Or How To Draw Attention…
Oh would I love to be able to chat with John Ruskin.
Ruskin wanted EVERYONE to draw. Not because he wished to turn the entire population of England into artists, to have factories filled with easels, and sketchpads on bankers’ knees, but in order to teach them to SEE. In his words: “The art of drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing and should be taught to every child just as writing is, has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles.” In Ruskin’s eyes, drawing was the most perceptive of ways for us to know and initmately understand our surroundings.
The other benefit is of course exploring why something attracts us visually. The time your pencil takes to circumnavigate an object or a landscape allows your mind the time to explore the reasons and constituent parts that drew you to it in the first place.
The drawing itself is of no importance, it is all about learning to notice rather than just look.
John Ruskin defended Turner’s paintings againt the establishment’s stuffed shirts, and deployed his eloquence in defence of the image (“word painting” as he called his writing). and his conviction that everyone is born an artist, that art should some way be as natural as breathing, and certainly not a walled kingdom in the hands of an elite.
Valuable advice indeed.
So why do the loose flocks of art students that spring and clement weather lure from their classrooms to scatter through the parks and streets of town all look so miserable, hunched over their sketchpads, grimacing and squinting at the view? Worrying about the marks they’ll get, no doubt. I always feel like squatting down on the grass and trying to cheer them up, to talk about letting the pencil do the drawing, maybe suggest they hold it less like a scalpel to dissect the landscape and more like a divining rod. That who cares about a nine out of ten, or a two, for that matter, that what they can really learn cannot be assigned a grade anyway, but the hawk-like gaze of the hovering professors is enough to make me flee like some timorous sparrow seeking shelter from an approaching storm.
How cowardly. Ruskin’s ghost would NOT approve….
John Ruskin was born in 1819. A champion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, he wrote and lectured extensively, and painted exquisite watercolours on his travels. I’d suggest: “Unto This Last: And Other Writings” as a good place to start. It’s available from Penguin, edited by Clive Wilmer.
Tolkien Exhibition in Neuchâtel:
I’ve checked out the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival site, which provides the following details:
Sur les Terres de Tolkien
Exposition John Howe
60 tableaux originaux/ 60 original drawings
Théatre du Passage, 1-6 juillet, entrée libre/ free entrance
My first thought was “Oh no! Somebody’s already swiped half of them!”, but of course that’s very silly. Here’s a picture of the poster:
Gandalf Getting On:
A couple more pictures of Gandalf:
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Left: Close-up
Centre: A rather disconcerting Gandalf shorn of his beard
Right: Hand and face
On the Drawing Board:
A few more pencil sketches for Tolkien, this time for the French-language version of Meditations on Middle-Earth. I am sure I mentioned doing these ages ago. Good intentions will be my undoing, but now that the deadlines loom over me like the Witch-King over Eowyn, time to sharpen some pencils.
Night table:
That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis and The Well at the World’s End by William Morris
Next week: Draw Winky
