Drawing as a Way of Knowing – A&S 095

A&S 095;   Tuesday: 04:00 PM – 08:00 PM, ANGELL B203
Professor Michael Strauss
531  Cook

Ph: 865 2329 (home)
Ph: 656 2594 (secretary in Chemistry)
email: Michael.Strauss@uvm.edu
web:  http://www.mjstrauss.com
cell (urgent only) 802 522 9978

“There is something that’s very intense about the experience of sitting down and having to look at something in the way that you do in order to make a drawing or a painting of it.  By the time you’ve done that, you feel that you’ve really understood what you were looking at…. and somehow it becomes a method of possessing the experience in a unique way.“

- Robert Bechtle -

Drawing is visual reasoning–it involves decisions about mark making, evaluating and reevaluating these marks, and ultimately, taking action to create in a particular way. The images made on paper during drawing form a partial record of  thinking.  Preliminary sketches – early ideas – are easily done with a pencil on paper.  In this way, they are easily revised and redone. This is one of the quickest and most direct means of creating visual representations of ideas. Free hand drawing and redrawing allow multiple interpretations and reinterpretations, and thus a constant production of alternatives. The process may be exploratory, expressive, or inspir-ational. It can scrutinize, map, record, exemplify, explain, symbolize or objectify.  It is a way of discovering and ultimately, a powerful and important way of knowing.

Drawing is a discipline in its own right, but it is also foundational for all the visual arts and sciences.  It is seen by some as the art form closest to pure thought.  At its best it is very precise in its meaning, and yet it is infinitely discursive.  It is one of the most ancient human traditions, but is in a state of continual renewal in both technique and content, from ancient cave drawings of animals to CHEM3D Pro images of molecular structures .

In this course you will be creating images in the process of learning how to draw, and you will be writing about this process and recording in language what you have experienced.   You will learn to draw better, and come to understand drawing as a way of knowing about a subject.

Drawing as a Way of Knowing

As students, you know that images help you better understand concepts.   Lectures, web sites and textbooks are filled with them.  Of equal importance however, but often ignored, are your own formative, rough drawn images and diagrams, expressing your understanding of content in biology, botany, chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc..  In these drawings, ideas often only become fully “real”  in your mind when you do them in your own hand.  This allows more complete comprehension, and extended revision and exploratory alternatives are possible.  Examples of the importance of drawing to learn  in this way are documented in thousands of notebooks, logs, and  journals kept by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, musicians and artists who create, discover and explore using drawing.  In this class we will, in part, consider informal drawing as a tool for learning across the disciplines.

Concurrent with our artistic work we may read and discuss a few essays from a variety of sources other than our class text.

During the semester you will also write one 10 page paper (5 pages of text and 5 of drawings.)  You will also give an oral presentation of this paper (see below.)

Xerox copies of paper drafts (there will be at least two drafts, and possibly more, of your paper) will be peer reviewed (i.e., you will be reading each other’s papers) and eventually be reviewed by me.  Final copies of artwork/images to accompany the text will also be submitted for review prior to incorporation into your paper.   Some may choose to incorporate images into the text of the essays rather than have separate sections for text and images.

As noted above, your final papers (only) should be about five pages in length (of text), single spaced, with margins as will be noted in class.  An additional five pages should be devoted to art/images.  The latter may be inserted into the text if you wish (vide supra.)  All drafts prior to the final manuscript should be double spaced.  This makes reviewing and corrections easier.  The font should be Times No. 14,  justified on the left (as in this syllabus) with centered titles. If you have any references, they should be in parenthesis and on line like this: (1), and tabulated numerically at the end of the paper without parentheses under the title “References.” A standard format will be discussed during class time so the papers are uniform in appearance.

The formal oral presentation of your paper should elaborate the text and the visual images of your artistic work.   Under no circumstances should you read your paper in front of the class.  Your images may be presented via overhead projection, slides, computer projection via the ELMO, Power Point,  or in any other appropriate way.  They should be visible to the whole class.  In your talk you should verbally express the meaning of each image and the process you went through to create it.

Grades (approximate distribution):

* ATTENDANCE and knowledgeable participation in class:    20%

* DRAWING PORTFOLIO (SHOWING PROGRESS)           40%

* ORAL PRESENTATION                                                10%

* PAPER AND IMAGES IN PAPER                                     30%

Class attendance is absolutely critical and will be a significant part of your grade. We meet only once per week (only about 14 times during the semester), and missing class is detrimental to the whole group because we will be working together on many aspects of the course. It is also detrimental to the individual student.  Missing one class is equivalent to missing a full week of the course.   Missing two classes is equivalent to missing a half month of the course.   Missing more than two classes (with an approved excuse) will result in a grade of incomplete.   Without an excuse you will fail the course.  Each of our four hour classes will be very busy.  Come prepared and be on time.  Late comers will be duly noted.

