The Education of the Artist

7/29/2019 The Education of the Artist

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IN

! : ~ ~ E VIEWrom the Studio Door

How ARTISTS FIND THEIR WAYIN AN UNCERTAIN WoRLD. ' .

TED ORLANDCo-AUTHOR OF ART &_ fEAR


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THE VIEW FROM THE STUDIO DOOR

THE EDUCATIONOF THE ARTIST

The best thing about the future is thatit comes only one day at a time.

-Abraham Lincoln

0 THERE YOU ARE, ALMOST A BEGINNER and stilla million brush strokes away from the paintings you want to make. You shine your desk. light on the sketches you've taped to the kitch-en wall, compare them in your mind to the great worksyou've seen in museums- and gravely doubt there's anyway that your work will ever make it from Point A toPoint B. Indeed you may wonder what magical qualitiesyou'd need to evenbegin such a journey. Genius? Boundless courage? Maybe a rich patron? Actually, naivete andchutzpah are more likely candidates. But it's also possible,just possible, that those who've gone before you mayhave something to say about all this- and that with theirhelp you may not need to re-invent the wheel in order tobegin the journey.

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Sometimes it's thedetours you take thatprovide the learningyou need.

-Tim Kelly


Your role in this, if not easy, is at least clear: learn thethings you need to learn in order to do the work youneed to do. To learn and grow, artists need to be able totake comfort in their own small steps, especially at thebeginning. Almost all progress comes in small steps, notwildly improbable leaps. If you need to paint a hundredpaintings before you're satisfied with one, then your jobis to paint the hundredth painting. Truth is, caring aboutthe work you do is the single best indicator that otherswill also care about it. The same goes for learning. If youthink mastering the things you care about is difficult, trymastering the things you don't care about. A friend ofmine realized this recently when she stumbled upon herold college transcript- complete with grades for entirecourses that had left no visible trace upon her memory.Consciously or otherwise, we each self-select the pathwe need to take.

That path, however, has a curious way of drawing usinto areas far removed from our day-to-day patterns -andthough we don't always appreciate it at the time, thoseseeming digressions can pay big rewards on down theline. The broader value of studying History (or Physics orSpanish or Art) is that each discipline teaches a differentapproach to problem-solving, a differentway to measurewhat's important-sometimes, in fact, a different senseof what is important.

Key works in every field draw upon the wisdom ofseemingly unrelated disciplines. Charles Eames learned

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THE EDUCATION OF THE ARTIST

how to mold plywood under heat and pressure whileworking at a naval shipyard, and later folded that knowledge into the design of his world-famous Eames chair.Physicist Howard Edgerton invented the high-speed strobelight, and then spent a good part of his career using i t toreveal the unexpected beauty of fleeting events like thearc of a golfer's swing or the splash from a single dropof water. Ansel Adams combined the discipline fromhis early training as a musician with his knowledge ofphotographic chemistry to create the Zone System forcontrolling the tonal scale of photographs. There waseven a time late in World War II when a lone Americanmilitary researcher saved the city of Kyoto from destruction by convincing military planners not to target it forsaturation fire-bombing. Why? Because he had oncevisited Kyoto's gardens and shrines- and was movedto protect their beauty.Real-world examples are wonderful things, and forgood reason: precisely because they are real, they cutright through virtual worlds of theory and abstraction.They also raise large questions about how the process ofeducation actually works. After all, if there's no predictingwhich particular piece of knowledge or experience willlater prove essential, we're faced with the disconcertingpossibility that everything matters. And i f hat knowledgeor experience could come from anywhere, the clear implication is that teachers are everywhere. That line of reasoning may appear extreme, yet after field-testing those

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The researcher's namewas Langdon Warner.


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THE VIEW FROM THE STUDIO DOORexact premises for about a half-century now, I've reachedan inescapable conclusion: Yes. Everything does matter.Teachers are everywhere.Where, then, do you start? Well, fortunately, you already have. Conceptually speaking, that ever-changinginstant of reality we call the present is merely a point intime weaving its way through a universe of potential wecall the future. One undeniable consequence of this is thateverything you learned or experienced in the past hassomehow delivered you, at this moment, to this sentence.You may be traveling a path that will closely parallelmine for years to come, or one that fleetingly intersectsat right angles- but right here, right now, we share thiscommon ground.Even i f we cannot control what we perceive, we cancontrol how we spend our t ime- and the control of timeis the gate to perception. You can only have the perceptions (and hence the experiences) that you put yourselfon a course to intercept. In fair measure, the person youbecome is the natural outcome of the experiences youhave. Your job is to watch where you're going (!) andhopefully have the foresight and freedom to make afew mid-course corrections along the way. Learning iscumulative, and one of the truly wonderful things aboutartrnaking is that it gives you permission- at any givenmoment, in any given art piece- to access anything youneed, from any source you find, to express any idea youwish, in any form your heart desires. You can't ask formore freedom than that.

