Enabling Children's Learning Through Drawing by Sedgwick Fred;

Author:Sedgwick, Fred; [Sedgwick, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Working with biros

On my third visit to Bealings, I went equipped with a bundle of cheap ballpoint pens. The cheapest are the best because they leave mucky little smudges. Often, when children begin working with them, they make no line at all. This leads to excited little scribbles as the child makes the paper bear the brunt of his fury. Sometimes, of course, you don't want mucky little lines, the equivalent of charcoal; you want clean, neat lines and then you will choose fine ballpoints. Another advantage ballpoint pens have over pencils is that the eraser is no longer an issue: an ink line cannot be rubbed out. Most important, you get an entirely different kind of line with a biro, as compared with a pencil, and its skinny look has a strength of its own in teaching children to draw.

Another point worth making here is that the children, once they have produced plenty of drawings, should be allowed to choose their graphic tools. In this book, I have given the children the tools I wanted them to use. This is not ideal, but it was necessary in my view for the book's production.

The subject of the ballpoint lesson was each child's right shoe. This served two useful purposes: first, it introduced the idea of the everyday as worthy subjects for art. George Herbert, the seventeenth-century priest and poet, wrote 'Who sweeps a room, as for [God's] laws, / Makes that and th'action fine' ('The Elixir', Collected Poems 176). Similarly, whoever looks at the most ordinary things with the eye of an artist 'until it hurts' makes the ordinary beautiful. Making the ordinary beautiful, or at least interesting - I think of this computer screen, and that stereo playing behind me as I type, and my desk lamp - is a duty for manufacturers in a literal sense, and a duty for artists in an extended sense. Also, manufacturers have a duty not to make things that are vulgar, but that have good design grafted onto them. They should make things in which the design is in an organic relationship to the function. The stereo is, indeed, a machine for listening to music. It should reflect that function by being as visually silent, so to speak, as possible. Artists have to make the ordinary beautiful for observers of their art. They are in the fortunate position of making what is ugly, beautiful.

How can horrible events in art be beautiful? This is not a difficult question to answer. Look at Goya's painting, The Third of May (1808), in the Prado, Madrid but reproduced widely. On the right, a phalanx of soldiers in tunics and boots, their faces hidden, aim guns at an unarmed man in a white shirt and gold trousers. His arms are spread wide. On his hands is blood: he looks like Jesus on the cross. Whether his arms are raised in surrender or protest it is impossible to say. Another man, blood flowing from him, lies in front of him.

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