Listed below are the materials you must purchase for this course (have the items shown in red with you at our first class if possible, but at our second class for sure.)   There may be an additional $20 worth of materials needed in addition to those listed.

Text: Bert Dodson’s “Keys to Drawing”  (in the bookstore downstairs at the Davis Center)

8”x 11” or 9″ x 11″ journal for small sketches, notes, journal entries, free writes,  and some homework.   Get one that has rings and opens flat for easy xeroxing.   It may contain lined paper if you prefer it.  The 9″ x 11″ size is best.  As noted above, please bring this, and the larger sketchbook noted below to our first class.

14”x 17” sketchbook for drawings.  This book will be in stock in the bookstore, (Davis Center.)  The brand name is called “Windpower.”  When you get your textbook, you will see a note appended to the course card description,  describing this sketchbook.  It will be kept upstairs in the supply section of the bookstore behind the counter.   It is very important that you get this particular sketchbook as it fits the easel/chair setup we have in the classroom.   It has rings and opens flat so it can be placed on an easel and on the blackboard tray for class critiques of your drawing.   Please purchase this Windpower, 14″ by 17″ sketchbook and avoid other odd sizes.

ONE 18 x 24” tablet of newsprint (very inexpensive)

Three ring binder for handouts and articles provided in class.

Drawing materials: (bring the ones in red to our first class.)

pencil set with pencils of various hardness

kneaded erasers (gray)

ink pens with water soluble black ink  (Tombo pens sold at Bouteliers downtown and also at the UVM bookstore)

charcoal sticks (vine and square).  Get “soft” and “medium”, not “hard”

charcoal blenders

box of tissues

masking tape, scotch tape

drawing board, ca. 18 x 25” with clips.

portable pencil sharpeners (get the kind that collect the shavings)

ruler

a carry portfolio large enough to hold your 18 x 24” tablet and drawing board, as well as your other materials.  (You can make one out of cardboard and duct tape if you wish, but relatively inexpensive ones are available in the bookstore.)

a small table easel (these cost about $10.00 online or downtown or at Artist’s Mediums in Williston.)   See me if you have questions about the easel.  You may be able to get by without one, but I recommend you have one for your work outside of class.  I may have enough to loan you one for the semester.  See me.

Main Activities, Projects and Goals for each student (i.e., items you will be working on each week in class and at home):

Readings from text and handouts  (homework)

Paper preparation (in class and at home)

Homework drawing exercises (Dodson)

In class drawing exercises

In class critiques of in class drawing exercises

In class critiques of homework drawing exercises

Your Class Presentation (towards the end of the course)

TIME IN CLASS:

During class time we will mainly be involved with four activities:

1) Informal presentations and discussions about techniques and methods.

2) Class critiques of your homework – you will put your homework drawings up and we will all look at these and comment upon them.  This will often, but not always, happen near the beginning of each class.

3) Drawing exercises ( you will draw about 3 hours during each class.)

4) Class critiques of your in class drawing work, usually at the end of class if there is time.

You should plan on a minimum of 9 hours of drawing and writing work outside of class per week.  THE MORE DRAWING YOU DO, THE BETTER YOU WILL DO IN A&S 95

Some topics we may be discussing and working on in class (not necessarily in the order listed):

Visualization in education
Drawing to Learn
Materials used in drawing
Learning to see
Learning about graphite
Learning about charcoal
Learning about inks
Perspective, an Introduction (one point and two point)
Mechanical Aids to Perception
Vertical and horizontal alignments
Measurement
What you “know” and what you see
Movement of the eye and the hand.
Eye-hand coordination
Gesture
The contour line
The variety of line
Lost and found edges
Value
Defining form with light
Chiaroscuro
Volume
Perspective, part II.  picture plane, ground line, horizon line, vanishing point, 3-point Aerial perspective
Figure drawing
Composition

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU ADD YOURSELF TO THE CLASS LIST SERVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.   DIRECTIONS FOR DOING THIS WILL BE HANDED OUT ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS. I OFTEN COMMUNICATE TO THE CLASS VIA THE LIST SERVE, SO IF YOU ARE NOT ON IT, YOU WILL NOT
BE ABLE TO PARTICIPATE APPROPRIATELY IN THIS CLASS.

