Why art education still matters

I have been working as an art educator for nearly 50 years. Today begins another year, and alongside making resolutions and hoping for new experiences, it is perhaps time to reflect again on what I'm doing. It is very easy to become stuck in one's ways and to allow experience to become a stick with which to beat people with, as opposed to it being something that can be drawn upon as an aid for others or as a help for them to make their own decisions when they need to find the best pathway to take. Recently Art21 asked art educators to reflect on what they thought they were doing and I was in particular interested in what Amiko Matsuo had to say about the art educator as connector. Matsuo had this to say when writing about her own approach to drawing to our attention the tapestry work of Otobung Nkanga.

 Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018. Photo by Amiko Matsuo

'I walk to the larger textile: a map or network layered and woven in the cosmos. The edge of the textile welcomes a figure about to step forward without feet or a brain. It enters the plane on the wall next to urchiny tree branches. Is the figure tethered to circular captions? Is it directing the mechanical arms to pull at the bubble captions? Floating, it feels unmoored even as it appears to be hard at work'. 

Matsuo points out how she attempts to translate for her students the sense of connectivity and geopolitics that she finds represented in Nkanga's work. She hears her own voice as an arts educator participating in the witnessing and telling of such stories and states that her understanding arrives via a lens of who she is right now and that the collective work of the art educator brings together an awareness of art, artists, other art educators and students, something that as a process she feels both defines her and expands far beyond her.

The fact that Amiko Matsuo begins by stating that it is her own voice that is central to the  witnessing and telling of stories and that she understands artwork through 'a lens of who I am' was I thought spot on. I also thought that it was important to remind everyone that she is also interconnected with a rhizomatic network of artists and other teachers and that her role is to try and connect others that she encounters with that network. She teaches ceramics and has had to think hard about how her own experience can be used to open out new possibilities for an area of creativity that has often been far too constricted in its use as a fine art material, by being seen as 'pottery' or looked at through a very Western lens as 'craft'. Above all she asks open ended questions, suggesting that her students have as much ownership of answers to these questions as she does. She reminds me that as a white, male, Anglo-Saxon I have to be very careful to continue opening myself up to wider and wider forms of thinking in relation to art practices. This is hopefully something I try to constantly work on, being very aware that my background is one of white, male privilege, but at the same time, I still feel able to make work about what it is to be who I have been and reflect on my time as an artist who has emerged from a working class Black Country, English town and who has attempted to always come to terms with life through the practice of making art. We are who we are, but that doesn't mean that we should be complacent, we need to keep on striving to be more aware, to watch what is going on and to uncover the many histories that lie behind the things we experience. As well as trying to remain self aware and trying to keep myself open to changing sociological patterns in both art and society, I have also had to think about why I might still be of value to a community of practitioners. Olivia Laing, in her book 'Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency', looks to find a stance for her writing that as she puts it, avoids 'paranoid reading'. I.e. the world is so full of horrid and worrying things that it is too easy to spend most of our time unpicking the wounds of modern life. I agree with her and would like to think that an aspect of my role as an art educator and as an artist is to look for things that are positive possibilities, that are speculative futures that suggest life affirming directions of travel, rather than using my activities to erect static platforms from which to rage and shout about the tragic consequences of our present day political realities. As Laing puts it, to be 'more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison'. (Laing, 2021, p.4) 

The readers of this blog as well as current and past students will of course be the judges of whether or not I manage to provide a fertile soil with which to nourish practice or whether I have just missed the point and that art practice is now somewhere totally different and that it is time for me to retire. I still though have a belief in a practice that has at times been compared to a religion. It has been argued that the foundational principle for the interconnection between art and religion is the reciprocity between image making and meaning, a connection similar to a creative correspondence between the human and the spiritual. The actual process of making something that operates as an external mind, that is at its core a fetish, something that is inanimate but which is possessed by an idea, is something wonderful. Artists supply the world with things to think with, special tools that are magical in that we embed within these things triggers for possibilities, we provide the grit around which, pearl like, ideas may form in other minds. 

