This course teaches the fundamentals of drawing from perception. Students work large and small, with graphite, ink, and charcoal. Students draw still lives, interiors, landscapes, and figures. We start with extremely simple exercises, with a fast and logical progression to much more complex and difficult enterprisesIn lower level courses at Hendrix I emphasize learning to represent what the eye sees. This approach leads to thinking of the picture plane as a locus of interlocking flat shapes or marks. Ultimately, this is all the picture plane is capable of. It is fundamentally impossible to create space and weight on a flat surface. However the will to create believable depth, open up the illusion of air in the picture plane, and represent things that seem to have physical weight is a desire that has gripped Western Art since the Greeks. Following this tradition, we attempt the impossible in this course - the creation of space. Our starting point is drawing the figure from life with a series of boxes. This enables students to work from life perceptually and conceptually at the same time. The artist looks at the figure and conceptualizes it. As the class progresses students begin to draw the sculptural surface of things through cross contour lines. This adds solidity and weight to their drawings. They then begin to "box air" by inventing geometric solids that occupy "empty" space. This is like drawing the styrofoam packing to ship an elaborate object, without drawing the actual object itself. Students have then drawn negative space in three dimensions. As the course progresses further the "tools" of artistic artifice (line weight change, size change, overlap, etc.) are used to create drawings that have the illusion of space and weight.

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