What Do You Want to See?

What would it be like to see like Rembrandt - to sense the gesture in all things, looking through to the ugliness and squalor and finding a harder beauty in that; what was that like? What was it like for him to walk down a street of an evening and how is it different for you today? Can we let him suggest to us the penetrating gaze, the love of everything alive and aging?

Rembrandt, black crayon on paper

Even if you're listening to Daft Punk in your headphones and everything is lit by street lamps and neon ads and the subway rumbles underneath you?

Is Rembrandt's experience and his gaze - 350 years old, pre-industrial, pre-electrical, pre-mass-media - unrecoverable, anachronistic? Do we have entirely new eyes?

There's a saying in Torah study that if Moses were to come to a temple today he wouldn't understand Torah, for he's missed 2500 years of commentary.

You aren’t coming to this school to be competent or just about good enough – this is about bringing what’s inside you out so that is bursts in the sunlight. You are in training to be astonishing.

When I was in art school I had a classmate - older, a returning student in his 40's - who called me at night and asked me with a manic glee if I had started the homework for our drawing class with Wayne Thiebaud, which was to copy a drawing by Honore Daumier. Because he had, he had been drawing for hours, and it had pulled him into an altered state of consciousness, as he was eager to tell me.

"The way Daumier draws is mind-blowing," Ron said, for that was his name. "He just scribbles until finds an edge that he likes, until he Hits something, then he Follows it, and makes it the Thing, and you know he couldn't tell if he was drawing it or it was drawing him. I can just feel it in my pencil! I know how he felt!" Then he whispered intensely - "and I've been listening to Shakespeare, Richard Burton reading Hamlet, and I'm thinking that's what Shakespeare was doing too, godammit - he spun, he scribbled, in the meter and the rhythm, until he Found something, the word or three words and then just followed them." His fervor was extremely funny. "I'm thinking this is weeeeiiird, man, I liiiike it!"

The very drawing we copied in class

In class Ron brought in his copied drawing and about 20 other drawings he had done in the fit of Daumier inspiration. Professor Thiebaud looked at them all, nodded, said, 'Not what I asked you to do … but … it will do …’ and walked on (he was a man of few words).

This, I've felt since then, is what homework should be about. This isn't drudgery, but a path to ecstasy! We're not here to make you draw better - we're pushing an altered state of consciousness!

When I went on to NYU, my teachers were man and women of the theater of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They taught about designing for a world of entertainment that economically, artistically and technically doesn’t exist anymore - and yet their deeper lessons about design go through my mind every day. Even if I then turned their lessons on their heads.

For the next three years, remember this, lodge it in a protected place in your mind: It's going to feel at times like we're forcing you to draw, see, design in our way, the officially agreed-upon right way to be a designer, but it's really about surpassing and flying beyond, doing the confounding, fucked-up, most off-kilter and at the same time most profoundly appropriate thing in the world.

We're trying to train you to do the thing we don't understand and don't know is possible.

Camus said that no graduation ceremony is complete until the students consume the faculty.

I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm smart as hell and you should listen to me hard – and I want you to take everything I have, like a thief in the night, and misuse it all to your own ends.

Your Mission

Be astonishing. 

Have a great year!

Gallery

Here's a sampling of what you and your classmates have done so far this summer. Based on this, you will be an astoundingly talented class, if you keep up the momentum! (Sorry if I've misspelled anyone's names - I'll get them all right by at least your third year).

Adrienne Carlile

Andy Jean

Joeng Hyun Cho

Chris Thielking

Ilana Breitman

Jennifer Hill

Jessica Posteraro

Kristopher Layng

Nina Vartanian

Ntokozo Kunene

Perrine Villemur

Peter Mitchell

Sarah Abigail Hoke-Brady

Taisa Malouf

Yu-hsuan Chen

Yu Ting Lin

Oona Curley

Katherine Mitchell

Reporting

This is really about how drawing works for designers. There are herds of drawing classes for the rest of humanity who are sadly not designers, where centuries of graphic tradition are heaped on people with no other point than to draw nice drawings. But we designers draw the way elephants use their trunks – it’s how we interact with the world, and how we communicate (so please picture an elephant trumpeting with his or her trunk when you are drawing).

             What makes a drawing a designer’s drawing? The point is not a display of skill or even to make a beautiful drawing (though both things are useful, in the background), but communicating. Design drawings are often covered in notes, the words and images combining to tell as much as possible - a costume sketch will note the silk trim and the distressed leather boots and in which act this character wears this, while set sketches note the glossy paint finish and where the wall moves between acts I and II, and so on.

            It is also about communicating with ourselves - we can argue that we don’t know how we see something until we draw it.

