The Studio Habits of Mind and HS Professional Development:
Reconnecting to the Artist Within
The Real Benefits of Drawing: Understanding the Studio Habits of Mind
We extend our heartfelt thanks to both the studio art and art education faculty of Georgia State University for the privilege of meeting in the GSU drawing and painting studios and adjacent classrooms. We especially thank our hard working model, Mario Mathis. Our art teachers left with a renewed sense of connection to their life passion—the making of art. Teachers regained a sense of childhood enchantment with the magic and power of drawing—extending our minds and senses in communion with that which we perceive and experience, distilling its essence through artistic choice, reflection, and revision.
In our Professional Development, high school art teachers explored ways of developing creative thinking through Postmodern principles and metaphorical thinking, reviewed the upcoming district-wide high school visual art assessments, and began assessing last year’s 5th grade performance assessments in art. They also engaged in an extended life drawing session designed to help them better understand the real educational benefits of art education as conceived through the Studio Habits of Mind framework. (Continued below)
In our Professional Development, high school art teachers explored ways of developing creative thinking through Postmodern principles and metaphorical thinking, reviewed the upcoming district-wide high school visual art assessments, and began assessing last year’s 5th grade performance assessments in art. They also engaged in an extended life drawing session designed to help them better understand the real educational benefits of art education as conceived through the Studio Habits of Mind framework. (Continued below)
As they worked from the model, teachers reported that they experienced the voices of old professors from long ago guiding their hands even as they brought their own artistic voices to the process of life drawing. From the vantage point of being veteran teachers and artists, this experience allowed them to reflect on the value of their own journey from child to adult artist—and to reflect on the needs of their current students with refreshed, and in some cases, new insights.
We began by doing short gesture drawing lasting two minutes each and then did a series of gesture drawings lasting only for five seconds. We then had two ten minute poses. The final pose, however, came with a challenging twist: teachers had to draw the figure, without moving, as if they were looking at it from the opposite side of the room! (Continued below)
We began by doing short gesture drawing lasting two minutes each and then did a series of gesture drawings lasting only for five seconds. We then had two ten minute poses. The final pose, however, came with a challenging twist: teachers had to draw the figure, without moving, as if they were looking at it from the opposite side of the room! (Continued below)
This life drawing experience lead to the following reflection on the Studio Habits of Mind framework. Teachers shared how the life drawing experience developed skills and knowledge in each of the following Studio Habits:
Reflection: The process of drawing, along with music, dance and theatre, is unique in the curriculum in that it provides instant feedback for immediate reflection on an ongoing basis, from the start of the drawing to its finish. Every mark is instantly evaluated in relationship to the previous mark and they are about to make. Students must constantly shift between end and means, the projected future of the drawing and where they are now. They must learn to exercise judgment “on the fly”: does this work? Is this line too dark? Is this shape too big?
Envision: The challenge of drawing the figure as if they were looking at it from the opposite side of the room made teachers have to both observe and mentally envision the figure in front of them not as flat shapes but as geometric and organic forms. This exercise helped sharpen teachers’ appreciation for the more subtle role that mental visualization plays in observational drawing: students must envision the end state of the drawing even as they start the first line; they mentally forecast what the composition might be like, where the negative and positive space will be, how large or small to make the next shape, etc.
Engage and Persist: Students learn to persist beyond their limitations, whether these are limits of skill or emotional limits, such as anxiety. As you commit yourself to work, your mind naturally makes connections, remembers past experiences and feelings that inform your drawing, and it envisions future projects (“In the next set of drawings, I’m going to make life-sized figures of that homeless couple I saw in the park last night as the snow began to fall.”) Students learn the connection of labor and struggle to deep meaning; the harder you work, the more meaning you discover.
Develop Craft: In life drawing, students learn more than just eye/hand coordination. They learn to both disengage the figure from its contextual meaning—seeing it as an arrangement of shapes, lines and values—and also to engage the figure in a highly personal way. One teacher reported that he could not draw our model, Mario, until he made a joke—when Mario laughed, the teacher had established a personal connection that let him draw naturally.
The craft of life drawing is found in the orchestration of how we see, how we think, and how we feel. The figure is the prism through which we project our empathic understanding of other people. Through the concentrated observation and presentation of the figure on a flat surface, artists learn: the subtleties of body language; the figure’s placement in space; the connection between gesture, structure, volume, and light; and the intricate relationships between parts to whole that we feel in ourselves but cannot grasp as a concept without actively exploring these relationships through drawing others.
