How important was Drawing to your course of study?
Extremely so! My first major was in Illustration, which obviously requires the ability to draw. However, I'm biased in believing that drawing is the foundation to any sort of visual composition, from painting to sculpture to designing furniture.
Was the Drawing tuition up to the standard you need?
I was fortunate to have excellent life drawing and composition instructors, all of whom were working artists outside of the classroom. (Honestly? It should be a requirement that those who teach also DO.)
The Course I Did
My first major was in Illustration, which basically means it took two years of life drawing, composition, perspective, color theory and academic classes (including English and art history) to get to the "fun" stuff. My second major was in Graphic Design, which was much more technical back in the day. Of course, by then I was firmly hooked on Art History and kept up a backbreaking schedule of studio classes to feed my AH minor jones.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Looking back, I regret little. Art school was expensive (constantly having to buy supplies, alone, kept me on a steady diet of ramen noodles) and I had to work full-time to pay my way through it. It didn't kill me, though, so it's all good.
I absolutely loved the atmosphere--being around creative people day in and day out. How we dressed or looked didn't matter, it was what came out of our mouths and hands that was important. You could float visionary concepts to a receptive audience; no one ever made that blank, wide-eyed, disbelieving face one often sees in the Real World. For the first time in my life, I felt completely normal.
Another positive is that, by taking foundation classes, you're forced to move outside your comfort zone. Left to my own devices, I could have cheerfully drawn for the rest of my natural life. Instead, I found myself learning how to etch zinc plates, pull prints, paint, develop my own negatives, run a band saw, work with chicken wire, throw clay, animate the old fashioned way with a mounted camera and a registry board and love the artists who came before me via my art history classes. Trust me, you just never know when any of this is going to come in handy later in life. For example, I am a whiz at fixing the wire around the chicken coop and I get to write about art history these days--from a technically-informed position.
The negative in all of this is that I still loathe formal perspective drawing.
And Graphic Design was a big mistake for me. I mutually hated one professor, learned everything the hard way by hand (roughly two years before computers got big; this was the early 80s), and discovered, too far into it to quit, that I really didn't enjoy it enough to want to get out of bed each day and make a living doing it. That was a rather expensive lesson to learn.
Lessons Learned
- Art school taught me at least as as much about myself as it did about art. I learned how to work harder than I thought possible and withstand a critique. I grew into a more confident person who could tap into her awesome creative powers ... because I'd gotten feedback that, yes, they existed and they were fairly awesome. All of these have been beneficial to carry through my life journey.