The art educator also needs to help provide a safe but also transformational space for students to operate within. This has become harder to do since covid. I am aware that some students no longer see the studio as a safe space. In communal spaces other people become threats, their bodies potentially hosting invisible microbes and for those that see life in this way, daily existence becomes a constant battle against unseen menaces. Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' is something all would be educators are introduced to in the early stages of any educational qualification; you are taught that every person has unique capabilities and has the possibility to move towards a level of self-actualisation. Unfortunately, educational progress is often disrupted by a failure to meet basic needs. Life experiences often causing an individual to become stuck and recently life seems to have thrown up a complicated mess of experiences, designed to unsettle and undermine the confidence of many would be learners. Therefore as an educator, I have to believe that I can help provide a safe space for thinking, one that can offer sustenance in times of unease, as well as provide information upon which someone can build their own educational pathway. One aspect of this is, as Amiko Matsuo puts it, to offer a series of connections to others working in the field, hopefully at least one of which will work for you, ring true and make sense. Each of these blog posts you could therefore think of as a possible connection to an idea or a person or to a way of working; lifelines stretched out between things, that anyone can also connect to. Remember, every journey, no matter how long, begins with the placing of just one step in front of another, but sometimes you need a shoulder to lean on if you are to take that next step and that perhaps is the best anyone can offer.

Otobong Nkanga: Search

But back to Otobong Nkanga, and my role as an art educator. There are always questions. How should I introduce her work? It feels important to state that she is from Nigeria and that she mainly works out of Belgium. An image like 'Search' of course makes us think that she is searching for something. This image of a human has a building sitting on top her, a construction that obscures her identity from the observer. This is a giant figure, that stands on one world whilst pointing to another. Is the presumption that this figure is a 'she' the right one? How much of a story do I need to initiate before there is enough of a narrative to help others begin their own interpretation? How much do I need to say? That her feet have sunk down into the ground on which she stands? That white lightening surrounds a newly discovered or revealed other world? That the fact that these are woven textiles creates a very important contextual reading to them?  She in many ways brings together the textile making practices of West Africa and Belgium, but what does that mean?  Or is it enough to simply show an image of her work? By putting her name into this blog's index, have I given her enough status to be worthwhile investigating by you as a student or follower of this blog? Otobong Nkanga is one more artist to add to a growing list, that has come to represent a world wide movement of artists emerging from what were at one time called 'Third World' countries. The old Western art canon has been challenged and we are all asked to redefine what we think contemporary practice is. Not just educators, but museums and art galleries have been required to re-think what their existing or historical curriculums, collections and curatorial strategies represent. As this process goes into action, there will of course be a time of debate, confusion and difficulty, especially for students entering into what was one type of culture and set of established art practices and which is rapidly having to re-define itself. An exciting time, but one full of hidden and very visible dangers. It doesn't seem long ago to myself, that German artists were forced to decide whether or not their art stood for Hitler's National Socialist ideals or whether it was unfit and impure and thus subject to be being ridiculed and burnt. As new and much wider cultural forms enter into contemporary art practice, I hear rumblings and critiques, such as the way that the word 'woke' is now used. Once meaning 'being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice'. It is now becoming used in a disparaging way, referring to a type of overly liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially one promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities. This standpoint has led to Brexit, a fear of immigration, a rise of far right politics and a stance that has argued that the new Global orientation of society does not understand or recognise the importance of older more local or national cultural values, which it is further argued, many people still believe in and therefore find it difficult to accommodate or even acknowledge sets of cultural values that have come from other parts of the world or which have emerged in order to acknowledge various struggles with identity. This is a situation many seek to use as a lever for their own political gain. However we must always remember:

"Wherever they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too". Heinrich Heine

