LINE AND WORD

The education for most of us has had a far more literary than artistic focus.  When you write a story in grade school, it of course is rough.  And you are given encouragement and suggestions on how to improve.  You try again, and it is better.  And you do get better over the years because of the priority that writing is given.  And that is not a bad thing;  it is important to know how to write and communicate with other sentient beings.

Yet when drawing is taught, if what you drew initially does not meet any sort of standard, you are discouraged from continuing.  If that first rough drawing that you produce is deemed inadequate, there is not the encouragement and support structure to continue.  Students in this scenario start to feel that since they are not getting any encouragement, they must not be creative, and so they very quickly loose interest in continuing to draw.  And this may very well be because most teacher’s can’t draw.

The written word and the drawn line have equal power.  Yet they are not given the same emphasis either in our education nor in our culture.  Both can be produced with a pencil and a piece of paper.  Quite possibly the knowledge contained in the drawn line is equal to or greater than the knowledge that is part of the written word. This is not the first publication to say that this disparity between writing and drawing does not make any sense.  I wonder how different the world would be if the line and the word were given equal emphasis in our educations?