If Schiele and David Had a Baby: Can Representational Art Education Congruently Maximize Personal Expression and Technical Accuracy?
Amanda Boyd Yin
“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.” Egon Schiele
“In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.” Jacques-Louis David
The Academy, a tightly controlled system of artistic training and salon exhibition that yielded tremendous power in France and throughout Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries, plays the villain in the history of modern art. Rebellion against Academic art, the Salon’s exhibition criteria, and its famed rigidity produced the Impressionists, leading to Expressionism, Cubism, and the modern art world as we know it. In the birth and development of these movements, The Academy is the controlling parent. Its “good” children grow to be dull copies of that parent. In contrast, its rebel offspring enthrall us with their originality, escaping and overthrowing their tyrant predecessors.
It is ironic, but perhaps typical of historical cycles, that the current art world, with its emphasis on ideas and expression to the near exclusion of technique — almost a complete inverse of the Academy — is comparable in matters of gatekeeping, power, rigidity .[Boucher 1]
From this yin-yang dynamic come the two current models of art education. Most universities and art schools teach art students how to think critically, form and communicate novel or impactful ideas, and explain those ideas within the context of art history, modern society, and the need for social change. Technical training is limited, emphasizing expressive drawing, unique mark-making, and some composition and color theory.
In contrast, the atelier movement is modeled after that old enemy, the Academy. A grassroots movement that sprung from working artists and art students' frustration with practical limitations created by their lack of technical drawing and painting skills, the atelier movement is a tradition kept alive, medieval monks-style, with knowledge passed quietly from master to pupil throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Atelier students learn academic drawing, painting, and sculpting techniques, including cast drawing, color theory, anatomy, measuring, one-, two, and three-point perspective, and the golden ratio. They copy old master paintings and even learn to grind and mix paints. In contrast to the university, critical, conceptual thinking is deemphasized.
Critics of the Academy are not wrong. Nineteenth-century and current academic art often seems stiff, and works can be as visually alike as their Egyptian-tomb painting predecessors (the Egyptians are often more interesting to look at.) Henry C. White argued in Notes on Drawing and Painting: [2]
“An academic training in drawing and painting does not
necessarily produce a great artist. It should not be continued
too long, only long enough to enable the student to express
himself fluently. What he does with his knowledge is another
thing entirely. Many Frenchmen and students of other nation¬
alities in the Parisian schools painted from the life model for
ten years or more or until they could render it with absolute
perfection and the greatest ease. Technique could go no farther.
Many of these men never did anything else. Their subsequent work was only a continuation of their school work, extremely
clever and facile, but wholly uninspired and distinguished.”
This uninspired quality may be because we do not perceive life in classic proportions. Scientists understand much about visual perception: how our eyes function and interpret information. Our eyes have evolved to aid in survival. As a result, we prioritize and adjust visual details. Motion immediately attracts our attention, probably to help us spot predators. Our eyes adjust lightness and contrast to see details, prioritizing contrast over color. Because we see through two eyes, we see from two different angles at once in 3D. We draw, however, onto a flat paper. Making the translation from 3-D to 2-D with careful measurements does not capture how the world feels to us as we observe it [3, 11]
In life, we see without measurements, unconsciously prioritizing some information over others and recording visual information symbolically; measuring may be why academic rendering can appear lifeless, stylized, or stiff. If this is the case, our distortions and how we capture them create a visual recognition beyond technical accuracy that viewers recognize and identify deeply with. [Pinker 4]
Likewise, the stylistic sameness and stiffness that can be problematic in classical realism may be because the classical artist, intent on drawing the roundness of a form, may have ceased to look closely at the actual object, favoring intellectual knowledge over true visual observation. This phenomenon can be observed when artists create a smooth, lovely, and well-proportioned drawing that looks nothing like the actual model with their unique quirks and proportions.
Harold Speed [5], however, counters that technique comes first and leads to artistic expression:
“…it is eminently necessary for the student to train his eye accurately to observe the forms of things by the most painstaking of drawings. In these school studies feeling need not be considered, but only a cold accuracy. In the same way a singer trains himself to sing scales, giving every note exactly the same weight and preserving a most mechanical time throughout, so that every note of his voice may be accurately under his control and be equal to the subtlest variations he may afterwards want to infuse into it at the dictates of feeling. For how can the draftsman, who does not know how to draw accurately the cold, commonplace view of an object, hope to give expression to the subtle differences presented by the same thing seen under the excitement of strong feeling?”
Listening to budding classical violinists who have yet to learn their notes expressing themselves could be considered torture. Likewise, jazz saxophonists and rock guitarists need extensive training and practice to keep listeners from sticking fingers in their ears. In each musical style, artists who know how to play — and who can yield those notes to express emotion — are the ones we love.
Are visual arts different? While academic atelier training is criticized for suppressing expressiveness, a lack of such training has artists crippled in their range, unable to create accurate perspective or anatomy when these skills are needed to express their ideas.