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An education in the arts opens with the premise thatsome things do matter more than others. Or more precisely:matter more to you. Picture yourself, say, standing in a .bookstore, face to face with sixty thousand choices. Obviously you could spend several lifetimes methodicallyreading your way down the shelves. And just as obviously,you won't. It's not just a question of time, it's a questionof purpose. If there were no purpose behind the choicesyou make, then you wouldn't actually be making choices-you'd simply be rolling the dice. So what you actuallydo is spend an hour looking for one book that clearlyresonates with (or challenges) your view of the world.

We hardly need to "decide" to scan for knowledge-it'salready hard-wired into us. Our species seems to harbor asingular need to understand why things are the way theyare-a need to grasp their underlying nature. There must bea hundred disciplines-everything from poetry to particlephysics -just waiting to enrich our understanding of theworld. Each in its own way contributes an essential pieceto the puzzle. The scientist creates experiments whosereadouts give form to an outer reality; the artist createsartworks that give form to an inner reality. Both constitutean imagination of the possible. The difference is wherewe search for the possibilities, and in that regard someencounters will always prove more consequential thanothers. Almost every artist I've met can recount- oftenin passionate detail- some particular experience or some

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special person who first opened them to the potential ofart in their life. Each of us has a story to tell about thepath that brought us to this point. Where did you learn thethings that really matter to you? Where was that critical forkin the road that directed you to this point? Who have been yourreal teachers?It's easy to assume that our understanding of the worldis a product of the education we receive-in other words,that we all begin as students. But what i f it's actually theotherway around? What i f it's our sense for the way thingsare that guides us to the education we need? After all, oursense for the way things are takes a set early; already shapedby instincts that evolution hard-wired into us, and thentested and refined by a myriad of personal experiences thatbegin with our first breath. Formal education comes later-sometimes years later- and by then our internal sensefor the natural order of things may bear little relation towhat the local Board of Education has in mind.

First-person accounts are legion: we've all knownkids (you may have been one of them) whose curiosityand appetite for learning were voracious- until schoolintervened. It's not uncommon to feel desperately out ofplace in school, but at a young age how many of us hadthe perspective to understand why, much less the powerto do anything about it if we did? It's not like wisdomand perspective magically appear in the fourth grade ortwelfth grade or even in college. How many people reallyknow themselves at age eighteen? Did you? I certainly

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didn't! There were long periods (especially during myhigh school years) when I felt helplessly swept along bythe currents, flailing around just to keep my head abovewater and rarely able to even take a compass bearing, muchless move in a direction of my own choosing. I suspectI'm not the only one with such memories.

Acquiring mastery in any field is largely a matter ofkeeping your eye on the far horizon and not beingundulydistracted by the choppy water all around you. And atleast on paper, the classroom environment seems perfectlysuited to keeping focused on that goal. After all, we havean educational system that offers world-class training forvirtually any professional field you can name, and it'sall yours if you just commit yourself to twelve years ofgrade school, four years of college and two or three (orfour or five) years of graduate study. Is there a problemwith that?

Well, actually; yes, there is a problem. Just as we sensethe troubling gulf that stands between law and justice,or between spirituality and organized religion, it's hardto ignore the disconnect that has arisen between learningand schooling. For better or worse we've created an edu-cational system that only works on any large scale whenthe knowledge being offered is first pre-packaged intoteachable gradable transferable and preferably marketablesemester-length courses. And more recently, structured aswell to satisfy the current political demand for quantifiableproof that learning has occurred.

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At California community college where I teach, thesystem for satisfying these requirements takes the lofty(if grammatically challenged) title of "Student Learning Outcomes". It works like this (take a deep breath):"Learning Outcomes" are created by first repackaging thecourse subject matter into assignments, which in turn aresubdivided into explicitly defined items-to-be-learned.Each of these items-to-be-learned is then listed in its ownseparate box on a "performance grid" (aka spreadsheet)along with detailed written definitions of exactly whatthe student must do to be awarded various numbers ofpoints for each particular item. When an assignment iscompleted, separate points are awarded for each item;the subtotals for the various boxes are then tabulated,weighted according to some formula, combined, averaged out, and converted into a final letter grade -therebyrevealing exactly what, and how much, each student haslearned. Wow. I feel smarter already. It's not that instructors are forbidden from helping their students to see theworld with greater clarity, to find their own voice, or tomake art that matters, but it does become an interestingchallenge. Good teaching still trumps bureaucracy everyday of the week- it's just that nowadays you have to becareful not to get caught at it!

