Art training in higher education is in trouble. Professional art programs in liberal arts settings are in imminent danger. Yet I find it difficult to become terribly distressed about the radical changes getting ready to sweep through America’s college and university art programs. In the world of business it happens every day. Bad management undermines a concern that sells an obsolete product, fails to pay its bills or find new customers, and goes quietly out of business. State-run colleges and universities will be hardest hit because they are subject to legislative whimsy reflecting shifts in partisan agendas. Post-9/11 state budget woes, declining student enrollments and a beleaguered middle class are contributing to the future meltdown of hundreds of mediocre arts programs. I would like to take the current crisis in art education as an opportunity to address the more basic issue of visual literacy. This essay includes conversations with a few of the most insightful art teachers working today.

Traditionally, professional art training occurred in highly selective academies and conservatories located in urban cultural centers. Rarely were such programs found in smaller regional venues. Some artists pursued liberal arts degrees before seeking professional training in academies, music conservatories and theater workshops. Most did not. Schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany did not award degrees, but certificates attesting to the attainment of a certain level of knowledge and skill—as in any trade. There was never any doubt that being an artist was risky business. Professional art schools located in big cities usually had ties to local industry—Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Curtis Publishing in Philadelphia and Honda or Disney in Pasadena. Professional schools could rarely survive outside of places where students could prepare for real jobs.

Where no careers in art exist, few if any art programs will survive. There are no more than five or six serious programs training art restorers in the United States, producing a handful of graduates every year, which is all that the market will bear. Most of them are not touching up masterpieces in big museums. They are analyzing wallpaper samples from antebellum mansions, stabilizing ephemera and documents or overseeing collections care procedures in small regional museums.

For many art programs, the digital revolution has backfired. Heralded as a quick fix for sinking enrollments, computer graphics were quickly incorporated into arts curricula. Schools raced to set up new labs, with all the plug-ins money could buy. In many instances, schools found themselves with more technology than they knew how to use. Teachers were hired, and students flocked to new media with dollar signs in their eyes.

Michael Oliveri, who teaches at the University of Georgia, worked for years in film and television before heading for academia. One of his first acts as head of digital media was shutting down the new digital animation major. Set up by his predecessor, the program was fast-tracked into operation without full review and approval. Oliveri explained: “It was just a lot of kids whose aesthetic was based on Game-boy, X-Box and Japan Anime cartoons. They had no sense of design. I saw no benefit in maintaining such a program.” I asked if the program had been launched with the promise of a career at the end. He replied: “Ten years ago a really talented kid who knew Maya might graduate and find a job paying fifty grand a year, but today most graduates’ skills will be eighteen months behind the curve. Most of them are looking at eleven bucks an hour in some ad agency.”¹

Art programs created during the anomalous post-World War II enrollment boom, mostly in public institutions, will either disappear or be unrecognizable within another ten years. That is the good news. The bad news will be the continued neglect of visual intelligence and literacy, a neglect that most art programs have been guilty of for years. Visual literacy is likely to become the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater, at the very moment when it is more important than at any previous time in history. Huge volumes of visually encoded information are being consumed via the Internet and mass media. Public colleges and universities that reconfigure their professional art degrees into visual literacy programs may survive, retaining faculty and facilities. Many college and university art faculties are already dominated by conceptual and installation artists, who tend to hold drawing in very low esteem. Professional training of designers and artists in the applied arts will continue in the art schools, and traditional disciplines such as painting and sculpture will thrive in the revival of academies and ateliers. Receiving professional training in art will become more difficult, which is more appropriate to the limited opportunities that always exist for working artists.

