As part of my research, I asked one of the tutors from the UAL drawing team for a chat and an opportunity to ask them some questions related to my ARP around methods teaching drawing
In your experience as a drawing tutor, how important do you think teaching technical skills (e.g. geometric and anatomical) are for students?
The question around technical skills, I’ve done a workshop when I did one with foundation students with like drawing with SketchUp and I use digital drawing a lot in my work.
And I guess thinking about like the drawings that I make is kind of working drawings, and because they’re on computer aided design programmes, there’s that potential for like an output. So like in 3D print, I can laser cut the lines or that kind of thing. The drawn lines become vectors, so it becomes a tool part to thinking about how you can translate that or make something from it. But I haven’t done any other like technical skills workshops. And that’s almost just like an intro. So it’s like this is a programme. If you want to like, yeah, learn this more, play around with it then.
It’s kind of like really bare bones and I think that’s it’s always useful to kind of try different skills.
How much of your teaching practice as a drawing tutor is dedicated to technical instruction?
The answer to this was not a lot, most of the tutoring work was one to one tutorials. A link was made to the splitting of roles with Technicians and Lecturers’Tutors. This is something which plays out less in roles within painting department or drawing even, but is something which is very much present in other courses such as textiles etc.
We also discussed the incentive being placed on students to pro-actively seek out workshops and there own resources and how this can be a barrier to learning:
“I think I don’t know if there’s like a lot of expectation on students to kind of see like almost learn things themselves or I guess that’s the framing of it’s like, it’s up to you to kind of seek these things out.
And like go to workshops, but then even going, I don’t know. I feel like sometimes they find like going to the workshop quite intimidating. Definitely on my BA like I didn’t use any of. I barely use the workshops. And when I did start using it was like third year.”
This also made me reflect on my own experience as a student, on my MA at the RCA, trying to learn how to 3D print was challenging. Booking a slot was difficult and then travelling to another site in the hope of learning how to use Rhino. I then found myself speaking to a nice staff member who spoke fluently in Rhino but could not translate it in a way that made it accessible to me. This led my practice away from this line of working which is a shame.
Do you think observational or representational drawing can be taught by other, more holistic methods of teaching?
I think so. I mean again, like thinking back to my undergrads, someone brought in from Laban Dance School which is like in Deptford Creek and they did like a movement and choreography notation workshop which I thought was really interesting. And I guess it’s like thinking about mark making or I mean I guess also like notation probably spoke to me more because that’s yeah kind of like.
I think I relate to drawing more in a kind of like, diagrams, notation type way?
But yeah, I think thinking about like the role of the body and those kind of practises of drawing felt quite interesting.
We discussed this at length and the different possibilities that experimental drawing can offer up to student intuitively and then cognitively. How not accessing the thinking or self aware part of your brain can allow you access other freer modes of working. The technique or method used can then in turn be understood at a later date and woven into ways of working.