Approximate sequence of “milestone” events during the semester, from first to last (exact dates will be announced in class:)

Hand in xerox copies of 10 best drawings/journal entries.

Hand in first draft of project paper and images.

Hand in 2nd draft of project paper and images

Sign up for a presentation date.

Hand in xerox copies of  next 10 best drawings/journal entries from your  portfolio

Bring draft 3 of your project paper/images for in-class peer review.

Hand in Final Draft of project paper/images .

Presentations begin.

Hand in your drawing portfolio for final review.

Presentations  end.

If you need to you may call me at home (865 2329) prior to 8 p.m. in the evening.   In an emergency only, you may call my cell phone number (802-522 9978) I would prefer you send email to make appointments.  Also, please feel to stop by my office any time. If I am not busy I will be happy to see you.  I have a mailbox on the 2nd floor of Cook outside the main Chemistry office.   You may leave messages or anything else there you wish except homework, paper drafts, etc..  It is a small mailbox, so don’t leave drawings.

A half-century ago I spent hundreds of hours in an underground bunker in the Sacramento valley watching a television image of a large, steel bread mixer in a nearby building.  I used the console in front of me to change the speed and direction of the mixer from time to time, or turn it off.  The bunker, and several others like it, was not far from where John Sutter first discovered gold in California in 1849.  I was there because my ancestors emigrated from Europe to the valley in the 1850’s, and the family never left.  They were aware of the gold rush, but instead of mining, opened up merchandise stores. I grew up there in the 1940s and 50s, went to college in the valley, and got a job in that bunker after graduating from college in 1962.

After watching the mixer for a while on the screen, I noted the time and turned it off, walked to the adjacent building and scraped down the inside walls of the mixer with a copper spatula. The copper contained a small amount of beryllium so the spatula wouldn’t spark when it touched the mixer walls. A spark could easily destroy the whole building and end my life.  I went back to the console, turned the mixer on, sat down, and again kept my eye on the television image.  I would repeat this several times during the afternoon, and many afternoons to follow.

The mixer didn’t contain bread dough.  Churning between the blades was a gray, viscous mass that looked like wet cement, a 60 pound batch of experimental rocket propellant. It was a combination of aluminum powder, an oxidizer, a viscous polymer binder and other ingredients.  After thorough mixing, it would be cured in ovens to become a rubbery, flexible, solid, the stuff that could propel missiles topped with satellites or nuclear weapons.  I would mix many experimental batches like this one, searching for the best combination of ingredients.

Each morning I would get up around 5:30 a.m., put on a white shirt and tie, and drive the short distance to the plant to begin my workday as a propellant development chemist. We were often in “crash” mode, working rapidly to generate new formulations, competing with other companies for contracts with the federal government.  The cold war was at its most intense and the space race had begun only a few years earlier when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first successful earth orbiting satellite.

About 34,000 people were employed at Aerojet in 1962, and the complex had its own airport, road system, and a variety of support facilities. It was called the “General Motors of U.S. Rocketry” by Time magazine; we worked on the Polaris and Minuteman missiles among other projects. Revenue was over half a billion dollars that year.  It was one of a number of large companies subsisting on contracts from the military to build rockets and propellant systems for launching missiles and other spacecraft. All of us working there were, in part, caught up in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.  In 1961, the year before I was hired, he said:

“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”

I was 22 years old, needed a job and was quickly swept up in this evolving industry. My starting salary was $9,500 a year, a very large sum for me then in 1962. I didn’t think deeply about the politics and history that led the nation to spend so much wealth to create these missiles. I was amazed at the vast size of the enterprise, but at the time believed in a strategy known as mutually assured destruction, or MAD, a doctrine in which the potential full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides, effectively resulting in the destruction of both, would supposedly keep each side safe. Neither would launch an attack in order to avoid their own worst possible outcome – nuclear annihilation. So perhaps my very small contribution kept the country safe, I thought. But the story of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them is not yet over. And fifty years later, I don’t feel quite the same way.

There were many beneficial scientific developments and outcomes from these early efforts to design rockets and rocket propellant (both solid and liquid,) including the manned mission to the moon, orbiting communications satellites, the space station, the Hubble space telescope, the space shuttle, unmanned planetary missions and much, much more.  The technological advances resulting from satellites launched by rockets are too numerous to even list, and Aerojet played a valuable and significant role in many of these.