The uninitiated sometimes view contemporary art as the visual equivalent of listening to an untrained violinist squeaking away. Matisse’s
‘The Joy of Living” caused angry shouts and screaming ay the 1906 Paris Salon des Independants. Thirty years previous the Impressionists angered audiences enough to attempt to attack the paintings with umbrellas and canes. Manet’s Olympia 1865 exhibition at the Paris Salon just a decade earlier, created a similar uproar. Are these viewers simply uneducated? Are they moralists or stuffy traditionalists — or are they like the fabled child who accurately shouts that the emperor wears no clothes? (It should be noted that Manet and Matisse were classically trained and spent hours copying the masters at the Louvre. Monet refused to enroll in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but his first teacher was Jacques-Francois Ouchard who was taught by Jacques-Louis David.) [Flanner 6]
In her thesis, “The Impact of University and Atelier Instruction on Classical Realism Art in America,” Rebecca Chyenne Brock [28] interviewed professors and teachers at leading university art programs and ateliers in the US to determine which education was preferable to a student focusing on realist art. She concluded,
“...at closer examination and review of the data, paying special attention to the surveys and interviews, a different conclusion is realized. The atelier environment is a bubble and classical art is not the end-all be-all of art making. The teaching process is highly regimented, students run the risk of becoming great at copying, or students become fixated on historical methods… Finally, ateliers focus heavily on recycling. For example, composition of old masters is taught as the basis for new works. Similarly, color, layering techniques, and subject matter is taught as what students should mimic. Teaching students to create new compositions or leveraging any new technique to enhance classical realism art is not encouraged. The skills of imaginative drawing or visioning the composition of multiple subjects within the painting are almost nonexistent in atelier training.”
Or, as the critic Thierry de Duve put it:
“Modernism won the battle against academicism. That story has been told often enough, and I will not repeat it here. Nor am I offering an explanation, new or old, of why modernism triumphed; no explanation is needed other than its aesthetic superiority.”
In analyzing only ateliers and university art programs, we may be overlooking models in which expressiveness and innovation thrived in environments where deliberate and deep practice allowed for the achievement of excellence.
In history's sweep, the atelier and the art college are relatively new educational models. Apprenticeships were the most common historical models for teaching artists and the model that fueled the Renaissance. Apprenticeships naturally utilize many elements considered best educational practices. Perhaps this tight knit educational model will provide clues to how modern artists can develop their best work.
Although the fine art world traditionally looks down on illustration, animation, and comic art, skill based education continued for commercial artists when it had ceased for fine art students; illustrators and animators still learned to draw. Techniques for teaching drawing to commercial artists, however, focus on gesture, expression, speed and contour. While figurative fine art languished, 20th century illustration experienced a renaissance, and animation went from new invention to extraordinary sophistication. Many of the evolutionary steps that figurative art may have explored in the fine arts, had it remained popular, were instead developed by commercial artists. It is surprising then, that as the art world refocuses on figurative work, atelier style training, a form that has not evolved stylistically, would become more popular than commercial art training techniques, which have evolved and grown.
In recent years, scientific knowledge and information on best practices for teaching athletic excellence, music, math, and foreign languages have grown exponentially. Much of this research has applications for all fields, including art, but there are no scientific studies on specifically how to teach visual artists best. This may be because visual art is currently the art form with the least consensus on what constitutes excellence. Great art seems to share Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, ‘We know it when we see it,’ or as Georges Braque puts it, “There is only one thing valuable in art: the thing that you cannot explain.”
This paper utilizes current scientific research, particularly the work of Karl Anders Ericsson and the ideas of Daniel Coyle on the psychological and physical nature of expertise and human performance. It explores Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura’s research of creativity, focus, and flow as well as the ideas of Sir Ken Robinson on encouraging creativity in education to determine what education methods will best develop exceptional artists. Finally it looks at the groundbreaking work of Carol Dweck in determining how personal and cultural “growth’ mindsets lead to creativity and innovation.
Through the lens of these thinkers, and by looking at teaching methods that succeeded in art history, atelier teaching methods can be evaluated alongside the conceptual curriculum in most art schools and university art departments. From this analysis, a new model in art education can be formulated, combining the wisdom of the past with current research and modern standards for excellence in art, creating a system that will impart artistic skills and range while encouraging expressiveness, individuality, conceptual innovation and creativity.
Deliberate practice, deep practice, mental representations and myelinated nerve fibers
Karl Anders Ericsson studied world-class performers in various fields for thirty years to determine how excellence is achieved. Except for height and body size in some sports, inborn qualities like talent were not a factor in attaining excellence. Exposure to specific types of practice at distinct developmental stages, creates the impression of talent. However, at any stage of life, almost anyone can exponentially improve in anything and even reach world-class performance levels. [8]
The key to significant improvement is a specific, challenging, highly focused form of practice he coined deliberate practice. Deliberate practice leads to increasingly complicated mental representations of the practiced activity, which are stored in long-term memory. These mental representations allow individual steps in a challenging activity to become automated. Without these mental models, gained through deliberate practice, but now automatic, we could not walk, drive, eat, or carry out most mundane human activities. Improvement, however, ceases once a task has become automated; repeatedly doing it does not practice that skill. Unless challenges arise and new mental maps form, the practitioner will hit a plateau. [8]
Deliberate practice was initially based on a study in which Ericsson observed Steve Faloon, an average student he had hired to regularly practice the memorization of random strings of numbers to see if the limits of short-term memory, estimated at 7-8 numbers, could be extended through practice. In the wildly successful experiment, Steve went from remembering and repeating nine numbers tops to appearing on the TV talk show circuit because he could remember 82 digits, a feat once considered impossible.