            The world is filled to bursting with surprising things, and it’s brilliant to keep a sketchbook to try to pin down fleeting appearances, and try to work out what the hell is happening here. Some of the notes and sketches could later be extremely useful, as you use a scribbled space or person as the inspiration for a design, but many will be just for interest, to keep your eyes open and your drawing muscles limber.

            Here are examples of pages from my own sketchbook, including recent times in airports. I’m looking at people and trying to figure out what’s going on – recording appearance but also asking what their relationships are, what’s propelling them. 

            Edward Hopper’s sketchbooks are filled with drawings that are so clearly for him, showing as much as he can with the pencil – form and shade – and using notes to record color and texture impressions, and reminders of the quality of light, the feeling of the shadows, etc.

            James Jean is a contemporary illustrator many of you may know of, who draws with an enviable freedom. Many of his sketchbooks are sold in reproduction, and many are online, like here.

            I still have my own sketchbooks from my time at NYU, 20 years ago. They’re there on a shelf with many more sketchbooks, filled with big and small ideas, all of them completely mine. By opening yourself to the strangeness and banality and beauty and boredom of the world, you can get a sense of who you are as an artist.

Your Mission

Grab your sketchbook, head to the coffee shop, and draw the people and the space. Or a bar or a park or a waiting room or wherever – if you are traveling, airports are perfect spaces to record humanity. Note details. Wildly speculate about whom these people are, what is happening in this space.

What are people doing or wearing that shows that it’s 2013? What signals are people putting out to the world? What signals are intentional, which are unintentional? You are doing research for the big picture.

The Line

The summer advances, the fireflies are fewer, the air conditioner needs a rest. I hope everyone is mixing some of those fantastic summer things in with all your graduate school preparations, like eating frozen bananas while floating down a river in an inner tube, or whatever your version of a fantastic summertime thing is. 

This week's mission is simple and sweet, an important idea we'll conquer easily. 

Drawing is a complex activity, there's no doubt about it - when your pencil is moving around the paper there are so many things to consider, keep straight, balance, and it can always be better. Many of the aspects of drawing we're looking at quickly in this summer course are massive ideas - like Proportion, from week 2 - that we could spend months profitably turning this way and that. There are several ideas, though, that we can raise, consider for a week, then stash away for when it's useful later. 

Lines

We want our lines to be clear, responsive, and varied as they describe different surfaces, textures, hard and soft passages, etc. A drawing with one unchanging line doesn't pull us in - lines that have contrast interest us, helping describe the variety within the subject. 

Line Weight it one of those ideas that we can absorb quickly. We have several examples here of master draftsmen from various times. Moebius, the pen name of the French cartoonist Jean Giraud, who died last year, was a comic book artist with a beautiful free flowing line that he could vary so subtly - here, thicker lines brings objects into the foreground, while thinner lines are for details and distant objects.

Winsor McCay, who in addition to drawing the greatest of all Sunday comics, Little Nemo in Slumberland, was also a set and costume designer and speed sketch artist on the vaudeville stage, and if that wasn't enough he was an inventor of animation and its first great practitioner. He had an amazing technique of drawing the silhouette first, with a lovely thick line, and then quickly adding details. His mastery of perspective should be seen to be believed. 

Egon Schiele had a profound sense of line, and a profound sense of anatomy, and it is remarkable to see what he conveyed just with his responsive, varied outline, with really minimal lines within the form.

Rembrandt provides the most masterful use of varied line, here with quick brushstrokes that you can almost count, but his lines and tones are so varied, accomplishing so many things - I never get tired of looking at this drawing. 

When I was a design student I had a teacher lay down the law for drawing costume renderings: your thickest line for the silhouette; your next thickest line for lines of tailoring; your thinnest line for wrinkles and texture. Boom boom boom. I learned it that way, and while I happily vary it and change it around, the clarity this approach gives is undeniable. Here are some sketches done at the American Museum of Natural History, with a nice thick silhouette and detailed passages within the form with a thinner line. 

Your Mission

You may use two pens, like a Sharpie and a Mikron pen, with contrasting line widths, or you could use a pencil for this assignment. Choose a nice subject, with an interesting silhouette and interesting passages within. Some ideas:

A pile of shoes

A cauliflower

A stack of various books

A dress tossed on the floor

Six asparagus in a pile

You could also try this on the self-portrait you did earlier. 

Use your imagination and surprise and charm me. Do a quick quick sketch to establish the overall form, and then draw a good strong, descriptive silhouette. Then map out important details within - what's the least you can get away with and still have a drawing that's fun to look at? Don't worry about shading, this is purely an exercise in line. Make your lines definite and continuous - we're saying good bye to the wispy, sketchy line.