Pencil: Effective tool for an artistic initiation
opened another world for me. It was my artistic initiation.
For the next seven or eight years I kept doing pencil drawings (I also painted watercolors and oils, but the blacks and grays never lost their charm for me) until heavy schoolwork prevented me from doing so.
Today, more clearly than with any painting I have ever done, I remember the black shine extending from the outer side of my little finger to the side of my palm. It was a shine resulting from hours of drawing, during which I would occasionally rub the paper with the side of my pencil-holding hand, to create the interplay between light and shadow. It was the painting process that matters above all else, a process that injected joy into my little heart.
So a few years ago I was flabbergasted on reading that a few renowned Chinese artists had condemned the strict pencil sketch training undergone by almost all children — usually between age 12 and 18 — in China who hope to pursue a higher art education.
Criticism
The most vociferous among them is Chen Danqing, famous in equal parts for being an artist and an art critic. In 2004, in a protest against what he called “an enrollment system that has kept our most talented students at the doorstep”, the Chinese American resigned as a professor at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, one of China’s top art education institutions.
On another occasion he commented that “another child has been killed”, on being told by the boy’s parents that their child “experienced self-doubt due to a lack of progress at his pencil sketch class”.
How is it that an art form that so inspires me is under attack by so many art professionals, some of whose works I have long admired?
I took my questions to my art educator interviewees, including Wang and others. And the answer is: it was not pencil sketch that has squeezed the genius out of many artistically minded children, but the way pencil sketch is viewed by China’s art establishment today, as the basis of a formal art education.
Pencil sketch education as we know it today was born in 18th cen- tury France before being exported to Russia and then to China, Chen says. Although there have been many masters throughout history — da Vinci and Rubens are but two of them — who left us wonderfully drawn pencil sketches, there have been just as many who never tried the art form.
Today students applying for art college entrance in China must sit pencil sketch tests. In months and often years leading to the tests, aspiring art students force themselves through grueling training at one of the numerous “coaching centers” across the country.
There they keep drawing, sometimes 10 or more hours a day. And usually they draw according to strict guidance by the teachers — rules that enable their works to take on the look of one by an “art professional” in the shortest possible time.
Viewed singularly, almost every one of these works appears refined and sophisticated. Put together, they resemble one another in a star- tling — and stupefying — way. It seems that the students are too preoccupied with painting the light as cast on the plaster geometric solids in front of them to allow any light to enter their own minds.
Art education
Today many places in Beijing that provide children’s art education start with colors. And colors come in a great variety of forms, be it pastel, print or paper cutting. Pencil sketch classes are open to students when they reach 11 or 12.
“We introduce them to pencil sketch at that point since grown-up children usually have higher expectation for their works,” says Wang Lijuan, founder of Lijuan Experimental Art Education Institution. “And pencil sketching can be an effective tool in studying an object.”
Almost needless to say, many of history’s master painters used pencil study to record and hone their ideas before they got down to work on the walls and ceilings of those grand cathedrals. Yet very often the studies themselves are masterpieces in their own right, their emphasis just as important as what is omitted.
The German artist Gerhard Richter once said: “Art is the highest form of hope.” When I was little I used to paint for so long that my limbs went numb and my grandmother had to lift me up from the floor. Today, every time I look back at those concentrated hours, my heart is filled with gratitude.
Then, there were all those school holidays spent drawing in the classrooms at the “cultural palace”. Many things can never be erased by the rubber of time, like the deep shadow cast by light on an apple, or the folds of velvet drapes that served as the background. We were translating colors into black and white and everything in between. It’s poetic.
These days I take my 4-year-old daughter to an art museum or gallery in Beijing once in a while. My hope is that art will extend its roots into her heart’s fertile soil, just as a giant banyan tree does in the ground around it.
And while we are there, I always linger a little longer in front of an inspiringly executed pencil study or charcoal painting, if there happens to be one.
They remind me of the days when easel was a sacred word for me, one that connected me with the blissful neverland of an artist. Every time I looked up from my own work, from where I stood in the classroom, I saw many easels all around me. Carrying the works of other child students, they formed a forest.
Just one more time I long to be lost in that forest.