Ericsson watched Faloon, a long-distance runner who primarily competed against himself while running, create elaborate sequences of mental representations, known as memory trees, which he based on running times and running drills. As Faloon gradually increased the number of digits he could repeat, Ericsson realized the implications of what he was observing and decided to dedicate his life to studying. practice, performance, and how exceptional performance is achieved.
In searching for a group that utilized the techniques Ericsson observed in Faloon’s practice to be the focus of his research, Ericsson chose classical violinists at an elite Berlin academy and later on top chess, mathematics, and sports performers. He found striking similarities between the practice habits and approaches of world-class performers. As a result, Ericsson was able to define best practices for improving a skill. He called it deliberate practice.
According to Ericsson, deliberate practice requires:
The full attention of highly motivated individuals
Well-defined learning objectives
A difficulty level just beyond an individual’s current ability level
Rigorous, measurable results
Informative, timely feedback from a teacher or other educational source
Monitonitoring with the aim of focused error correction
Evaluation to determine if the minimum standards of excellence are reached
Advancement to the next level is beyond what the individual is currently capable of. [8a]
Ericsson noted that four other elements are required for a practice to be considered deliberate:
The field must be well established, and elite performers must be easily identified.
The skills and techniques for teaching are highly developed.
The field is competitive, and there is a strong incentive to improve.
An established, expert coach or teacher guides training. [8a]
The 10,000-hour rule, coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers” was based on Ericsson’s research but is an inaccurate simplification; Ericsson wrote “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” [8a] to correct these misconceptions, which he felt had become a damaging part of popular culture. 10,000 hours of simply practicing a skill any old way will not create significant improvement. A pre-established mental map will simply be on repeat.
Thousands of hours of deliberate practice, however, will give one's nerves a pretty tough myelin sheath. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle [9], describes developments in cutting edge neurology that explain why deliberate practice, which he calls deep practice, works. Our nerves are covered in a fatty insulating substance called myelin. All human skills are created by chains of nerve fibers carrying tiny electrical impulses. Myelin wraps the nerves in the same way we wrap electric cords in order to keep electrical signals from escaping so that they travel faster. Deep practice, it turns out, grows myelin, almost like weight lifting grows our muscles. Making mistakes then correcting them, grows the most myelin. The thicker the coating of myelin over our nerves, the faster signals travel. Super-thick myelin sheaths over the related nerves, allow top performers to execute chains of mental representations almost instantly. Thus an olympic diver can do 4.5 somersaults before hitting the water or a chess grandmaster playing many simultaneous games, can win them all.
While we can increase myelin at any age, myelin develops quickest during the first five years of life and in the early teen years, making these time periods critical for skill development, and giving the impression of inborn talent to the young people fortunate enough to be exposed to experiences that develop myelin in coveted skills.
Coyle’s, nerve-myelinating deep practice, is extremely similar to Ericsson’s deliberate practice, Coyle’s “Three Rules” are:
Chunk it up: Students practice the many small parts of a whole before integrating them.
Repetition: Students practice repeatedly, but not in a rote way, with full engagement. The practice should be highly targeted with an emphasis on real time error correction by an expert teacher or coach. This repetitive practice should always fall into the “sweet spot edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits''
Integral Learning: Students are exposed to models of the desired outcome of their efforts to develop what Ericsson had called mental representations. An example of this is having a music student frequently listen to exceptional musicians play the piece that they are learning.
Both Coyle’s deep practice and Ericsson’s deliberate practice align with what psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) . ZPD is the gap between what a student can and cannot do on their own. It is the focal point for reaching the next level of mastery. [23]
The French academy, and the academic training model that atelier training is based on, meet deep/deliberate practice criteria. Master artists train students through increasingly complicated lessons that result in excellent draftsmanship. They emerge capable of painting and drawing in a classical realist style at an expert level. This is possible because there are well defined objectives for success, as described in the Encyclopedia of Art History:
“As part of its regulation of French painting, the French Academy imposed what was known as the hierarchy of genres, in which the five different painting genres were ranked according to their edification value. This hierarchy was announced in 1669 by Andre Felibien, Secretary to the French Academy, and ranked paintings as follows: (1) History Painting; (2) Portrait art; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscape Art; (5) Still Life Painting. This system was used by the academies as the basis for awarding scholarships and prizes, and for allocating spaces in the Salon. It also had a major impact on the financial value of a work…As well as regulating genres and themes, the Academy introduced numerous conventions on (eg.) how a painting should be painted: including overall style (the Academy preferred representational art in the neoclassical idiom); recommended color schemes; how much brushwork should remain visible; how a picture should be finished off; and many others.”
It would be convenient if we could just go back to the academic model, as many ateliers have done, but when this happens, several problems emerge. The first is simply that tastes have changed, but the tasks that lead to success in classical realism become highly myelinated automated mental representations. Artists taught for years to work in this style are often unable to draw more expressively.
For some artists, that is a good thing; classical realism becomes a jumping-off point to the work they hope to accomplish, usually work that emphasizes technical excellence, accuracy, some emotional distance over feeling and expression – or work where the subject or storytelling is more important to the artist than an expressive style. After all, they are experts in a style created to tell mythological and, eventually, biblical and historical stories. Rarely, artists can draw in the academic style with tremendous expressiveness, (later we will explore why they may have this capacity in our discussion of the flow state.)
