I could barely draw a stick figure when I walked into Sage 235 for the first day of Drawing 101. It took countless hours, late nights in the drawing studio, and pointed critiques, but through the 16-week course, an artist was born. The art of drawing takes time, patience, and grit: qualities essential to a comprehensive education. Drawing 101 should fulfill the fine arts requirement in the core curriculum.
The course meets twice a week, running nearly 3 hours per class period, and begins with everyone sitting on wooden benches called “horses,” blind contouring — drawing in pencil without looking down at the page for five minutes — an item in the center of the room. Immediately afterward, students assess and critique each other’s drawings. It is brutal. My drawing resembled an abstract pile of spaghetti, when the object I was attempting to draw was a cow skull. As I walked around the room comparing my drawing to my classmates’ attempts, I realized we were all bad — not at drawing, but at observing.
After this public humiliation, Julio Suarez, associate professor and chair of the art department, explained that drawing is similar to the game of golf: It is impossible to pretend to be good. One’s game can only be improved through many visits to a driving range, leaving it filled with divots from practice swings and misses. Drawing is even harder because the mediocre golfer can curse the course or the clubs, while the artist has no such excuse. Somehow, lines connected in the right place with the right shape and proper proportions become art. It is akin to anything difficult; it takes intentional effort. Drawing is public and vulnerable.
Talent might even hurt your ability to excel in the course — as Suarez told me — because the untrained student will begin by learning the principles and then develop from there, while a trained student might need to unlearn their preconceptions. Like education, drawing is the simple retelling of what your mind has interacted with. There is no place to fill pages with empty words repeating the same statements and ideas in an already-too-long English paper. Drawing will take hours of practice, hours of erasing, and hours of staring at inanimate objects. It is raw, exposing, and humbling. It is an attempt to copy what is seen exactly as it appears.
Drawing 101 highlighted the flaws and gaps in my mental approach to education. It exposed my pompous attitudes of procrastination and mediocrity, while challenging me to produce something beautiful and entirely individual.
In the course, it is impossible to inflate one’s abilities. The student’s talent, effort, and patience show through every homework assignment. It is a lesson in the willingness and vulnerability necessary for a complete education.
Most students who take this class will not become artists. Yet, through the course, they can develop educational skills that apply more broadly to life. The liberal education is a pursuit of beauty, and every student should understand that beauty requires effort. Drawing is hard, but it is for everyone. It develops the habit of dedication to an unknown final product, which is something beautiful.
The Hillsdale education intends to develop virtue and cultivate excellence. Drawing 101 exposes how seriously you take education, and thus it should fulfill the Fine Arts requirement of the core curriculum.
Anna Broussard is a senior studying politics.
