Back to school

1. "Drawing is absolutely quintessential to knowing the self."   Richard Tuttle
2. "After Beuys left the Dusseldorf Academy in 1951, he commenced a period of isolation that resulted in one of the most remarkable outpourings of drawing in this century.  Beuys spent close to a decade elaborating a personal idiom, doing so almost entirely in the medium of drawing…Working in solitude in Dusseldorf, Beuys drew prodigiously: thousands of works on paper in oil, watercolor, and ink and pencil record the themes and ideas he was investigating.  The intensity with which Beuys worked during these years finds few equivalents in the art of his predecessors.  The analogies are to periods of crisis…"
Excerpt from essay Joseph Beuys: Life Drawing by Ann Temkin
3. "In 1966 Guston had an exhibition of his recent paintings and drawings at The Jewish Museum in New York.  At about the same time he stopped painting, and for the next two years concentrated on drawing.  He felt exhausted, drained of the creative energies that had sustained him through the early sixties paintings and the haunting, dark gouaches of 1963-1964.  Now he needed time for renewal.  But it was to be a period of anxiety, both personal and artistic: two years of struggle.
Within that two-year span he executed hundreds of drawings—“pure” drawings as he called them, as well as images of objects—in brush and ink or in charcoal.  Again feeling encumbered by the accumulated baggage of his experience, he turned once more to drawing, trying to reinvent the way to 'locate the mark.'"
Excerpt from essay The Drawings of Philip Guston by Magdalena Dabrowski
4. “I wrote the poems individually and then, after about a year, I found I wanted a bigger form, and then I was writing prose.  It expanded into this huge mongrel thing and I wondered if I might be going crazy when I was writing it.  Later I went back and looked at it.  I knew I had to find some kind of shape and form for it.  That was probably the most difficult thing I had to learn—how to shape the material—place three hundred pieces into an organic structure that seemed natural, and still juxtapose a gentle scene with something violent.  I think that was when I became interested in how a collage works.”
-Michael Ondaatje describing the genesis of his novel, Billy the Kid to interviewer Tom Barbash in the August 2007 issue of The Believer.

Today is my first day of teaching in about 8 months;  I cannot believe it really!  So today is a day of syllabus reading (hence the quotes, all from the tops of my syllabi), answering questions, talking about materials and getting them thinking about drawing (and some collage as well of course).  I teach three classes today--two beginning drawing classes and one intermediate drawing class called Variable Topics in Drawing.
I'm ready to be back--a bit calmer I think, more measured.  I do hope I can keep my equilibrium as the days pass.
(More studio pics soon--and this semester...more classroom pics I've determined!)