In pre-historic times, when I was a young art student in England, my art teacher taught the basics: drawing, perspective, lettering, illustration, live models, and on-location painting (now called by the fancy name "plein air") . One of the lessons he taught us has lived down the years with me, and that was to always carry a small sketchbook and pencil. He encouraged us to keep drawing even if our subjects moved by the minute. He felt the act of rapid sketching sharpened the mind and forced you to look for basic shapes.
I no longer carry a sketchbook everywhere and have substituted a digital camera instead. Not quite the same thing but being constantly alert to potential subject matter concentrates the mind wonderfully. The sketching habit was brought home to me a couple of years ago on a flight to Calgary, Alberta. A man sitting next to me in the bulk-head area produced an iPod and a sketching pad. Nestled in his earphones and comfortably oblivious to all around him, he proceeded to sketch the area in front of him. During the refreshment break I struck up a conversation and he showed me his book. It was filled with sketches of his trip to northern Ontario. He was a retired artist who was just "keeping his hand in". I told him of my former art teacher and his advice to keep sketching, and we passed the rest of the flight reminiscing about the "good old days" before computer graphics and other technological wizardry.
I'd like to claim he motivated me to start sketching again, but alas, I couldn't seem to be able to re-capture the past. I forgot all about my fellow traveller until I read a piece in the Canadian newspaper "The Globe & Mail", May 27, 2006 p.M3. Called "A Moving Picture Show", the piece described how a man transformed his habit of sketching people on the (Toronto) subway into a powerful and popular teaching tool. Bobby Chiu is a teacher at Sheridan College, a well respected college graduating many successful computer graphic artists, and his subway classes have their own fascinating website: Bobby Chiu's Subway Sketch Club. I had come full circle in my experiences with rapid sketching. Everything old is new again.
It appears that even in this age of high-powered computer graphics the basics of old-fashioned art training are still in vogue. Many of Chiu's students shuttle back and forth on the subway with him in a literally mobile art school classroom. My days of quick sketching were restricted to cafes, libraries and train stations, and the natural reticence of the British public in those far-off days precluded in-your-face sketching. Ours was almost furtive, and I suppose it made us sketch faster.
Toronto is such a multicultural city that sketching on the subway generates a fascinating mixture of people from all over the world, with all the colourful clothing that goes with each culture. Chiu's classes and results became quite famous. The Globe & Mail's article points out that the moderators of CGTalk, a computer graphics forum with 200,000 members worldwide, approached him to ask him if they could promote his group on their site. Not long after, Subway Sketch Groups sprang up in cities all over the world.
I thought again of those far off days when my old art teacher urged us to carry a sketch-pad, and how he would have loved the results from Chiu's students. It's somehow comforting to know that in the age of sophisticated computers and Photoshop, students still recognize the need to be able to visualize and draw from real life; that their own computer graphics creations are much better coming from a good basic art background.
John Fisher