The early-twentieth-century American poet Vachel Lindsay is quoted as saying that “a bad designer is a bad citizen.” ² Unfortunately for us, he is right. American public space, which once reflected the values of community and citizenship encoded within the town common, village green and the courthouse square, is now overrun by bad design in the service of grotesque commerce. If these changes truly reflect changes in our society, we are in trouble, and hundreds of mediocre professional art programs are partly to blame. The failure of professional training in liberal arts institutions suggests that a better direction would be toward building visual literacy. Rigorous competencies, skills and knowledge must return to curricula. Without the ability to exercise visual intelligence, the average citizen consumer who receives a daily barrage of visually encoded information via the Internet and mass media will have no way to use it, because it will already be using him. Art programs which fail to meet this challenge will soon blunder into oblivion.

There is one benefit of the current shake-up, the rebirth of drawing. As visual studies programs of every variety reinvest in a return to skills and knowledge, one subject will emerge with renewed vitality—Drawing. Because drawing is not a technique, its fundamental nature is not defined by any technology. Drawing is not about having a pencil or a computer. It is not just a genre of art object. It is a process informed by certain habits and assumptions, but its fundamental nature is not physical. It is nothing less than the act of seeing and the exercise of visual intelligence.

Among traditional skills and knowledge, drawing has suffered the most. Condemned as an obsolete activity, the art of drawing is today barely understood. Drawing is too large a subject to be defined by artistic practice and aesthetic discourse; everything in the man-made world passes through a process of visualization where it exists as a drawing—in one medium or another. Perhaps the biggest disservice we have done to drawing is to consider only its artistic applications while ignoring the vast majority of others.

Drawing is already making a return in surprising ways. Last November I visited the Maryland Institute College of Art, to meet with Academic Vice President and Dean Ray Allen.³ During our visit we discussed many subjects, including the impact of Information Technology on drawing. Allen told me that Firaxis Games, Inc.,⁴ a local business designing and producing computer games, regularly hires MICA graduates “because they know how to draw.” Firaxis’s best known game is “Civilization.” Mike Gibson, Art Director of Firaxis,⁵ confirmed Allen’s claim. “There’s nothing better than a good pencil,” Gibson told me. “Drawing is our shorthand. For one thing, it’s cheaper. We can look at a lot of ideas and critique them before going to 3-D. I’ve never heard of anyone needing a computer to do thumbnail sketches.” Gibson described working on a new project, “Sid Meier’s Pirates,” which first came out as a computer game in 1987: “We always look to tradition for inspiration. In the case of ’ Pirates,’ we went to the Brandywine School, Wyeth and Pyle. Their paintings have a sense of light that we are after.” I asked him if the best training for a twenty-first-century digital animator would be similar to that of a nineteenth-century painter. Gibson replied with a one-liner: “That’s the way to go.”

Another revelation occurred while I was surfing the web in search of art academies. The Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, in Van Nuys, California, offers a curriculum that is very similar to those found in other academies popping up around the country in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Old Lyme, Connecticut, and numerous other locations. Students learn to draw in traditional media, paying close attention to anatomy, composition and craft. Paintings on the academy’s Website appear to follow the same priorities and criteria. Surprisingly, the faculty is made up of artists who have worked mostly in film production and digital animation. These artists are way ahead of the New York art world in terms of the amount of capital that is invested in their film work. Recent films such as What Dreams May Come, Lord of the Rings and Master and Commander clearly reflect aesthetic values identified with Romantic landscape painting and nineteenth-century history painting. The vast majority of filmmakers with access to the latest technology do not appear to identify too closely with modernist aesthetics, nor any painting style after Impressionism.

Life Drawing Class at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art, Old Lyme, Connecticut. Photo by Pete Rambetsky.

Fred Osborne, President of the Lyme Academy of Fine Art, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, agreed with this point of view, noting that costly film projects need people with real skills who can make convincing pictures.⁶ Academies are the only places that make no bones about preparing people to do just that. Challenging assumptions and misconceptions people have regarding computers and modernity, the values expressed by the Los Angeles Academy signal one aspect of the return to drawing—and narrative painting—with the support of a multi-billion-dollar industry.

For too long drawing has been incorrectly categorized as strictly an artistic discipline. This has been the habit of higher education since 1945, simply because more drawing classes per se were offered via art programs. A drawing class at Yale School of Architecture⁷ is one of several places where these assumptions are being challenged.