I would never underestimate the power of fear. Change brings with it elevation and new status for some, but always loss of status and fear of redundancy for others. When this happens it is fertile ground for the rise of fascism, and it is instructive to look carefully at why during the 1920s and 30s many people across Europe in their yearning for national unity and strong leadership, turned to an idea that would lay the blame on others for collective economic and spiritual problems; a climate of blame that would eventually lead to the Holocaust. This is why the development of intellectual and spiritual nourishment for all and not just some, should be the key factor when looking at what role art and artists should be undertaking in the future. Above all as an educator I would like to remind the people I work with, that at times we seem to collectively fall morally asleep and that education can help people to wake up from that sleep and support society as a whole in the devising of ways to live, especially approaches to life that accept and value the lives and cultures of others. Teaching art is about far more than art education, it is about looking and as we learn to look we need to take off the social media blinkers and learn to see what is actually going on in front of us. It is also a celebration of the power of speculative futures, of creative possibility and the need to continue playing, especially as we become adults and most of all it can be reminder of the joy of seeing something new and fresh for the first time.

References

Laing, O (2021) Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency Dublin: Picador 

Laing writes for Frieze magazine and is a long running contributor to current debates as to why art matters. By writing across the various art disciplines she makes it very clear that art as it is now experienced is a multi-platform discipline and that sometimes it is the written word that makes most sense and at other times moving images and then at other times static ones. Above all, art for her demonstrates that there are alternative possibilities and that the moments of contemplation that the arts give to us, are much too important to the health of our internal lives for us to ever give them up. 

ART21

Art of Now: Hong Kong Artists 

See also:

Why it matters

Why do we draw?

What use is art?

Drawing as entanglements with life

John Dewey: Art as Experience 

Austin Wright: Emerging Forms

Austin Wright

The exhibition, 'Austin Wright: Emerging Forms' is on at the moment at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery. For those of you interested in sculptor's drawings this is a very interesting exhibition as it includes several of his working drawings as well as a selection of his early drawings that point to his emerging interest in the depiction of three dimensional form. 

Early drawings

I must apologise for the poor quality of the images but all the drawings were under glass and I couldn't find a position where either myself or the gallery spotlights weren't reflected in the glass. Even so do go and look at the original drawings. I was particularly taken with the drawings of everyday life just after the war. His figures have a monumentality and grandeur about them, all reduced to essentials and seen as emerging sculptural forms even before he was working as a sculptor. His more linear later sculptures may be of interest to those of you thinking about making three dimensional linear drawings, as in a post David Smith context, but all of you should be interested in his drawings that attempt to sum up groups of figures as simple masses. 

Drawings for hanging sculptures

Details of drawings dealing with groups of figures

The working drawings of sculptors are always interesting as they reveal how the process of thinking about form progresses. In Wright's case he is always interested in human beings as a communal animal. Very rarely do you see a single figure, what he is searching for is that composite form that suggests the interaction of small groups of people, either of family or friends, people that know each other well and who are prepared to invade each other's space. The quick sketches that I have tried to photograph (sorry about the reflections folks) were for myself really moving. He was trying to visualise something very important about the human condition, our need for supportive touching and feeling and being around others; suggesting that an isolated figure is in some ways less human. 
These small exhibitions tracing the history of recent Modernist art practices are nearly always rewarding, you just have to be receptive and open to ideas that sometimes feel old fashioned or not contemporary and in doing this I think you become able to appreciate a much wider range of art works and above all educate your eyes to see. 

