Every now and then we deviate from our normal lessons in my art classes just to see if the kids are actually having any sort of muscle memory as far as drawing is concerned. We end up doing a lot of landscapes in this class because it is what I consider to be the easiest to practice since there are so many buildings and fields etc to draw in the world.
The other day we got small bits of paper out and I told everyone to grab their pens and we were going to attempt to recreate a landscape picture that I turned on the screen for just a few minutes and I wanted them to quickly draw what they saw (after I turned the screen off) on their piece of paper.
As is always the case in the class this was not a competition and I wasn't at all concerned about if anyone made any mistakes. I encourage mistakes because I believe that this is what makes everyone unique in their artwork.
Here was one of the results.
I feel as though the fact that they were only given a few minutes to do the best representation of a random and not famous house in the countryside that this student shows a lot of promise. Like I said I only put the picture on the overhead screen for a few minutes and this was drawn completely from memory.
I think this is important because some of the most famous pieces of art that the world has ever seen were drawn from memory such as The Starry Night where it is rumored that it was painted from the memory of Vincent Van Gogh of the view he had from an asylum window.
Now I am not suggesting that my students lose their minds and get put in an insane asylum but perhaps that has something to do with artistic talent. It seems a lot of the famous painters of the past several hundred years were a bit "off" and well, I would imagine that there have been works written about how being a bit nuts helps the artistic side of things.
I'm not going to encourage that in my classes though because I would prefer that my students NOT cut their ears off.
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