Not surprisingly, formula-based approaches work betterin some fields than others. Placed within tight constraints,the universe of ideas that can be explored implodes dramatically. In the arts, the price paid to achieve clarity andprecision is the loss of the intangible. When students are

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rewarded for finding the answers that lay (quite literally)inside the box, it hardly encourages them to think outsidethe box. Subtly but pervasively, like the force of gravity,formula-based systems trivialize art, compacting largeideas into cookie-cutter McNuggets of knowledge. They'renot called Standardized Tests for nothing.

For that matter, even if grades could reliably cleavetrue from false, that's still only one of many purposesthey serve- and one of the more trivial purposes at that.Naturally teachers make judgments when they critiquetheir students' art, but the role of the critic (at least themost helpful role) is to see the potential in that art. Teachershave to look past the tangible and offer encouragementand acknowledgment to those who are making headwayin ways that are not visible in the finished canvas; theyalso need to give an occasional kick in the butt to thosewhose work is flawless but stagnant.

And in any case, students always know who amongtheir classmates deserve the most credit. They know who'sbeen making amazing headway (even though their workis still unpolished); they know who's been valiantly hanging in there (even though all hell's breaking loose in theirpersonal life); they know who's coasting along withoutimproving (even though their flawless work, cashing inon easy-come talent or past training, meets all the Learning Outcomes requirements).The whole dreary issue of grading pretty well sumsup the uneasy fit between art and academics, a conditionthat art students- a rather paranoid lot even in the best

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And what happenswhen a student'sresponse is betterthan any answerthe instructor couldenvision?


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Zen & the Art ofMotorCIJcle Maintenance,by Robert Pirsig. Of allthe books I own, nonehas more passagesunderlined and notespencilled in the marginsthan this one. It is anabsolute treasure-troveof ideas.


of times - all too readily attribute to a vast right-wingconspiracy to keep art in its place. (Well, OK, there's thattoo.) In his extraordinary novel Zen & The Art ofMotorcycleMaintenance, Robert Pirsig exposed the dark underside ofthe grading process with deadly accuracy: "Abad instructorcan go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds ofhis students, curve out thescores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression thatsome have learned and others have not. But i f grades areremoved the class is forced to wonder each day what it'sreally learning. The questions, What's being taught? What'sthe goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish thegoal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes ahuge and frightening vacuum."

In academia it's considered a virtue to frame questi9nsthat yield clear, concise and demonstrably correct answers-answers that remain unchanged no matter who respondsto the question. But equally, there exists another entireuniverse of questions in which the answer always changesas each new person engages the question.You can measureto a clear, concise and objective certainty the color of thesky above yourhead - butwhat is the color of he sky insideyour mind? For Maxfield Parrish the correct answer wascerulean blue; for Albert Ryder it was midnight black; forBeethoven it was F major. Questions that introduce shadesof meaning and degrees of certainty and value judgmentsinto the equation engage entire fields of human endeavorthat fit poorly (if at all) within the prevailing educational

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framework. Like the arts, for instance. Making headway inthe arts is a process of navigation without numbers. Howdo you measure what is Good? What happens when thereare many correct answers to a given question? And whathappens when some of those answers are profound, others superficial? Or when some are intellectually abstract,others searingly personal?Those are not - pardon the pun - academic ques-tions. I f a roomful of students all arrived at the identical(and demonstrably correct) answer to a math question, i twould be exemplary. But i f those same students answeredan artistic question by producing a roomful of identicalpaintings, something would be terribly wrong. Indeed,if the only thll:).gs that counted were the things you couldcount, then Haydn would clobber Beethoven 106-9 inthe symphony playoffs, and the Museum of Modern Artwould hang street banners declaring Whoever Paints theBiggest Picture Wins.

