawing. It was a moral and intellectual approach that he was
after, an approach that involved teaching students to place themselves morally and
intellectually in the world, not the market place - or in a life class once a week. What he
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was trying to develop in his students was an intellectual curiosity that would lead them into
looking closely at art, science and nature. I am certain that he was trying to turn his
students into artists, but he didn't necessarily want to work with those who had an ambition
to become an artist. I believe he wanted them to be just like Pliny's first artist, driven by
love. With this in mind, I suspect that all Jemima needs to do if she wants to draw pigeons,
is spend time in Trafalgar Square watching them and then with a pencil and paper begin to
record her impressions. Her love of pigeons will give her a position from which to draw so
she will in time be able to estimate the size of the head, relative to the body, relative to the
dome on the top of the National Gallery, and improve with practice.
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My conclusion is that since the Italian Renaissance, at least, it has been thought that
learning to draw was an important part of a 'gentleman's' education and for slightly less
time this assumption has also applied to 'ladies'. Both William Morris and John Ruskin
considered classes in drawing to be an essential part of a young person's education and
placed it on the same level as reading and writing. Art education during this period has
very gradually placed less emphasis on a need for learning to draw. Art schools have
instead placed a loose notion of creativity and a tighter attitude towards teaching art
history and theory in its place, which has by default generated a greater emphasis on the
idea and the finished product than the exploration of genuinely creative routes to it. So
drawing has become less important on the curriculum. If you accept that this is true and
that it is time for an overhaul, I believe that before we can carry out this overhaul within art
schools some fundamental changes are needed in how drawing is taught and examined in
secondary schools. This may sound like a neat way of passing the buck, but I believe there
is no sensible alternative.
Briefly my proposal is that a new A Level and GCSE be devised in Drawing - not Art but
Drawing. The curriculum will explore drawing as a way of recording measurements,
planning, illustrating, mapping, self-expression and simply leaving traces. It will be 30%
History and theory and the rest practical. Art schools will demand a pass at A Level as an
entry requirement and it will be both useful and attractive as a GCSE for students applying
to many other subjects. By implementing such a change, we will lift ourselves out of the
present trap, where we are doing the equivalent of admitting undergraduates to study
Physics without them having an A Level in Mathematics, and make some positive moves
towards linking art and science in the curriculum.
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