For other artists, however, the sameness and emotional distance of academic perfection is undesirable because it becomes a developmental plateau that is as hard to rise above as it is to retreat from. Their work looks like that of other classical realists, and because the tasks used to create that work are now automated deeply, it is hard to draw or paint in any other way.
Enthusiasm, fresh observation, critical thinking, and expressive feeling are absent in automated tasks; (we do not generally brush our teeth or drive the car expressly; we do not even think as we perform these tasks). Drawing likewise becomes automated so that the work can have a generically classical, anonymous quality. As Sidney Tillim, American art critic and a figurative artist writes, [10] “We are too removed from the Greeks historically and too removed psychologically from the naiveté that led to a belief in their perfection.” or as Robert Motherwell put it, “Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.”
For those seeking to become better contemporary artists, the modern art movement offers no step-by-step, goal driven, educational equivalent to the atelier model. With no consensus on what constitutes excellence, and no perimeters on what an artist may want to express or how they should do it, it is difficult to determine what skills should be practiced and how. Once art became about Ideas, it also became increasingly subjective. As any discipline becomes more subjective it becomes increasingly hard to deliberately or deeply practice. Were there a consensus however, it would be a simple thing to use a deliberate practice model similar to the atelier education model, but teach currently relevant subjects and skills.
Fortunately, Ericsson does have advice for improving in fields where deliberate practice is not possible because there is no consensus on what constitutes improvement or excellence. He advises honing in on the skills needed for success and to practicing those skills as closely as possible to the deliberate practice model. Because deliberate practice requires feedback, he also suggests seeing experts in that field and developing a mentoring relationship to receive feedback. He does warn, however, that in a highly subjective area, people considered experts may not actually be experts. Subjective fields often promote attractive or charismatic people and suppress people of color, women, and marginalized groups. The student seeking to improve must carefully vet mentors to ensure their feedback will truly provide value.
Flow, mindfulness, and creative excellence
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” – Robert Henri
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” – Ray Bradbury
While Ericsson was researching deliberate practice, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura also studied top performers and how they achieved excellence. They interviewed self-actualized, high-performing people: including mountain climbers, chess players, surgeons, and ballet dancers, and noticed that when doing their best work, these experts go into what Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow state. He describes flow as, “The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost.”
When in the flow, there is full task engagement and low levels of self-referential thinking (e.g., worrying, self-reflection). Unlike deliberate practice, which is rigorous and challenging, flow is pleasurable. People working in a flow state lose track of time and are reluctant to take breaks, going for hours without food or bathroom breaks.
While deliberate practice relies on stretching one’s skills to reach the next level, flow happens when one's skill level matches the difficulty of a task. If the task is too difficult, it generates anxiety and prevents flow. In contrast, boredom, which happens when one’s skill level surpasses task requirements and the activity is too easy, also blocks flow. (Keller, 2016) [20].
If task difficulty matches one's skill level, flow requires only:
a task that one cares about
a defined goal
an environment suited to focus, and deep concentration.
At first, it may take effort to concentrate. As one enters flow, however, the task absorbs all attention, and the resulting work is at the pinnacle of one skill, often pushing the practitioner to new skill levels and exceptionally creative work. “There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback,” Csikszentmihalyi said in a 2004 TED Talk [29]
The most exciting aspects of flow are that performers in this state intuitively know what needs to be done without thinking about it and that they experience a state of joy and ecstasy — the opposite of the difficult, rigorous effort of deliberate practice.
Studies of flow how reduced activity in the frontal lobe areas of the brain that are related to self-reflective thinking. (Dietrich, 2004) [17] The flow state also activates the dopaminergic reward system (Ulrich et al., 2014, 2016) [18]. Studies also indicate the flow is possibly related to activity in the locus coeruleus norepinephrine (LC-NE) system, a small nucleus in the pons that is responsible for most of the norepinephrine release in the brain. (Benarroch, 2009) [19] Also,
“During flow, stress levels are low and so are worries and self-reflective thinking. The presumed brain network associated with this is the Default Mode Network (Van der Linden et al., 2021), which is typically active when not engaging in an external cognitive task (Bressler and Menon, 2010). Brain imaging studies have confirmed that activity of the default mode network is indeed lowered during flow states (Ulrich et al., 2014, 2016).”
Lack of stress, worry and self-referential reflection has been linked to increased creativity by other writers and philosophical movements too. Although the idea that the left side of the brain is analytical and the right side is creative has been discredited as inaccurate, (both sides of the brain are utilized in all activities,) the classic instruction book, “Drawing With the Right Side of the Brain,” by Becky Edwards, [13] may hold keys to how to enter into the flow state to enhance learning and performance in art.
Edwards presents a series of activities and exercises, many of them exercises that have been used successfully in illustration and animation training throughout the 20th century, that she explains will confuse the left brain, causing the more creative right brain to take over. While these activities do not actually disengage the left side of the brain, they may still teach expressive drawing. These exercises may work by triggering flow.
Edwards presents tasks such as drawing an object upside down or drawing a self-portrait with one’s non-dominant hand, that are in the sweet-spot of skill vs. task difficulty for most people. These tasks are novel enough to be unlikely to trigger self-reflection or self-criticism (nobody becomes self critical about their skill at an upside-down drawing), but interesting enough to encourage strong focus. A focused but unself-critical state is flow.