Still, just looking around you, there's no denying thatthis educational approach has had a truly remarkable trackrecord. In a very real sense it made the twentieth centurypossible - or more precisely, it made the complexity ofthe twentieth century possible. And as we become evermore dependent on specialized technology here in thenew century, we also become ever more dependent onthe system that supports it. When knowledge is highlycompartmentalized and questions are framed to generateverifiable and repeatable solutions, certain things become

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possible. Exhibit A: The Space Shuttle. Unless two million electronic circuits and mechanical parts function ex-actly so, the whole thing just sits there like a hundred-tonpaperweight. (Or worse, a firecracker.)But even as some things become possible, other possibilities are lost. Wisdom does not reside in facts alone- experiential, intuitive and moral judgments on howknowledge should be used lie near the core of our definition of humanity. As history suggests, getting a rocket off

the ground is only half the equation."Once the rockets are up,

Who cares where they come down?That's not my department"Says Werner von Braun-attributed by mathematician/ songwriter Tom Lehrer

to the inventor of the German V-2 rocketUnfortunately we're given little preparation for balanc

ing the far side of that equation. As T.S. Eliot framed theissue, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

It's hard to resist a slow-moving target. But even if weall agreed that the current educational system i s - at leastin the arts- a setup for failure, what then? That system,flawed or otherwise, has roots that stretch back a centuryor more and will likely be with us for decades to come.The school years may be the perfect time to take on large

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problems, but do you really want to pencil in "ChangeBasic Premise of Educational System" at the top of your ToDo List?I t is, of course, entirely possible to master your craft

without any formal education in the arts at all. In hisclassic book The Shape of Content, Ben Shahn offered hisprescription for an ideal education in the arts. In what isarguably the most passionate passage in that book- a fullpage and a half delivered entirely in italics- Shahn's ap-peal to the student can be summed up in two words: DoEverything! And well you should. A degree in art doesn'tautomatically make you an artist, any more than lackingone precludes you from becoming an artist.Despite obvious pitfalls, however, clearly there oftenare good and sometimes even compelling reasons forembracing a formal education in the arts. Beyond theobvious benefit of imparting craft, school offers an environ-ment that supports and values and encourages the workyou're trying to do. Itprovides a safe harbor to begin build-ing a network of friends and community that will serve asthe life blood to your continued growth as an artist afteryou leave school. Your teachers provide introductions toideas, to people, to processes- simply put, they provideyou with tli.e opportunity to make discoveries.

And for what it's worth, the university is also the onlysource for obtaining a degree in Art. Now that soundsimpressive! But wait a minute: why would you need one?-certainly not in order to be an artist. After all, how often

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The Shape ofContent,by Ben Shahn. Firstpublished in 1957and continuously inprint ever since. It isone of the best booksever written about thepurpose and practiceof art.


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do you hear about art being exhibited or published-muchless garnering rave reviews -because its maker has anMFA? Not often. If you doubt that an art degree has realvalue, however, all that really proves is that you're notplanning on a career in teaching. Viewed dispassionately,an MFA is simply a glorified union card. To be considered for a teaching job it's rock-bottom essential; in mostother contexts it's just another sheet of paper. So i f youcan survive without seeing your name inscribed on fauxsheepskin, your opportunities for an education in the artsexpand far beyond the university to include everythingfrom apprenticeship to workshops to simply plunkingyourself down where the action is.

There was a time when apprenticeships providedvirtually the only entree into the arts, and even todayworking with a master remains an admirable pathwayto perfecting one's art. Unfortunately there's one largeobstacle to implementing that idea: there aren't enoughmasters to go around.But i f anding a decade-long one-on-one apprenticeshipwith a top artist in your field sounds unlikely, sharing aweek-long workshop with that same person is often asurprisingly attainable goal. It turns out that top artists inevery art medium- people who would never settle intoteaching semester-length university classes - are oftengenuinely attracted to leading a concentrated workshop

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designed around sharing what they know best. The secret,both inside and outside academia, is to ask around andfind out who the really good teachers are- and alwaysgo with the best you can find. Finding the perfect coursetitle is secondary. I fyou find a good teacher you're boundto learn something worthwhile, but i f you find even theperfect course topic and get stuck with a drudge, it's worsethan not taking the course at al l - you'll merely end upbored or discouraged about the very thing that had excitedyou enough to take the plunge in the first place.

