Looking through your recent posts, I have to say “How to use references” is something the majority of my art teachers had no idea how to teach (or even that it was something that needed teaching).

eliciadonze:

amaluelmwood:

eliciadonze:

beyoursledgehammer:

:

That’s because no one likes to be open about how art is actually made.

Because then you’d have to know what you’re doing to teach it.

I feel like art is taught that it has to come 100% from your brain or else it’s not “real”. Your art has to come from the void or else it’s fake or a copy. Nevermind that literally no one can do that.

That’s why references are viewed as cheating even though it ignores the fact that in order to draw something you kinda need to know what they look like.

Oh for sure. The traditional art classroom is an exercise in gatekeeping. Even the skills we praise have been decided by the people who benefit the most from gatekeeping. “Good” and “bad” = “white men made it” and “undesirables made it.”

As soon as you take away those arbitrary rules and impossible standards, art is accessible to everyone. The definition of art changes. The definition of “skill” changes. People in power become obsolete.

And we can’t have that. So we keep a veil over it and let kids believe they shouldn’t even try.

God’s this is So much why I encouraged my students to reference, encouraged them to study the thing they are trying to draw/paint, to take their own photographs, to find images to use in books or online, to look at the objects around them. Some of my most enjoyable lessons were the ones where I taught the kids how to look at the thing they’re drawing. And they always did better and they kept it up.

I find myself wondering if this is a difference between American and British education in art? Because so much of my own education and my own teaching practice, and the teaching practice of my peers has really incorporated referencing properly.

Maybe. I was never taught how to reference. That was considered “copying” and bad. Most of my art education was basic skills. You were either good or you weren’t, and “good” meant “it looks like what’s in our textbooks.” 

But I mean.

What’s a skill?

What we call skilled art, good art, and meaningful art is very very much a product of colonialism. Imagine if the skills you got in those institutions stopped mattering.