Edwards’s exercises encourage concentration by actively encouraging the use of line (discouraged in academic drawing because they do not actually appear in life, but used intuitively by artists, the untrained and children alike as a symbol for differentiation of objects, colors, textures and shades.) She encourages deep focus on the subject being drawn, especially the act of primarily looking at the subject and not the paper, gesture drawing, quick poses, focusing while drawing extremely slow to observe details, and exercises like only drawing the negative space, creating symbolic drawings like children do (like when a simplified icon of a house is drawn rather than a detailed attempt at sketching the child's own home.) these are all techniques used in teaching animation and illustration both of which emphasis expression and movement.
Edwards also suggests working in a quiet environment, not speaking or listening to music with words or talk radio while drawing. She explains that it prevents the “verbal” left brain from overpowering the “artistic “right brian, but what is probably happening is that a quiet, distraction-free environment encourages focus, leading to flow..
Interestingly, Edwards also uses aspects of deliberate practice. She offers increasingly difficult drawing exercises for students as they progress through the book. This suggests the possibility that aspects of deliberate practice and flow may work best in combination, especially in subjective fields like art, where one danger to learning is the inner critical voice that leads frustration and disrupts flow.
Another classic book, The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron [14], was written as a guide to overcoming an artist's writer's block. Cameron focuses on disabling critical self-referential thinking through free-form journaling. Journaling is used as a way to express one’s worries and critical thoughts, clearing the mind for creativity. Like Edwards, Cameron asserts that one’s inner critical voice disables creativity. The emphasis of both writers on quieting worry and self-referential thoughts to increase creativity brings to mind Buddist thought on mindfulness, and present-minded focus.
Clearing the mind of busy thoughts is a large part of Buddhist meditation and yoga practice. What is of great interest to artists, however, is how mindfulness and meditative focus allows yoga practitioners to control their body, entering into poses that otherwise seem difficult or impossible.
Yoga, it seems, combines aspects of deliberate practice – like having an instructor correct poses and gradually increasing the difficulty of poses, stretching just beyond one’s ability level – with the sort of deep focus that is an integral part of flow. The connection between yoga and the flow state, and the use of yoga as a tool to enter flow is widely embraced by the yoga community. In an article in Well-Being Curious the authors state:
“The flow state is that feeling of “being in the zone”. It’s when you’re completely immersed in “doing” to the point where you are just “being”; when you’re so engaged in the activity that everything else kind of disappears. Does this sound familiar to any yogis reading? It should. It’s reminiscent of the experience that Master Patanjali talks about in the Yoga Sutras — when the seer and the object merge into oneness — or deep dyhana(meditation) and samadhi (bliss). And moving towards this state is fundamental if you are interested in creativity.” [14.15]
Yoga is a physical activity that leads to mindfulness and flow. Art too is a physical activity that is connected to focus. Drawing, especially, is similar to yoga, in both practices, deep focus leads to flow, and flow leads to increased abilities..
As we look at how to best learn and improve in art, mindfulness and learning to achieve the flow, seem to be at least as important as deep practice. It is exciting to see that there are activities where deep practice and the flow state seem to be combined rather than separate, many of them eastern. Martial arts, in addition to yoga, comes to mind. The implications for art education and excellence are significant.
The importance of a growth mindset vs a fixed mindset
Carol Dweck, a psychologist that studies motivation at Stanford University, determined that there is a continuum of individual beliefs that impact motivation to practice, learn and to take creative and educational risks.
People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and talent are set qualities and little can be done to improve one's base potential. Failure is frightening because it suggests constraints they cannot overcome. As a result, those with fixed mindsets will avoid challenges or easily quit, as they do not think effort makes much difference.
Those with growth mindsets believe that talent and intelligence can be developed. They are more likely to seek out challenges, be persistent and view failure as a growth opportunity. [24]
Like individuals, families, cultures and institutions can have fixed mindset or growth mindset cultures. Those with fixed mindset cultures tend to reward perfectionism and conformity, and discourage intellectual risk taking.
In a famous experiment that has been replicated repeatedly in multiple contexts, University of Florida photography professor, Jerry Uelsmann divided his students into two groups. One group was instructed to spend the semester focusing on quality; they were to be graded on one photo, but to get an A it must be a nearly perfect photo. The second group was graded on quantity alone, to get an A they must take 100 photos, 90, a B and so on.
The quantity group overwhelmingly produced the best images. They spent the semester experimenting and taking creative risks, using different lighting and darkroom techniques and learning from their mistakes. They enjoyed the class more and were impacted by the experience.
The quality group struggled, they spent time theorizing about perfection and were conservative and safe in their efforts, producing few photos, and quality was ironically lower.. They ended the semester struggling with doubts and only one mediocre photo to show for it. [25]
The photography students that focused on quantity learned to operate with a growth mindset. They were rewarded for trying and experimenting even if they fail, a business concept referred to as “Fail Fast” [26] because we learn from our mistakes and so the more we learn, like Thomas Edison who unsuccessfully attempted to create a lightbulb 1,000 times before succeeding.[25]
The quality group was crippled by perfectionism. This lesson should give pause to advocates of academic art training; 200 hours spent on a cast drawing may not be the best use of a budding artist's practice time.
