FEEL THE LINE, AND ENYA.

Been diggin' through the vaults, finding old Art Institute work and comparing it (curca '94) to the stuff I had to do for my current degree. Back then, "digital design" was a concept, not an actuality. We were all hands-on, even with type faces. I miss that, and am lucky I got to get both worlds.

This was a great class. Wish I remember who the teach was. He was a weird, pony-tailed body-builder who played Enya and Fresh Air during drawing sessions. It could have been creepy, but the guy understood the core to drawing from sight. I would be drawing in pieces, composing figures how I knew how -comic book style that I had learned from books I had when I was a little kid. (e.g., HOW TO DRAW A SKULL: START WITH A CIRCLE, THEN AN OVAL, TWO MORE CIRCLES FOR EYE HOLES, AN UP-SIDE-DOWN HEART FOR THE NOSE HOLE...."), then applying that to comic book art which was obviously done in the same way. He would catch me doing this and immediately make me stop. "Draw what you see....not in isolated bits...feel the line that your eyes trace, and let it happen on its own. Let the hand follow the mind, not the other way around." Whether you end up with the right proportions or not, the technique felt more fluid, natural, even intimate. You felt the composition render itself, rather than building it robotically, block-by-block.

Steve Brodner once told me, after asking him if used reference material for his sketches, "Drawing is seeing." (Not name dropping, just cool to interact with a hero....and it was a good quote.)


"I think you can define drawing, or the drawing impulse, in a variety of ways: It is concerned with the line, as opposed to color or form; there is typically a concern with movement -- what is a drawing if not the record of the movement of the hand over a piece of paper; and finally there is an interest in the process of thought, by which I mean that drawing, even it its most expanded form, has a relation to language in that it structures the creation of meaning."

-The Institute of Contemporary Arts/Boston's chief curator Helen Molesworth