Express: In traditional Chinese art, the most expressive drawings do not have the bold, wild lines of Modern art. Rather, intense expression is found in the subtle qualities and exquisite control of line and tone. As in the above example of the teacher needing to laugh along with Mario before he could draw him, artists learn how to express themselves in both bold and subtle ways through life drawing. “What does it feel like to hold that difficult pose? I know what it feels like for a muscle to tremble under intense strain—can I show the model’s exertion using this kind of line?”
Observation: Because we see the world through two eyes, we have ‘binocular” vision; we reconstruct the world in our mind from two slightly different perspectives—one from our left eye and one from our right eye. Our minds put these images together, and it is this synthesis that we experience as the real world. Photographs flatten space—the mind does not have to work to understand the space in a photograph because it is already flat; you can’t “look around” a figure in a photo. But you can look around a figure in life simply by tilting your head or moving a few inches. Our minds can also trick us by substituting preconceived ideas about what is really “out there” for what we actually experience. Therefore, drawing is a dialectic between figuring out what we “really see,” what we think we see, and what we know (or think we know).
Reflection: The process of drawing, along with music, dance and theatre, is unique in the curriculum in that it provides instant feedback for immediate reflection on an ongoing basis, from the start of the drawing to its finish. Every mark is instantly evaluated in relationship to the previous mark and they are about to make. Students must constantly shift between end and means, the projected future of the drawing and where they are now. They must learn to exercise judgment “on the fly”: does this work? Is this line too dark? Is this shape too big?
Envision: The challenge of drawing the figure as if they were looking at it from the opposite side of the room made teachers have to both observe and mentally envision the figure in front of them not as flat shapes but as geometric and organic forms. This exercise helped sharpen teachers’ appreciation for the more subtle role that mental visualization plays in observational drawing: students must envision the end state of the drawing even as they start the first line; they mentally forecast what the composition might be like, where the negative and positive space will be, how large or small to make the next shape, etc.
Engage and Persist: Students learn to persist beyond their limitations, whether these are limits of skill or emotional limits, such as anxiety. As you commit yourself to work, your mind naturally makes connections, remembers past experiences and feelings that inform your drawing, and it envisions future projects (“In the next set of drawings, I’m going to make life-sized figures of that homeless couple I saw in the park last night as the snow began to fall.”) Students learn the connection of labor and struggle to deep meaning; the harder you work, the more meaning you discover.
Develop Craft: In life drawing, students learn more than just eye/hand coordination. They learn to both disengage the figure from its contextual meaning—seeing it as an arrangement of shapes, lines and values—and also to engage the figure in a highly personal way. One teacher reported that he could not draw our model, Mario, until he made a joke—when Mario laughed, the teacher had established a personal connection that let him draw naturally.
The craft of life drawing is found in the orchestration of how we see, how we think, and how we feel. The figure is the prism through which we project our empathic understanding of other people. Through the concentrated observation and presentation of the figure on a flat surface, artists learn: the subtleties of body language; the figure’s placement in space; the connection between gesture, structure, volume, and light; and the intricate relationships between parts to whole that we feel in ourselves but cannot grasp as a concept without actively exploring these relationships through drawing others.
Express: In traditional Chinese art, the most expressive drawings do not have the bold, wild lines of Modern art. Rather, intense expression is found in the subtle qualities and exquisite control of line and tone. As in the above example of the teacher needing to laugh along with Mario before he could draw him, artists learn how to express themselves in both bold and subtle ways through life drawing. “What does it feel like to hold that difficult pose? I know what it feels like for a muscle to tremble under intense strain—can I show the model’s exertion using this kind of line?”
Observation: Because we see the world through two eyes, we have ‘binocular” vision; we reconstruct the world in our mind from two slightly different perspectives—one from our left eye and one from our right eye. Our minds put these images together, and it is this synthesis that we experience as the real world. Photographs flatten space—the mind does not have to work to understand the space in a photograph because it is already flat; you can’t “look around” a figure in a photo. But you can look around a figure in life simply by tilting your head or moving a few inches. Our minds can also trick us by substituting preconceived ideas about what is really “out there” for what we actually experience. Therefore, drawing is a dialectic between figuring out what we “really see,” what we think we see, and what we know (or think we know).