There is value in the traditional. Despite my advocacy for more contemporaneity in visual art practice locally (because colloquially speaking we need to shake things up), I do value traditional approaches to art and most definitely training that is steeped in the traditional. What does all this mean? I am simply saying the foundations of a classical art school training cannot be beaten.
Drawing as a starting point: The cube, the pyramid, the oval or sphere tucked away in a corner or an open box to control lighting so that one can see how light falls on the forms more clearly. Hours are spent drawing and shading that oval or sphere, the most troublesome of the trio, so that it appears three-dimensional on the paper. There is drawing from nature; fragments or expanses of nature. I am thinking of a lovely drawing I recently saw in an exhibition of the rocks along the Georgetown Seawall. I don’t remember much else in it. I was distracted. Folks were talking to me as I looked and I was already a bit fatigued by the volume of work I had already seen.
