Despite the popularity of radical theoretical perspectives and the exalted status of digital technology, there are, fortunately, some among us who still  look at these issues from a very different perspective. Ellen Dissanayake, in Homo Asetheticus, presents an intriguing Darwinist perspective on aesthetics that takes serious issue with the postmodernism position that denies the naturally aesthetic part of human nature that has evolved to require beauty and meaning.

“Making special is a fundamental human proclivity or need.  Aesthetics is not something added to us-- learned or acquired like speaking a second language or riding a horse --- but in large measure is the way we are.”

"To make something special generally implies taking care and doing one's best so as to produce a result that is -- to a greater or lesser extent, ---- accessible, striking, resonant, and satisfying to those who take time to appreciate it.  This is what we mean when we say that via art, experience is heightened, elevated, made more memorable and significant."

In explaining the misguided direction of much contemporary art production she goes on to say;

“Much of art today is like the display of a captive lone peacock vainly performed for human spectators, or the following by baby geese of a bicycle wheel instead of their mother. When an animal is removed from its natural milieu and deprived of the cues and circumstances to which it is designed by nature to respond it will behave as best it can but probably in errant ways or reference to aberrant cues and circumstances.”

If Dissanayake is correct in identifying essential aesthetic needs, and I believe she is, then it is critical that we waste no time in restoring a sense of proportion to the intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual character of art making and art education. I encourage this in the understanding that longstanding culture tradition, far from being the root of evil, is that which gives meaning to our lives. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels),

“Civilization transcends barbarism. Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend their biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.”

He goes on to say,

“Art, in its highest expression, explains our existence to us, both particularities of the artist’s own time and the universals of all human history. It transcends transience and therefore reconciles us to the most fundamental condition of our existence. In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.”

Sometimes the answers to tomorrow’s questions can be found in the past. This is certainly true in art training. I am confident that there is no better course of study for helping to restore the aforementioned sense of proportion than that of perceptual drawing/figure drawing. Perceptual drawing demands active, perceptive sight. It requires both the artist and the viewer to look deliberately, look intensely, seek meaning in experience, and pursue a state of complete awareness of what it is that you are seeing. Figure drawing is unique in its clarity of focus and in its ability to address not only the expressive potential of the drawing process itself, but also to foster understanding of perception, the means of translating those perceptions, one’s own personality, the relationship of the mind and body, and, most importantly, an understanding of one’s environment. And as Walt Whitman wrote in I Sing the Body Electric, "If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred." 

The importance of figure drawing relies directly on its narrow focus on the human body. Ernst Gombrich, in Art and Illusion, reminds us that “limitation is not a weakness but rather a source of strenght for art.” Figure drawing has also played an exalted role in Western civilization. Quoting Gombrich again,

“The hallmark of the post-medieval artist has been constant alertness. Its symptom is the sketch, or rather the many sketches which proceeds the finished work and, for all the skill of hand and eye that marks the master, a constant readiness to learn, to make and match and remake till the portrayal ceases to be a secondhand formula and reflects the unique and unrepeatable experience the artist wishes to seize and hold. It is this constant search, this sacred discontent, which constitutes the leaven of the Western mind since the Renaissance and pervades our art no less than our science.”

Well, I can see by my word count that it is time for this voice to stop crying in the wilderness but before I go let me make one last plea for us to stop marginalizing, disputing, and undermining the essential core of our humanity and rededicate ourselves to making our lives more significant through the life affirming traditions among which is the study and artistic mastery of the human figure.