‘Lost art’ lamented as drawing goes belly up

• Sharon Verghis
• The Australian
• 12:00AM November 8, 2014
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• Sharon Verghis

  

  @SVerghis

  

Ollis, a 2012 Dobell prize finalist, says the demise of drawing, once regarded as the foundation of all art-making, is “partly due to art schools pushing for new technologies and new directions, and thinking that drawing belongs in the last century’’.

“I think drawing in art schools is going through a poor time. A lot of people said, ‘out with the old, in with the new’, but they don’t know what to replace it with. They say, ‘here’s all this wonderful technology to play with’, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better artist. I do think there is a kind of ­crisis in art schools at the moment, a dilemma as to what art schools are now providing. You have a lot of people wondering, ‘what now?’.

“Drawing has been going downhill partly because I don’t think curators really have a particular empathy with drawing, and partly because it’s never been pursued or pushed in art schools or curating courses, so it’s really been marginalised.

“It’s much more sexy to work with new technologies than to draw something, which is a bloody hard thing to do.”

Ollis’s views are shared by many leading figures in the art scene. The likes of Archibald prize-winners Cherry Hood and Wendy Sharpe, former Dobell prize-winner Kevin Connor and The Australian’s art critic Christopher Allen rue the rise of a generation of aspiring artists without even basic knowledge of perspective or tone — essential skills to art-making, be it painting or film or digital art, in their view. The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak calls drawing a “bit of a lost art”.

Critics lay the blame on a ­theory-heavy curriculum at the nation’s leading art schools, and an arts culture which, for a time, regarded drawing, according to Allen, as “incomprehensibly old-fashioned”. Ollis says: “I remember talking to a friend in London who is an art school lecturer about life drawing, and she said, “Oh, do you still do that Victorian peepshow stuff?’.’’

Ollis believes the lack of an old-fashioned studio culture at art schools is a source of the problem. He says “it seems COFA (the College of Fine Arts, now known as UNSW Art and Design) has somewhat lost its way in that ­regard, and Sydney College of the Arts lost its way years ago”, but both reject these charges. Sydney College of the Arts says “drawing is alive and well” at the school.

Ollis and many others would like to see a return to foundation skills being taught as core, rather than elective, subjects. “I don’t think you have to spend all day in a life-drawing studio or learning still life or urban landscapes but I think you need to keep these things alive and well,” he says.