When I was young it never occurred to me that I would at some time in the future be writing a sentence that suggested that Modernism was old fashioned. However in 7 years time it will be 100 years since the original publication of Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook. It was a central text in relation to my own art education, but already nearly 40 years old when I first encountered it as a teenager at school in Dudley. Wright was born in 1911 and Modernism would have been the dominant mode of expression throughout Western Europe for most of his working life. But times have changed and yet in some ways they haven't. I'm reading the Rev. J. G. Wood's 'Insects at Home' a comprehensively illustrated book published in 1871. The preface states this; "The reader may probably notice that these figures of insects are but slightly shaded, and in many cases are little but outline. This is intentional, and the shading is omitted in order that the reader may supply its place by colour." The text goes on to recommend mixing ox-gall in with the colours so as to neutralise the oily lines of the printer's ink. There is something of the Modernist in this, a democracy of engagement, that suggested the reader become engaged in a process that would lead to the fixing of the insects firmly in the mind of the reader. Klee encouraged the reader to take a line for a walk, the Rev. Wood encourages us to colour in the wood engravings in his book. Art becomes something that we can all do, and Modernism released us from the need for academic training, in France the Salon de Refusés had allowed non trained artists to feel as if they could produce work of equal significance to their Academy trained peers. But strangely the art schools that were set up as models of the Bauhaus, eventually became as academic as the old academies. Klee's teachings becoming central to the idea of a Modernist art education, but now perhaps we need a new Salon de Refusés, another new start, a fresh Modernism or even a new academy if that's not a contradiction in terms. If so what would we teach? Maybe the arts of bioengineering, robotics, and nano-technology?

Camberwell hosts an exhibition of a History of Drawing

There is an exhibition coming up soon at Camberwell College of Art in the new year that may well be of interest to those of you that follow trends and changes in the education of drawing. This is the text given out by Camberwell to advertise the event:

The Temptation of the Diagram: Matthew Ritchie.

A History of Drawing surveys the practice and teaching of drawing at Camberwell College of Arts over an eighty year period. Featuring the work of over sixty artists, this exhibition celebrates Camberwell’s past, and will shape making and critical debates about drawing for the future.

Throughout Camberwell’s history, the definition of drawing has expanded; from lines on paper to 3D and digital space. The exhibition is characterised by an outward-looking approach as artists have increasingly explored drawing’s uses in fields beyond that of fine art, incorporating new technologies, politics and science. The works in the show include medical illustration, drawing machines, and moving image works, exploring a wide... range of issues pertinent to our globally shared present

The exhibition includes work by historical artists such as Edward Ardizzone, David Hepher and R.B. Kitaj, to recent graduates including Izat Arif, Adam Farah and Jennifer N. R. Smith, and current teaching staff including Miraj Ahmed, Tim Ellis and Janette Parris. The exhibition also features a new large-scale vinyl drawing ‘The Temptation of the Diagram’ by Matthew Ritchie.

A History of Drawing will be accompanied by a new publication and a symposium event about drawing in education, including presentations by Dr Hester Westley (Artists’ Lives Interviewer and Goodison Fellow, National Life Stories, British Library) and Ruth Stiff (Associate Curator, Kew). The speakers will highlight Camberwell’s legacy as a leader in the practice and teaching of drawing, and consider how current practices might shape future generations

The exhibition is curated by Kelly Chorpening, course leader of BA Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts and a practicing artist.


There will be a symposium at Camberwell on the 15th February 2018 from 2 - 6pm that will open out some of the issues raised by the exhibition.


http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2018/2/15/A-History-of-Drawing-Symposium/

Camberwell Space 45-65 Peckham Road, SE5 8UF London, United Kingdom Exhibition open Jan 16, 2018 - Feb 16, 2018

From perception to concept: Why draw?

A Francis Alys storyboard

Those of you undertaking modules within the Fine Art course at LCA and doing these within the drawing strand, may well have asked questions as to why there is such a thing as a drawing strand, especially when so much work done within this area would be hard to define as drawing. People are making films, installations, doing performance, constructing sculpture, making prints and paintings, as well as of course sometimes making drawings.

So why a drawing strand?

Drawing is a way of thinking about the world, and all our thinking begins with an act of perception. Drawing, I would argue, is therefore a special tool that operates not just at the threshold of the journey from perception to concept, but is a tool that continuously reshapes itself to be able to carry and create new thoughts as they morph from what you are aware of, to what you can think about.

