Brenda Sageng — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:52:26 GMT

While I do agree with Mark Gottsegen's assertion that strength of idea is critically important, if one does not have the technical skill to put forth those ideas, our artistic expressions will be weak and incomplete. As a young woman attending a state Univ. in Minn. years ago, this was the kind of instruction I expected and begged for, but sadly,did not receive as the chauvinistic attitudes of Modernism held a lock on what passed for instruction in that art department. None of the professors actually gave any instruction in how to utilize the media or what to look for in drawing or painting from direct observation. In fact, observation was not even encouraged. I have spent years of my life trying to unlock the technical secrets that I knew must be available and though I have made great progress, I don't have the youthful years of study available to me to travel to such a place of concentrated study. I currently teach drawing and an Elementary ed. Art class at a small state univ. in Kansas, and do my best to transfer what I've learned to my students. Unfortunately, very few understand the need for intense, concentrated practice and skill development to acquire the abilities they so admire. It is very true that we distract art students with a great deal of extraneous classwork, even at the graduate level, which was a great frustration and disappointment for me in my graduate studies. If America wants to be foremost in any discipline, we must be willing to give up the notion that everything can, or must, be done on artificial, hurried time-tables. To quote a reference from the art ed. class I teach, "only those who are well-educated in any discipline, can be truly inventive in it." Creativity and inventiveness are natural outgrowths of the intuitive facility that develops with practice. If there were only such a place as SORA to study here in southwest Missouri, I would be the first to enroll!

Mark Gottsegen — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:08:38 GMT

Learning to draw this way is wonderful training and discipline, but unless the artist pushes way beyond this with her pictorial ideas she will end her career as a well-trained 19th century artist.

Drawing Basics: Classical Art in the Modern World