The season of the art workshop

Now comes the season of art workshops sprouting all over for kids of all ages to enroll into. It is a welcome sign that interest in art is increasing for our city. And yet, it is always good to be forewarned that the pragmatic need for summer workshops in general is the need of parents to keep their kids preoccupied in the long days of summer. The kids may not have any interest at all in knowing much about art. The challenge is to put this interest into students anyway.

But we do know that the highest priority for teachers of art workshops is always how to make the enrollees enjoy the workshop itself. Students learning anything new from the course at best deserves only second priority. Intensive workshops are good only for those who are ready. First-timers certainly need special attention. The workshop might only dampen their interest in art for the rest of their lives.

Part of the danger of this stems from a mind-set which places too much stress on the concept of in-born talent. There is a mistaken notion circulating about that only “talented” people can do art. In fact, research has shown that the capacity to appreciate and do art is an inherent human capacity. Parents who want to know more about their children’s innate propensity for art would do well to find and read the book “Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain” by Dr. Elizabeth Edwards.

This book reveals much about art and the the human capacity for it. It includes exercises for developing the drawing ability in people of all ages. But its best quality is in providing a practical theory basis for teaching art to one’s self as well as to others. It is a popular reference for most of the art workshops now in the city.

The idea of self-teaching drawing is a good focal point to start from. Teachers of art workshops know that it is difficult to learn how to draw effectively within the time horizon of the workshop itself. Rather than teach students everything about drawing, art teachers might do better by orienting their teaching programs to providing students the ability to teach themselves how to draw over a longer time horizon than is covered by the workshop itself. Self-teaching exercises are therefore of great importance.

Then there is the idea of looking at drawing as a method of processing and communicating information rather than as esoteric “art.” The name art workshop in this sense is a misnomer since it limits the applicability of drawing into a narrow field both of doing and of thinking. While drawing is certainly important in making art, drawing has a wider application. And its wider application covers all disciplines of thinking including even the sciences. It has to do with creative thinking and why it is different from intelligence.

Intelligence searches for the single solution to a particular problem and stops as soon as the solution is found. Creative thinking is applied to the search for as many possible solutions to a particular problem, the greater the number of possible solutions within the shortest possible time the better. The appreciation of creativity and its applications to a wider field of human enterprise is now ever increasing. Nowadays, art workshops might consider themselves better named as creativity workshops.

But even so, the drawing ability is still the pivotal craft-field to develop creativity in people especially when they are young. Inside the drawing craft we learn to appreciate the duality of structured and non-structured thinking and how these apply to ordinary problem-solving activities and situations. The idea is to teach ourselves how drawing is more a thinking process rather than a simple act of copying into paper what is seen with the eyes. Every drawing is a record of human thought. It is creativity applied to practical problem solving. Seen this way, drawing seems more fun. It seems less the domain of some esoteric and mysterious talent. It seems almost as if, everyone ought to know how to draw.

That everyone ought to know how to draw is of course the target lesson of every summer art workshop. That every student learns this is really the true measure of every summer art workshop’s success.

*This writer and his daughter Linya are offering a special creative drawing workshop for young people ages 9 to 15 at the Sacred Heart-Ateneo de Cebu campus starting today April 10. Those interested to know more should call the school for inquiries.