Jeffrey Carr, the new Dean of Academic Affairs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is a busy man, juggling a host of responsibilities. The Academy has followed a bewildering variety of paths for many years—from the ultra-conservative faction of Arthur da Costa, to the tradition of painterly color abstraction originating with Arthur Carles, represented by Bill Scott and Jan Baltzell, to the narrative realism of Sidney Goodman and Scott Noel, the surreal figuration of Bruce Samuelson and the heroic machine compositions of Vincent Desiderio, not to mention many notable sculptors, painters and artists exploring new media. The Academy is essentially a computer-free zone. Carr indicated that there were plenty of other schools dealing with digital media, and that it didn’t really serve the goals of the academy to get involved in it. Getting back to skills and knowledge were at the top of the agenda in America’s oldest art school, but that did not mean sticking one’s head in the sand. Carr admitted that he sensed a return to drawing—and not just by artists. In a conversation last fall, he mentioned considering a number of opportunities to offer drawing outside of the realm of artistic practice—most of them predicated in some way on the needs of computer-related activities such as engineering and architecture. During a recent conversation,⁸ Lyme Academy President Osborne, who preceded Carr at the Pennsylvania Academy, mentioned having had a similar conversation with Carr.⁹ Neither of them was quite sure what the class might look like, how it would be structured and how it would be run. Later that afternoon I was a critic at Yale,¹⁰ in a drawing class that could provide them with a paradigm.

A few days before,¹¹ I sat down for a lengthy conversation with Philip Grausman, who invented the course, which he has been teaching at Yale for nearly thirty years. Sitting at his kitchen table in rural Connecticut, Grausman and I described drawing concepts to one another on sheets of cheap white printer paper. This was just the latest installment in a conversation that began in 1973, when I was a student at Skowhegan. Grausman was one of the resident artists. We discovered a connection based on a sympathetic passion for drawing, which Grausman delivers through his course to first-year architecture students. Yale School of Architecture traditionally accepts a number of students from liberal arts backgrounds with no formal training in art or design. During my year as a teaching assistant to Bernard Chaet, several members of his Intermediate Drawing class were also graduate students in architecture. Grausman’s course is geared toward architects, but it could just as easily be modified to teach visualization skills to studio artists, engineers, product designers and the general population.

Leading students through a series of assignments designed to develop perceptual and imaginative thinking, Grausman forbids the use of any mechanical devices in his class. Rulers, compasses, triangles and T-squares are all prohibited. Students work with their brains, eyes, free hands and a hard graphite pencil. Erasing is tolerated. Shading is not. Color, texture—anything superfluous to line drawing—is banned. He explains: “Tools get in the way—rulers and triangles, for example. Paraline drawings are different. They are task oriented, allowing for measurements and scale. What we do in my class is get back to basics.” Philip pushed aside the soup-bowl and grabbed another sheet of paper. The tip of his pencil struck at one spot, and then raced across the page like a rifle-shot. “A point can be projected into space and it becomes a line,” he continued, as he repeated the process. “One or two more lines will let you build a volume, which you can relate to other volumes and build a space.” He rapidly drew a frame around the scaffolding. “Composition is about using the edges of the page as lines in the drawing. Just as perspective locates the viewer in space, they locate the idea.”

Assignments in Grausman’s class range from the visual analysis of a vessel, to a Victorian house, a staircase, master painting and a courtyard. Developing a macro-structure based on the simplest geometry present, spatial volumes are measured by eye, divided, connected and realigned. Each student must draw a plan view, elevation, paralinear view and compositional thumbnail sketch, which is developed—usually the night before it is due—into a large sustained drawing representing a bird’s-eye view, snail’s-eye view or the ordinary point of view of a person on the street. Grausman continued: “Bill Butler, who teaches the class with me, has a very exciting way of dealing with perspective. He says that the history of perspective is crucial. It may not answer all of the questions, but it is a good place to start asking them.”

