Enroll in John Ruskin’s Class

(Via: Mark A Jones)

Between 1856 and 1860, no form of art was more important to the advancement of society than drawing. Or so John Ruskin touted.

“The art of drawing is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing…and should be taught to every child just as writing is.”

(Source: The True and Beautiful) 

A convicted Ruskin authored two books, The Elements of Drawing (1857) and The Elements of Perspective (1859), while also delivering a series of lectures at the Working Men’s College in London where he instructed students in shading, perspective, proportion, composition and so on.

But why drawing?

While it is easy to understand the value of the arts to the progression of culture, it is less obvious why Ruskin attached such expansive influence to something so specific as the dance of a #2 on bleached wood pulp.

To understand, one must first know his admiration for drawing was not focused on talent or the final product – even Ruskin downplayed his own sketches as unoriginal and listless. Instead, he saw value in the action. The practice of drawing, he believed, evolves the individual from a “looker” to a “seer.”

He spoke of this difference to his students:

“Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane…The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines and that it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause [my bold] of beauty, and penetrates the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkling down among the gleaming leaves overhead, ‘til the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come to the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.”

(Source: The Art of Travel)

Ruskin’s lectures and books did not teach people to draw. Only to see. Drawing was merely the mechanism because he believed the practice of recreating what lies before one’s eyes extends to the individual a conscious understanding of why a psychological bond exists between a person and an object, activity or setting.

That said, Ruskin would expect account planners – whose duty, like artists, is to impart vital, emotionally-charged truths that inspire others – to be among the most frequent and ardent practitioners of art…

…Yet there is a self-satisfaction among this painfully academic and desperately bright discipline to not recreate life, but to look at it.

Research tactics of choice – article grazing, online surveys, focus groups, Flickr scanning, blog scanning, Simmons cross tabs, cluster analysis, MRI and secondary research reports – often fill out the list of plannerly due diligence. Despite their varied names, each hits the same note. Each presents the world in a reductive, overly simplified manner forcing the planner to understand the world as a Looker does: abbreviated and blunt. Therefore, what passes as vital truths in this circle are rarely more than, at best, clichéd and, at worst, esoteric interpretations of data that lack much in the way of sooth and poignancy.

This is why, after a presentation of pie charts, indices, bar graphs, opened-ended response slides, pyramids and words like “human” and “approachable,” Ruskin would realize the planner has learned skills in data compilation but little in the way of finding and understanding the truths uplifting objects, organizations, people and activities. To impart a lesson, he would proceed, without word, to each planner’s desk and, in one disappointment–charged swipe, shovel the laptop, research reports, Simmons cross tabs and stacks of articles into the trash bin. In its place, he’d lay a Strathmore sketchpad and a #2.

“Nuance is the midwife of understanding,” he might bellow. “If you want to find nuance, you have to sit in front it and recreate it. Only then will you see subdivided sunshine sprinkling down among the gleaming leaves, the jeweled brightness of the emerald moss and variegated lichens mingled into a single garment of beauty. Only then will you have something unique and of emotional significance to share with and inspire people. At that point, and only that point, will you understand your subject.”

While Ruskin devoted many of his words to drawing, his fondness for the recreation of life extended to all art forms. Today, Ruskin would nod approvingly of a planner who, rather than scanning Flickr, shoots twelve hours of video on a subculture and spends twenty four editing it into a short movie. He would encourage a planner who, rather than just reading research reports about their client, visits their offices and/or retail outlets for the sole purpose of writing a poem, short story or script about them. He would appreciate a planner who, rather than launching a survey asking people to remember and report their purchase experience, walks through the purchase process conducting a photographic study of it.

In each case, Ruskin would remind the planner that it does not matter whether or not their final pieces prove to be well made or even seen by others. What matters is the experience of creating them. “Art is a remarkable process for accruing knowledge – about the physical, the constitutional, the psychological, the contextual and the relational,” he might share, “because it forces you to deconstruct and consider your subject in ways surveys, focus groups and Simmons never could.”

If we take his teachings to heart, we may no longer look at art as the abstract paintings decorating The MoMA or the obtuse mixed media confusing us in The New Museum, but see art for what it truly is: the process of pinning down from whence emotion arises.

And, in the end, we may just become better account planners.

(PDF)