Uelsmann’s experiment does support the training that animators and illustrators undergo, based on the methods used in the Chouinard Art Institute by founder Nelberta Murphy Chouinard. Chouinard’s educational philosophies were greatly impacted by psychologist and educational reformer, John Dewey whose functionalist philosophy was based on Darwinian thought, and trial and error approach to learning.[31]
One of her first students, and an eventual Chouinard professor, Donald W. Graham was a Stamford University engineering student, who dropped out to enroll in Chouinard and was part of the first graduating class. Graham went on to teach at Disney, training a generation of animators by breaking down human movement into its components and teaching students to replicate motion using fast, gestural drawing techniques. Chouinard and Graham’s students spread their teaching style in the animation and illustration worlds. [32]
David Passalaqua, an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications moved to New York City and taught illustration students at the Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design for over thirty years using Chouinard techniques, and was this writer’s most influential professor as an undergraduate. He made students draw dozens of poses each class, quickly and accurately using lines and gestures. We failed fast and often, and received immediate feedback. I can attest to the excellence of this method in teaching accuracy and expression.
The success of these teaching and drawing technique is not only related to the myelin-building benefits of failing fast with immediate coaching feedback, but also to its ability to tap into what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls “System One” or “Fast Thinking,” which he defines as tapping into our intuitive rather than rational brain.
This intuitive thinking, which is forced during fast drawing exercises do to the requirement of speed, taps into the same intuitive brain process that powers the flow state, deep intuition apparently leads to expressiveness and accurate observation when drawing.. [27]
Educational Individualization and the “finding one’s element”
The late Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity,” [21] has the distinction of being the most watched TED talk in history. An influential educator and researcher, Robinson argued that creativity is not a trait reserved for the talented elite, but an essentially human capacity that exists in everyone, and waits only to be allowed to develop.
Robinson argued that talent development requires students to pursue highly individualized curriculum paths, which are only possible within the context of close student teacher relationships. As a result, Robinson believed in very small class sizes and the removal of standardized curriculum or testing which discouraged focus on the individual development and the specific learning and development needs of the individual student.
A passionate believer in diversity, Robinson warned against environments where sameness quelled innovation and where new ideas were discouraged. People of different backgrounds naturally bring in new perspectives making diversity of all kinds his most important criteria for encouraging creativity.
By following the careers of geniuses in different fields, Robinson observed that individual talent grows exponentially in environments that are designed to recognize and appreciate it. He recommended that artists and thinkers find, “their element” an environment where they are surrounded by cutting edge ideas in their field, and motivated peers. One’s element, he argued, provides the best chance for others to recognize their skills and for them to innovate in an impactful way. [22]
Robinsons ideas about individualization, diversity, and access to environments where an individual's specific creativity are recognized, provide keys to how Ericsson’s and Coyle’s, aideas can be implemented even in area that lack consensus for what defines excellence. His focus on close individualized coaching-sylte teaching, within the context of “one's element” supports learning environments that can be closely tailored to specific individual talents and interests, allowing teachers to keep students in their zone of proximal development and deeply engaged in their work, while able to geek out, filming coles bonds with peers who share similar deeply specialized passions. [22a]
The History of Art Education; what worked, what did not, and how we got where we are now
While Ancient Greece had art schools, such as the school at Sikyon in the Peloponnesos, knowledge of their learning techniques has been lost to time. Medieval and Renaissance artists, however, were educated in workshops as apprentices to masters. To set up a workshop, a master would need to be registered with a guild. Registration required that the master graduate from a workshop and prove his skill and knowledge by producing a masterwork, then the master was able to sell work under their own name and take on apprentices to learn while assisting them in producing professional work. Apprentices learned by preparing materials for the master, copying drawings, and eventually helping create commissioned work before becoming masters themselves.
The workshop model of education fits both the criteria for both Errickson’s deliberate practice and Coyle’s deep practice. Apprentices learned in the context of established guidelines for excellence. They were coached by one master, and were given real time feedback and focused error correction. Many individual component skills were mastered before integrating them and tasks increased in complexity as the apprentice learned. Practice was repetitive, but not mindless as apprentices worked on a variety of skilled tasks, and shared in the ideas and culture of the workshop. Advancement required that apprentices stretch and grow beyond their current abilities and mastery had the well-defined objective of learning to reproduce the master’s in-house style. Apprentices graduated to become salaried assistants who produced lesser commissions, or components of larger ones until they improved enough to produce a master work of their own.
The apprenticeship system produced the Renaissance. Despite learning under a specific master’s style, artists developed unique ways of expressing themselves, perhaps naturally over time, or perhaps as a way to achieve status as a master in their own right. Although not all Renaissance apprentices turned into Michelangelo or Raphel, this system led to tremendous artistic accomplishment.
It is interesting to note that the same system that bred excellence from around 1300 - 1600 CE and created the Renaissance,, was the same one that saw little innovation from the fall of Rome in 476 CE to the 14th century. While exploring the cause of this contrast is beyond the scope of this paper, the cause may be related to Dweck’s ideas surrounding mindset The mindset in a deeply religious society, especially one with a prohibition against creating likeness of God, will favor conforming to societal norms, whereas a culture where science, literature and new ideas are thriving is likely to reward individuality and innovation.
In 1563 the Florence artist’s guild, the Compagnia di San Luca, established the first recognizable academy-style art school, the Accademia del Disegno, in order to produce art for the Medici state. In 1582 the Accademia dei Carracci opened in Bologna. In 1648 an academy opened in Rome, then in 1648 in Paris and in 1768 in London.