Workshops offer aspiring artists arguably the best- and absolutely the most concentrated- of al l educational possibilities. A really good workshop generates alevel of intensity that's virtually impossible to achieve inthe classroom. That potential is embedded in their verystructure: working together closely sixteen hours a day forthree days virtually guarantees a richer and more variedexperience than sitting in a classroom three hours a weekfor sixteen weeks. In a traditional school setting, intensityis diluted by short and widely-separated class meetings,continuity is lost as everyone scatters to the winds at theend of each class period, and ideas dissipate before theyever fully develop. Workshops, however, typically engageparticipants during all hours of the day. Moreover, everystudent figures out sooner or later that the really importantdiscoveries don't even occur during the formal morningor afternoon sessions -they happen in the spaces betweensessions, out in the field or over lunch or coffee, or late

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in the evening when everyone's sharing sketches spreadout all over the floor and arguing about the future of theworld. These intense and often intimate encounters at theedges of the main event bring another revelation- thatfinding your friends is every bit as important to yourfuture as learning your craft.Sadly (or at least ironically) the gap between workshopand university instruction is slowly widening. Many artteachers currently nearing retirement age earned theirreputation the old-fashioned way: they made art. But withthe "terminal degree" (such an instructive term!) now theuniversal prerequisite to teaching at the college level, art

departments are increasingly populated with faculty whoessentially never left the nest, leaping directly from MFAProgram to Tenure Track without ever muddying theirfeet in the real world. The academic climate is changing,and with it the very nature of the art that emerges fromthat new environment. The contemporary art gracing thewalls of galleries today is largely the product of this newacademic order.

Despite any surface appearance of formal structure, agood education in the arts is still mostly improvisationaltheatre. It's a delicate dance played out every day in classroom, field and studio, as teacher and student take centralroles in this timeless interplay between potential and experience. It's also a high-stakes,dance- there are lives at

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stake here, and education changes those lives. Simply put,teaching has consequences. As a First Principle, teacherswould do well to heed the counsel of Hippocrates: First,DoNo Harm.Every now and then some particular exchange throwsall those elements into sharp relief. Awhile back at a photography workshop one of my students was a bright youngwoman who had always been, for as long as she couldremember, excruciatingly shy in the presence of strangers.This was plainly evident from her portfolio: Jennifer madeelegant images of trees, rocks, water, details, abstractions,even animals- but never included even a single humanfigure within the frame. Itwas a startling artistic omission,coming as it did from someone who was entirely unselfconscious and gregarious among her friends.

It would've been easy enough at that point to handJennifer an individualized assigrunent to "make portraitsof strangers"- but to what good end? Being told to dosomething we've always avoided short-circuits the learningprocess- i t neither encourages nor enlightens. In fact it'susually downright unpleasant. By my accounting, goodteaching is more a process of raising the next question (ornext hundred questions) a student needs to confront inorder to make headway in their work. The answers prettywell take care of themselves- after all, when it comes toresolving the really important issues in your life, no oneelse has the answers you need anyway. With that in mind,I posed a few questions for Jennifer to mull over:

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What's the easiest subject for you to photograph?And the emotionally riskiest subject you'd dare approach?What do you have a passion to photograph!?What's the single greatest obstacle preventing you frommaking the art you need to make?A few days later we took a fieldtrip to an oceanside

state park, and Jennifer brought along- apparently as aprop for a picture she had in mind- a larger-than-lifesizetoy plastic seagull. Once there, everyone quickly scatteredto the winds and I lost track of Jennifer for an hour or so-until suddenly she came running up and announcedbreathlessly, "I just took two rolls of portraits of strangers!" This, mind you, from someone who had not taken tenpictures of strangers- cumulatively- in her entire life.

Her strategy was deceptively simple (and charminglydeceptive): she stood on the pathway leading into thepicnic area, and as each new group of tourists approachedshe held up her slightly absurd toy and said, 'Td reallylike to get a picture of my pet seagull- would you holdhim for me while I take his picture?" And verily, a weeklater, there on her proof sheets (that's why they're calledproof sheets) were seventy-two portraits of completestrangers- every one of them holding that same dumbplastic seagull!

Buckminster Fuller once commented that there's nothing about a caterpillar that tells you it's going to become abutterfly. It's a great line, but it misses the mark-at leastas far as artistic development is concerned. Every good

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teacher bears witness to such metamorphoses. Watchingyoung artists at work- their energy sparkling with theintensity of a summer lightning s torm- is an exercisein humility. You soon realize that your real purpose as ateacher may simply be as a catalyst, offering a few pro-vocative ideas here, clearing the way past a few technicalhurdles there, and eventually just pointing the way to thefar horizon.

After that, well, all you can do is stand back and watch,hoping they can hold it all together long enough to converttheir seemingly limitless potential into accomplishment.Over time it is life's enduring patterns and rhythms thatsustain us. This holds as true in education as in any otherfacet of life. Every student, sooner or later, will wear ateacher's hat. And every teacher, periodically, will returnas a student. The cycle is common and recurring, withteacher and student trading roles many times over thecourse of a lifetime. It's a universal truth: giving back whatwe receive gives life meaning. Ask any parent.

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The Education of the Artist

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