Frequently Asked Questions 11
11. I enjoyed the experience of doing the workshop but I find my drawings strange and hard to judge. What have I learnt?
The workshop's main concern is to allow you to discover
in your own way what the possibilities of drawing and creative approaches
are; you may well have learnt that you are capable of experimenting, taking
risks, making your own connections and surprising yourself; because of
this you can now do more with drawing than you might have previously thought.
Knowledge gained from experimentation is often difficult to immediately
understand or find a use for (when electricity was discovered no one knew
what to do with it!)
You don't have to like the drawings you have made to learn from them.
Having completed the day you probably have a range of drawings; some of
them you might be happy with, others might partly work, others might seem
confusing and a few you might hate entirely.
Try not to let your own personal taste or preferences colour your analysis
of your drawings (maths, history, languages or P.E. might not be to your
taste but they still have their uses).
Avoid merely passing judgement on the pictures in front of you; think
back to the processes involved that lead to the making of each drawing.
Assess related drawings together looking for how ideas might have moved
from one image to the next, is it possible to predict what might have
happened if a given approach had been taken a little further in some of
the pictures? Could something you tried in one drawing be combined with
another approach from elsewhere? Try to recall how the most striking parts
of your pictures were made, did you plan them carefully, were they spontaneous
or did they arrive by chance as a result of some sort of emergency or
conflict? Any change in your activity as an artist greatly influences
the type of result you come up with, it is important to relate the 'how'
to the 'what'.
Don't worry about whether on the day you performed well or badly, enjoyed
it or not or even understood everything; making connections between ideas,
instincts and results so that you can isolate what you feel to be important
to your own development is what counts.
Finding a path for yourself isn't always clear-cut; answers don't come
overnight. Ideas take time to settle and make sense, art is not an academic
subject it requires personal experience and curiosity.
