The Political Baggage Check
Leaving noise at the door of the drawing studio.
In the Fall of 1990 my life changed and I moved into a factory studio space. My neighbours included a pot grow-op, a phone sex business, artists, and bike couriers. The first Gulf War had started in August and I had begun teaching life drawing one day a week at Sheridan College in September. My studio was full of images dealing with the day to day politics of the time, my classroom was not.
I had enough to deal with in a Drawing Fundamentals course with a wide range of skill sets. Two years later when I started teaching drawing to the grad class in Illustration, I still left my politics in my studio. Drawing is a practice and a language for engaging with the world.
Propaganda and persuasion isn’t going to make my students draw any better. I don’t see the drawing studio as a place to escape the world, we’re not hiding from reality but exploring an approach to fully live within it. Teaching and being immersed in the problem of drawing this past week was a welcome break from the News of the day. I actually removed the News widget from my iPad, as each time I opened it there was more noise. I replaced it with a Substack widget—-much better.
In 1990, it was hearing the casual terms ‘collateral damage’ that inspired my drawing in my studio. As a Canadian, you can guess the fuel that is filling my tank right now—-sorry, had to use a fossil fuel reference.
