The Heart of Drawing: Stories and Images from Around the World
About this ebook
Drawing is described as an act of cognition that can help you develop eye-brain-hand coordination, conceptualize and analyze ideas, think creatively, and express yourself and communicate with others. It’s about Drawing to Learn, which is the main focus of the book. The words and images you see express a journey, and the artists are exploring their internal and external realities with shape, line and value. The book promotes gestural or expressive drawing, not necessarily a perfect finished work. Because of this, many of the drawings show restated lines, drawn over erasures and other tentative marks and “draw overs” showing the process of creation. They are not all flawless finished pieces.
Though from many countries and with various backgrounds, most of the artists say they began drawing at an early age. And most had someone in their lives encouraging them to create. What most have in common is their gestural and exploratory approach to drawing. Some describe entering a meditative state while drawing when nothing matters except putting marks on a surface. Such drawing is sometimes a felt bodily experience more than an intellectual one. For example, one artist notes "I keep a journal of my thoughts, a kind of reservoir for fleeting feelings and impressions where, like a primordial soup, ideas congeal and give birth to strange creatures that crawl onto the shore, discover wings, and take flight."
What’s best about The Heart of Drawing is the drawings themselves. How these artists create is as diverse as humanity itself and the whole collection will give aspiring artists ideas for their own creative efforts.
About the author
Michael Strauss was a professor of chemistry at the University of Vermont (UVM) from 1968 to 2003. His academic life focused on teaching chemistry and on research in physical-organic and medicinal chemistry. Since 2003 he has been teaching drawing for the Honors College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and Continuing Education at UVM. He has also been involved with outreach efforts in grade schools and high schools around Vermont, focused on science education. In all of his classes, both art and science, the iterative process of learning how to see, draw, and revise was paramount. There was considerable overlap between his university teaching and his outreach efforts in community schools. He had, along with colleagues in the College of Education at UVM, a National Science Foundation grant from the Teacher Enhancement Program to help train teachers in both active learning pedagogy, and content in chemistry, physics and geology. And for about a decade, he was also heavily involved with the Writing-to-Learn and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movements, traveling around the country giving workshops and meeting with educators in both elementary schools and colleges to talk about science education.