Awareness of the world comes from experience, our knowing of this comes initially through the perceptions we receive. However we are always shaping and looking for patterns in these experiences to help form our world view. When you make a drawing by looking at the world, the activity in many ways mirrors what happens when we perceive things. We edit, we select and we take from these perceptions what we need in order to get on with our lives.

As we think more about the world we need shapes for these thoughts, containers that can carry them and drawing has given us a whole range of these containers, each one tailor made and honed into shape, sometimes by thousands of years of use. We tend to think of verbal language as being the key thinking tool that defines us as human beings, but the advantage of a visual language is that it is less prone to the rise of linguistic barriers. I think it is no accident that so many artists are fascinated by the image of the Tower of Babel, a visual image that sums up a fundamental problem with verbal languages.

I’ve been thinking about the issues surrounding what it is to think through drawing over many years. When I left school I worked as a technical draftsman at a local steel works for a while and then after leaving art college as an industrial interior designer, both these occupations although not fine art based, relied heavily on drawing as a way to communicate. The machine components I was drawing were visualised as technical drawings first and then machined, the interiors I designed were in two stages, the first as client visualisations, usually done in perspective and then again as technical drawings so that building teams could follow all the necessary instructions exactly. Drawing was in both these cases, drawing as ‘disegno’. A visualisation of a possibility. 
So how was this similar and yet different to Fine Art drawing? Perception in this case is complex. First of all there is a meeting with a client, a client that would have their own perception of the issues involved. I would then take measurements, talk to as many people as possible involved, from people who would have to work in the area, to senior management, spend time watching activities to see what actually happens in the space, begin technical research, floor loadings, aisle widths, turning circles of any vehicles such as fork lift trucks used in the space, architectural specs etc. and would then look to explore how a particular problem I had been given could be solved within the restraints of both health and safety requirements and technical constraints. This was about problem solving and as drawings were done a dialogue was built between the client and myself, the drawings operating initially as a way of highlighting issues and opening out the communication channels between us. For instance the client might have an idea that was not technically feasible, a drawing can demonstrate this much easier than simply saying it wont work. Sometimes the drawing might be a scribbled plan or view just to get a basic idea across and at another time it might be detailed showing under-floor joists alongside calculations as to what these mean in terms of possible weights of machinery that the client wants located. My perception of the problem would therefore develop and change as I gained more knowledge.

As a fine art student I was taught to think about drawing in a very different way and at the time it felt as if my previous work had no connection to what I was doing in the art college. Drawing was introduced as both a recording of visual perception and as an object in its own right. My first day in an art college in the late 1960s was designed as an experience to get rid of old habits. We were all asked to make a display of drawings done during the summer and these were heavily criticised by the staff, who pointed out how we were all trying to make shaded renderings of things and that the drawings done had no value as images in their own right, as well as them having no conceptual direction. This was at the time very difficult to understand and people who had spent hours trying to perfect their images found it hard to let go of their facility, especially as it was this very facility that had been part of their decision to apply for art college in the first place.

Drawing we were taught had several stories to tell, one about recording perceptions and another about the materials used and another about the experience of a drawing’s making. It was as if we had always been telling lies and now we were asked to speak some sort of truth. A truth to materials, a truth to the role of the body in a drawing’s making and a truth to the way we actively looked. These were hard truths to learn.

What I didn’t realise at the time was how these ideas had been arrived at as a product of Modernism; how the foundation course I was on had developed a certain way of teaching and how this style of teaching had spread, until it was standardised by exam frameworks. Five years on from this experience I would find myself teaching in a similar institution, but this time it was an institution that had been part of the laying down of the rules and many of the staff there had been party to the development of the model. I learnt a lot from the people I found there. They were passionate about the abstract dynamics of form and I learnt both how to much more accurately control a visual language and how to use an associated verbal language which was used to help students recognise what they were looking at. 


