Elements of Drawing on iTunes

iTunes U from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University

iTunes U from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University

iTunes U has a number of on line courses.  Administrators in academia are drooling over the prospect of distant learning in this way, more customers and lower faculty costs are too delicious a prospect to ignore.  It is part of the New Stupid where technology has outpaced ways to use it and so technology has formed new eddies of activity because of itself rather than in the service of some other more pressing need.  (Steve Jobs understood this implicitly)  The dark side of technology’s power is that it negates labor and is more about bottom line-save-money-and-lower-labor-costs than it is about freeing people from laborious  tasks.  Learning from the screen is not well understood.  It is not the simple broadcast of information.  Something else happens in learning.  It usually requires another human present in the flesh.   Beats me what that transfer is or why it is, but it isn’t simply sending some text or audio over the internet to a recipient who will then take in the knowledge like a donut.

Course instruction from a member of The Royal Academy

Course instruction from a member of The Royal Academy

Nonetheless, on line courses have interested me for a long time and I poke around looking at them from time to time to find what’s being offered, what’s popular and what readings are being assigned. Yesterday on ITuneU I watched The Elements of Drawing (taken from Ruskin’s legendary book available from Dover) and was pleasantly surprised by how well the instructor, Stephen Farthing, used the medium.  It’s very, very simply done and it seems a credible course for the beginner or one who wants to refresh his idea of drawing.  The lessons were simple, direct and with methods that are easily learned.  Oxford University has a group of courses on various topics and The Ruskin School of Art has these subsets.  It’s free and for anyone interested, I recommend it as a good way to refresh you basic thoughts and practice about drawing from nature.  The internet does simple very well.

In the morass of critical language it’s refreshing to return to the simple.

Thinking about Software

Interior for a Flash movie, drawn in Adobe Illustrator on a Wacom Tablet

Interior for a Flash movie, drawn in Adobe Illustrator on a Wacom Tablet 

My fun in learning Illustrator and Photoshop was about the way it extended consciousness.  I am not aware of any way that it altered or expanded my imagery or my narrative, but more that it opened possibilities as a new extension of my eyes and hands.  No matter what current theory proposes, Art is always an extension of the corporeal, specifically of touch.  This is especially true for the painter.

 

So what do these other interfaces do, in their abrupt reduction to the flat screen?  They trigger off ideas that may not have been released otherwise.  To draw on a tablet or with a mouse gives an Other kind of experience that is thrilling and re-equilibrating, not equivalent to a piece of charcoal in hand, a brush or a pencil as it caresses a page, not better, never more sensuous, but in a delicious thrill unique and its own.  No artist should deny himself that experience.

 

The two modes aren’t in competition.  They are just different.

 

 

I am much less interested in seeing the work that computer interface produces than I will be retrospectively in looking back at the way the consciousness of the artist will have changed.  If it does.