Academic art training standardized the workshop model, tailoring it to teach many students at once. Because their students were ont in their employ, teachers lacked the motivation to invest heavily in their lives and work. Additionally, tasks that were purposeful in the workshop setting to learn skills that they saw daily in use by their master, lose context in a purely academic environment. While apprenticeships provided room, board and education in exchange for labor, schools required tuition, attracting gentlemen, not tradesmen. Visual artists began to be seen as intellectuals rather than workers. As church commissioners gave way to private collections, a hierarchy of genres developed (in order of importance: history, portrait, genre, landscape and still life) and students competed against each other to achieve a standardized ideal.
Like the apprenticeships it was modeled after, academic teaching models met both Errickson’s and Cole’s criteria for deep/deliberate practice. The Academy produced excellent draftspersons. Stylistically, however, the student’s work was almost indistinguishable.. Standardizing the workshop mode of instruction had also standardized the work. While the deep lifelong coaching relationships between apprentices and masters seemed to allow for stylistic development and differentiation between teacher and pupil, this was not as apparent in the Academy. Perhap the “rigorous, measurable results” that Errickson’s model requires had become too rigid.
Beginning in 1667, the Paris Salon, the official yearly exhibition of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris became the art world’s defining event. Inclusion in the Salon established an artist, rejection came with no other opportunities for artistic exposure. Using Greek and Renaissance art as the standard for excellence, the Salon became increasingly conservative, as Salon inclusion equaled success, the Academies taught it;s students to create work that would meet Salon exhibition criteria: classically idealized scenes from history or aristocratic life. Rebellion against the constraints of the Academy and Salon created modern art and revolutionized the art world.
The Industrial Revolution, which began midway through the Enlightenment and continued through the height of the Paris Salon until the beginnings of the Impressionist movement, created demand for skilled workers trained not to create single objects, but instead to draft and design templates for objects to be produced en masse by machines and unskilled workers. Government and private trade schools emerged in the mid to late 1800s to train Industrial designers, architects and graphic designers. These schools returned art to the realm of skilled trade and included the many German Kunstgewerbeschules (vocational schools for high school aged students which produced Otto Dix, Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele), The Government School of Design in London, founded in 1837 (now the Royal College of Art) the Glasgow Government School of Design, founded in 1853. Perhaps the most impactful art education change to come out of the Industrial Revolution was that public elementary and high schools in the US and Europe began teaching rudimentary drawing and drafting skills in order to prepare industry with potential designers, resulting in the popularization of drawing and art amongst children of all classes. {8
The Arts and Crafts Movement, which began in the late 19th century in England, led to reforms in design thinking, design education and eventually to the influential Bauhaus school. The Movement was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and especially the perceived ugliness and disjointedly frilly Victorian ornamentation of many of the objects at Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851. Richard Redgrave, Supplementary Report on Design (1852) called for “more logic in the application of decoration,” and reform of what art historian Nickolaus Pevsner called, “ignorance of that basic need, in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface,” as well as the, “vulgarity of detail.” The movement’s philosophy, inspired by the ideas of historian Thomas Carlyle, art critic John Ruskin and designer William Morris held that the social strength and a nation was rooted in the quality of its architecture and design and in the nature and dignity of each individual’s daily work.
The Bauhaus in Germany, was the first institution to marry practical design and fine art. Created by combining the Weimar School of Applied Arts (one of the Kunstgewerbeschule design schools which began during the Industrial Revolution) and the neighboring Academy of Fine Arts, the Bauhaus was created to unify all of the arts removing distinctions between artists and artisans. Founder, Walter Gropius’s Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919) describes a of utopian craft guild free of social class distinctions with architecture at its core:
“Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of building, both as a totality and in terms of its parts so that their work may once more imbue itself with the architectonic spirit, which it lost in salon art….So let us then create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that attempted to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us together will, conceive, and create the new building of the future, which will unite everything in a single form—architecture and sculpture and painting—and which will one day rise heavenwards from the hands of a million craftsmen as a crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.”
Gropius developed a curriculum to this end in which students spent several months studying materials, color theory and form before entering three year intensive workshops, working closely with a craftsperson and a form teacher in the subjects of: metalworking, cabinet making, weaving, pottery, typography, architecture, interior design, photography and fine arts. The instructors were working artists and artisans, rather than professional teachers and included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Bauhaus students benefited from an approach that emphasized experimentation and problem solving.
Though short lived, it’s last iteration closed in 1933 due to political pressure from the Nazis, the Bauhaus was extraordinarily influential in all aspects of design. Its last director Mies van der Rohe’s motto, “Less is more,” sums up this influence and its streamlined, logical aesthetic and made its mark on modern art. Exiled professors, Joseph and Anni Albers took Bauhaus ideas to Yale University and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy started the New Bauhaus in Chicago, later named the Institute of Design. The school not only impacted the design world, but also abstract and minimalist fine art movements as well as pop art
As design education thrived, fine art education entered a period of some confusion. Academic training continued as a form of fine art education with some influences from the new art forms being established. In New York, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, a conservative academic institution that practiced idealized classic art, whose bullying President John Trumball was known for his conservative approach, splintered to form the National Academy of Design. 1n 1875 another small group, influenced by the European modernists, split off to found The Art Students League, perhaps the most influential school in American art history, it is “a collection of autonomous studios under the direction of individual creative authorities, without interference from administration…students are able to choose among a wide range of modes of expression.” Still the League “based its philosophy on the 19h century French atelier system” {6} and in 1896 William Merritt Chase led a small group of Students to found the Chase School, which later became Parsons School of Design, a more progressive and less traditional institution [7}.
