It's drawing stupid!

So this was reported about a week ago. I have admired Robert Hughes for many years... mostly because of his television series and book "The Shock of the New" but here he encourages the RA to hold fast to drawing in the face of the mass media.

The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing - but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: "not so fast, buster". We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game.

The digital camera has been the most influential piece of IT kit to have been introduced into the school art room in the last 20 years. Combined with computers the fast access to photographic imagery is intoxicating and addictive.

What is the transforming power of drawing? There are whole campaigns here in the UK. It is the extraordinary ordinariness, the fundamentally human thing that making marks on a surface is, that has power.

As I have said before, I really enjoy teaching drawing... Its about thinking but unlike most thinking it results in something real and completely new.