When the Italian Renaissance architect Alberti codified linear perspective, it was a radical invention. Portraying the visible world from the point of view of an individual person demolished the iconographic space of the medieval world, filled with symbols and conventions reflecting the religious and political order. Perspective is the starting point for contemporary notions of personal expression. Perspective also gives us the grid, a device fundamental to the modernist tool-kit.

When Computer Aided Design programs began to displace traditional drawing practice in the 1980s, Grausman found himself in an embattled position, defending the value of freehand drawing against those who questioned its value. His persistence and the popularity of the class carried it through. The 2004 class has an enrollment of sixty students. A sculptor trained at Cranbrook and Skowhegan, the recipient of a Prix de Rome, Grausman is now a member of the National Academy of Design. Combining rigorous formalism and a refined sensuality, his work is both highly rational and deeply personal. Grausman has the eye of an aerospace engineer and the touch of a libertine.

“I teach drawing as a tool of discovery,” Grausman explains. “The basis of art is geometry and proportion. Architects need a way to think in three dimensions. It may seem very old-fashioned to a lot of them, but freehand drawing is still the most direct way to get at an idea. What will they do when the electricity goes off and they can’t turn their computers on?” Grausman clarified his point by observing that, in the Yale School of Architecture, the pervasive view of drawing has shifted from presentation to representation. Both addressed more product-oriented approaches than the skills and knowledge that are advanced in Grausman’s class. He explained the distinction: “In a university we are in the business of teaching people how to see, how to learn—not just professional practice and production. Drawing is a thinking tool. Exploration, invention and intuition occur through observation. Drawing makes it happen.”

Computers and Computer Aided Design programs made it possible for people without much natural ability to produce drawings, while it turned talented draftsmen into lazy ones. An old friend who is an architect and designer in Boston complained that while this was true, the amount of time it takes to turn around a job allows no time for reflection—the legacy of Computer Aided Design. As we looked at last year’s student drawings prior to the critique, architect Howard Lathrop concurred with the view that Computer Aided Design had become a necessary evil. Lathrop was trained before computers and, like others in his generation, he learned how to draw by hand. He confessed that he used a computer at work, but that he did draw on his own, chiefly for pleasure. One thing, he said, stood out: “If you can’t draw, you can’t see. If you can’t see, you can’t visualize.”¹² Taking his point one step further, if we cannot visualize, how can we design?

“After one critique,” Grausman recalled, “a group of top-notch critics got into a discussion about art and the computer. They agreed that while computers were great for production work, something about technology inhibits expressiveness. It gets in the way, whereas manual drawing remains more direct, more personal.” He went on to cite another example: “A couple of architecture students accepted into the program from a liberal arts background struggled with their lack of visual skills and training. They took a course on theory where they were required to make a plan drawing in ink. It got them very excited because it forced them to slow down, ask questions and consider what they were doing in a new way.” This makes an important point about how drawing forces one to think about what one is seeing, while using all of one’s knowledge to transform it into a drawing.

Drawing deserves a broader definition. Let us give it one. Students need to be exposed to the kind of rigor and enthusiasm Grausman brings to his students at Yale. He is not alone, but more like him are needed. His course imparts basic skills and wisdom about one of mankind’s oldest methods of communication, which remains one of the best. Look carefully and you will find others, here and there, bringing students the same message. Drawing will outlive those who lack the manners to attend its funeral. Information Technology has revealed itself as an ally, reinforcing the necessity of drawing by providing it with a bigger realm to govern. Pay attention. Drawing is back.

Actually, it never was very far from us. Ask any engineer or product designer. Many have written about this subject. Few have expressed the hunger and longing that makes us pick up a tool and draw as eloquently as the Japanese printmaker Hokusai. In 1835, he wrote:

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs; but all I produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty I shall have made still more progress; at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word.

This was signed simply “Old Man Mad about Drawing.” ¹³

Originally published in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 21, number 2.