The university's schools emphasized academic drawing techniques. There was much debate about the relevance of this academic training. The existence of the competing, non-intellectual trade schools and the fact that traditional liberal arts topics like history and philosophy were not taught to artists and there was little practical or philosophical reason for the way schools were structured was cause for concern.
Cries for reform from government funding and from students movements in universities in Britain led to the formation of the Coldstream Committee, led by William Coldstream, a prominent figurative realist who, before World War II started the Euston Road School.
Although seemingly a middle of the road figure, William Coldstream’s committee recommended a series of sweeping reforms to art education between 1960 and 1970, which were implemented to form what we now know of as a university or art school education. As Kate Aspirnell explains in her thesis, “The ‘Pasmore Report’?: Reflections on the 1960 ‘Coldstream Report’ and its Legacy,”
“The publication of the 'First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education' (1960), otherwise known as the first ‘Coldstream Report’, is a graspable moment of displacement in the British art world. It represents a shift between an educational system based on disciplined studies of techniques and crafts to one based on conceptual thinking and design. Its legacy is marked by trauma and confusion that deepened as the decade matured, spilling over into creative outbursts and political revolt. It has become a symbol of oppressive, narrowly defined rigor and prejudiced artistic values. As such, both the report and the painter and educator who leant it his name, William Coldstream, have been blamed and demonized.”
As Alexander Massouras explains in his thesis, “Patronage, professionalism and youth: the emerging artist and London’s Art institutions 1949–1988,”
“The practical consequence of this debate was a loosening of curriculum as art was allowed to find its own frontiers. In the Slade this can be seen by contrasting the diploma exam description in the 1955–56 Slade prospectus with that in the 1964–65 prospectus. The former required six drawings of the human figure from life, four drawings of a plant or still life from the object, and six other drawings. The latter required simply a portfolio of at least twenty drawings, and either ten paintings, at least two of which had to measure 36 x 28 inches or larger, or ten sculptures.”
Or as explained by Tom Holert in his Art Forum article, Art Schools,
“The reforms—belatedly enacting the recommendations of the Coldstream report, a 1960 government paper that called for “academic credibility” in fine art education—stipulated that 20 percent of any art school curriculum was now to consist of history and theory.”
Marshall McLuhan’s statement on “art is anything you can get away with” started with the Coldstream report because the focus of art college and ultimately art criticism and the art world as we know it became conceptual. The ideas behind a piece became more important than the craft or execution. Or as Tom Stoppard quipped, “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects, such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” Or, perhaps the most useful distinction is that made by Octavia Paz, “What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”
The ideal visual art education
There is, of course, no single, ideal art education, but for each art student an individual ideal exists based on their specific needs, goals and vision. Because the art world has no consensus for what qualifies as excellence, each student must have specific goals of their own, or deep, deliberate practice will not be possible. As a result, the ideal art education is one that is able to provide the significant individualization recommended by Sir Ken Robinson.
What Errickson called “talent hotbeds” cultures or schools that produced outsized talent in the visual arts, have always fit Errickson’s coaching model, pairing students in intense coaching relationships with teachers or mentors who give real time feedback and make sure that students are challenged enough to stretch their abilities but not so much that they are discouraged. Examples of these hotbeds include the Renaissance apprenticeship model, which gave us history's most revered masters. The Bauhaus, is an example not only of close mentoring relationships, but also of individualization in skill learning and of challenging students in their zone of proximal learning, had students choose a specialized courses of study, then work closely with one expert in craft and another expert in form, to learn by solving challenging problems in their chosen field. The impact of the tiny, short-lived, Bauhaus on every aspect of modern life from our iphones to our armchairs, attests to their success. The Art Students League, which allows students to choose amongst master-teacher-led independent workshops, refining their skills as needed, has given us countless exceptional artists, including, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstien. The Chouinard Art Institute, where Donald W. Graham, working one on one with professional disney animators, eager to excel in the new field of animation, used the skills Graham taught to create classics like Bambi and Snow White. Engaged mentorship works.
Interestingly, both programs of art study widely available to students today, art school/university art programs, or the emerging atelier movement, have problems with individualization. The university model has thrown up it’s hands at specialized technical training, providing some basics, but mostly focusing on the critical discourse, assuming that students will learn what they need to know to execute their ideas.. The growing atelier movement takes pride in following the academy’s training methods, almost religiously. Both the university and the atelier, however, do not individualize. Students at small ateliers may get to know their teachers well, and in choosing an atelier, they have decided on a specialized course of study, but they will nonetheless spend hours drawing casts and rather then working towards their own vision, they will be attempting to master the classical ideal. Students at universities and many art schools may come up with interesting and deep concepts, but Tom Stoppards famous quote rings true: “Skill without imagination is craftsmmanship, and gives us many useful objects such a wickerwork picnic baskets, Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
There is evidence that individualization, close mentoring relationships, and work that is just beyond a student’s skill level is a recipe for exceptional art education.
has acted as new generations often do, rejected the wisdom of the current system and gone all in on nostalgia, returning to a model that’s flaws created legitimate problems in the past. NOT FINISHED
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