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David Shariatamadri talks to George Negroponte and Kate Mc Farlane in an article, Drawing Lessons, Contemporary 21, Issue 83

`Drawing comes first. Before an artist picks up a paintbrush or begins to model in clay, to plan an installation or a performance, there is a drawing, a sketch, a draught. This is hardly a coincidence - there is an immediacy to drawing that narrows down the gulf between thought and expression, allowing ideas to spill onto the page’

The Studio Arts Drawing Programme aims to develop, in each student, a critically understood balance between the formal, experimental and conceptual dynamics of the drawing discipline.

The training privileges the intimacy of direct observation as a means of training the eye and the gaining of formal skills. This is balanced by teaching methodologies which accent the expressionistic, feeling, experimental and playfulness critical to creative engagement on all levels, in all media.

The drawing programme is divided into three sections. The first section concentrates on formal investigations of objects, figures, architecture and landscape.

In the second section, the focus lies on each student developing an individual approach to drawing and includes the use of new and experimental approaches to media and concept.

The third approach requires a rigorous engagement with research in the form of visual journals, the documentation of all observations, source material and process, the recording and developing of ideas and the repository of personal writings that that form the nexus of the development of an individual artistic persona.