However, perhaps because of my previous experiences I always thought this particular approach to what drawing could do was limited and although it helped open out the possibilities for formal expression, other forms of drawing were ignored or not given the prominence they could have had. It also meant that certain types of ideas were prioritised, something that I was fascinated by because of my earlier immersion in Wittgenstein's philosophy. By teaching a certain set of formal approaches to thinking about visual language, the staff were in effect limiting what could be thought, (the limits of my language are the limits of my thought). What was needed was a recognition of drawing as a primary thinking tool, and this required examples over a much wider range of human activities. When I thought about my experience in industry I realised that it was research and talking to other people that lay at the centre of the process, and this seemed much more about the human condition. Even if now when working I try to solve my own problems rather than trying to solve someone else's, in many ways it isn't just my problem. I have realised that it is only in dialogue with others that the full complexity of an issue can be fleshed out. I have by now built into my working process times to talk to others, time to research around the subject and space to allow these other events, people, whatever seems appropriate to have some sort of influence on what I'm doing. As I get older the distinctions between what a designer is asked to do and what a Fine Artist does, seem to be less and less important. I'm now more interested in how effective the communication is.

Frank Ching

The drawing above by Frank Ching is a very basic perspective, but it gives a clear indication of the space and how a rising platform cuts into it. Frank Ching has a very good blog here. 

It's a working drawing, but it also exhibits several of the traits that one would expect from a drawing purely designed to work aesthetically. The line quality reflects the searching hand/eye, there is a quiet understatement to the drawing, its stability ensured by the staggered verticals that anchor the image. It's a drawing about space and how an individual is positioned in relation to that space.

Compare this with a drawing by Giacometti. This is also about space and how an individual is positioned in relation to it. Both draftsmen are thinking and working towards an understanding of something, but one is labeled an architect and the other an artist.

Giacometti

What is particularly wonderful about drawing is that it is a physical thinking tool. We are in effect using the world to help us think. We move elements around into new configurations and as we do we see new possibilities. Playing with the drawing material reveals possibilities for both abstraction and visualisation. A mark can be used to count with and to represent visual similarity. Direction indicators easily become symbols in a basic map, footprints can stand for the animal that made them and the ability of charcoal to be smeared over a rock might allow you to make something that looks like a bison or a cave lion. Representations and symbols, both probably arriving together. 


This ability to slip seamlessly from abstraction into representation and embed both into signification allows drawing to be used to conceptually plan and to emotionally represent. A film maker will use story boards as a very cheap way to visualise a future film, an architect uses technical drawing to present possibilities for new buildings, cartographers develop maps to help us visualise where we are, medical illustrators clarify the relationship between the various body organs, when photography fails to do so and children use drawing to communicate their particular world view. As artists we are like children who also have technical skills; we can use drawing to plan, map, technically illustrate, storyboard, capture our gestures or communicate our emotional experiences; sometimes as separate focused initiatives and at other times we can develop hybrids of these uses, combining maps with gesture or technical illustration with emotive mark making. 

Storyboard for Hitchcock's 'Marnie'

Storyboards help film makers think through how to sequence a shoot and think about camera angles and composition. They are an essential communication tool and allow the director to work closely with the camera operator. Several contemporary fine artists now work in film and they have to deal with similar issues.

Robert Smithson was considering making a film of his Spiral Jetty and of course he had to think this through using storyboard techniques. The storyboard by Francis Alys that heads up this post, is I think typical of the sort of drawings that many contemporary artists do. Alys also does drawings for his huge performance pieces and animations.

Drawing for 'When faith moves mountains'

'When faith moves mountains'

Francis Alys

Francis Alys: Drawing for animation

I've mentioned before that I make a lot of ceramics, and know that without my ability to use drawing to visualise ideas, my work would be so much poorer. 

Sketchbook pages

It's the end of the academic year and shows open on Friday, and those of you in the drawing strand will have a summer to think about how to prepare yourself for next year. Hopefully you will continue to think about your practice and how you can use drawing to help visualise the next steps. Whether you are thinking about performance, making objects, constructing images, refining working processes, collecting information, researching the context for practice or making observational records, there will be a way of using drawing to help clarify and focus your ideas.

See also:

Why do we draw?

Drawing it all together
More on drawing as ‘disegno’.

The practice and science of drawing

The Practice and Science Of Drawing, by Harold Speed was a classic book of its time. Published in 1913 it set out to give a fully rounded introduction to drawing, both as an observational practice and as a means towards developing composition and expression.

Speed has some interesting observations and is very opinionated when it comes to critiquing other artists. The book reads as if it comes from another world, an age well before modernism, but you need to remember that Cubism and early abstraction were already well established in mainland Europe when it was written.

However when he gets to unpicking why he doesn’t like academic approaches to drawing he has this to say about too much precision.

‘There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" is, I believe, the Scotch word for it. The piston must be allowed some play in the opening of the cylinder through which it passes, or it will not be able to move and show any life. And the axles of the wheels in their sockets, and, in fact, all parts of the machine where life and movement are to occur, must have this play, this "dither." It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount of this "dither" be’.

The concept of a drawing having life comes up yet again, as it did in the previous post. In this case Speed comes up with the idea of ‘dither’ to explain it. However he also warns against too much ‘dither’.

I can see what he means, energetic markmaking for its own sake can become a mannerism and when it does a drawing begins to lose authenticity.

I think Speed’s book is a salutary read. It comes from a time when people could have firm convictions as to what is right and wrong about art, convictions now long denounced as outdated and obsolete in this time of post-post-modernism. 

His sections on composition like the one illustrated above, take me right back to school and those art classes whereby we had to draw out the various underlying dynamics and geometries of a painting’s structure.

Even though no longer taught (well not in most undergraduate Fine Art courses in England), it is still useful to go back and look at how an awareness of these things was achieved. I have seen so many poorly composed images or even worse images that have no conception of a relationship between surface organisation and meaning, that I personally believe it would do no harm to look again at these things, even if simply to consign these ideas to history. At least people would be able to make a decision as to why no compositional construction is needed or how their approach to constructing a figure differed from more traditional methods.

Speed himself saw his approach as being modern. He wanted to free students from the tight constrictions of the academy. He is one of the direct descendants of the staff that now teach cutting edge contemporary practice at Goldsmiths. He indeed uses an example of student work done in classes there to illustrate a point. I went to art college nearly 60 years after this book was published, the book is now of course over 100 years old, so my art school experience should feel as out of date now to contemporary students as his did then to me. 

England was slow to take on the lessons of Modernism, but when it did it took the teaching of the Bauhaus to heart and the institution I now teach in was at the forefront of the radical change to art education when it finally happened in the 1950s and 60s. 

However I’m always worried about throwing out the baby with the bathwater and when you look back, you can always find things of interest. So why not read this book and see if there is anything in it that still makes sense to you?

Download here The Practice and Science Of Drawing, by Harold Speed 

Compare Speed's book with earlier writings that influenced him.

In particular Hogarth'sThe Analysis of Beauty  and SirJoshua Reynolds's Discourses

The further back we go the firmer in their convictions art educators become. As Reynolds states in relation to the setting up of the Royal Academy: 'The student receives at one glance the principles which many artists have spent their whole lives in ascertaining; and, satisfied with their effect, is spared the painful investigation by which they come to be known and fixed.  How many men of great natural abilities have been lost to this nation for want of these advantages?' 

Compare this situation to contemporary books on drawing practice. For instance 

'Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art' published by 'Tracy' the collective name for the centre for recent drawing in 2015, has this to say about drawing; 

'A position of ambiguity, a lack of definition, is not only desirable within fine art drawing but also necessary - having the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices.' 

See also:

Kimon Nicolaïdes and the natural way to draw

Drawing and philosophy 

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders to compose an image