In the early 60’s, a major focus of government funding was missile defense – including the Polaris (submarine based) and Minuteman (land based) missiles, as well as antiballistic missiles like the Sprint.  I worked on solid propellants for all of these projects in those early days. Solid propellant was critically important because missiles in silos and submarines must be stored for long periods.  Liquid propellants can’t be used in such environments.  Eventually Polaris was replaced with newer submarine versions: Poseidon, beginning in 1972 and in the 1980s by Trident I. Advanced versions of the Minuteman remain the nation’s only land based missile system.

On October 22, 1962 while I was in a bunker mixing an experimental batch, a colleague came in and told me President Kennedy was going on television to address the nation.  It was in that speech I first heard the Soviet Union had erected medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba, and that the United States, among many other activities, was blockading the island.

“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Russian ships with crews and materials necessary to operate the missiles were sailing toward Cuba at the time of Kennedy’s speech. They would be stopped by the blockade. The Cuban missile crisis had been brewing a few weeks before that time, but that day in October, it came to its most dangerous point.  We were clearly very close to an all out nuclear war. Most of us then, for a short time during the crisis, thought very carefully about what we were doing and what the ramifications would be if the worst happened.  Some employees sent their families from the city to the countryside. We were perhaps closer to the reality of a potential disaster than most Americans.

After this episode ended I first began to think more deeply about my job, not only the ramifications of an actual nuclear exchange, but also a more direct awareness of personal risk.  Safety procedures at the plant were stringent and there were very few accidents.  Nevertheless, earlier in the month I had seen the results of a small explosion from a one-pound batch of propellant, similar to many I also had mixed. Images of the wounded man and the ambulance still remain in my mind. Explosion of a sixty pound batch in a sealed mixer would completely destroy the building and anyone near it. Other larger explosions had occurred in other companies in the United States and around the world, some with many deaths. Rocket propellant is a hazardous material.

Then I had an accident casting propellant in a vacuum. I built the top of the chamber with thick, clear, plastic Lucite so I could see to direct the mix.  There must have been a defect in the Lucite, because when the pressure inside the chamber got very low, it gave way with a very loud bang, as pieces imploded into the chamber, and into the viscous propellant.  My brain interpreted it as a propellant detonation, and my heart rate jumped high enough to make my head pound and my ears ring.  I was momentarily deaf.  In a second I knew it was just the collapse of the chamber as I realized there was no other damage, but it took five minutes before my heart rate returned to normal.  My ears continued to ring for several days afterwards and my hearing was permanently damaged.

I decided soon after this incident to leave. In 1964 I returned to graduate school, got a degree, and eventually a job at an academic institution where I had to obtain research money to succeed professionally and to fund my graduate students.  I wrote research proposals to many different private and government organizations over the years to do this. In the early years a significant portion of my funding came from military sources, which was easier to obtain than funds from non-military institutions. Considering the nature of the world and the risks we must guard against, I understood the need for this kind of work and respected the individuals and institutions that did it. But my awareness of the implications continued to grow and over the years, I became more uneasy.

I asked myself whether MAD was still relevant? If all adversarial nations have equal numbers of nuclear weapons and missiles, will this keep the world safe from a nuclear disaster? Maybe when there were just two it did. The Soviet Union and the United States came to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, but pulled back.  But does mutually assured destruction as a strategy work now in 2009?  Tensions between the superpowers have dramatically diminished since the cold war. But the number of missiles and nuclear weapons is still very large in both Russia and the United States, as well as in China.

In the 21st century fear of a nuclear attack has prompted more and more countries to seek both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them as deterrents to attack from others – a version of the MAD strategy.  The list continues to grow and now includes England, France, and China, as well as Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and soon, perhaps, Iran.  The proliferation itself creates a substantial and growing risk.  The weapons, both rockets and nuclear technology, may continue to proliferate and eventually be available to groups of people without countries, as the security necessary to control the rapidly growing number of weapons breaks down. North Korea, which obtained its nuclear technology from Pakistan, has recently held secret meetings with officials in Myanmar, one of the world’s poorest nations, presumably to help it develop nuclear weapons. North Korea also provided Syria with materials to begin a nuclear program.  And Israel, having already bombed Iraq (1982) and Syria (2007) to remove their developing nuclear weapons technology, is ready to do the same again to Iran within the next year or so.  The United States has been drawn into a long and costly war with no easily determined end. One of the reasons, we were told, was to destroy nuclear weapons technology (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) which turned out not to be there. Reverberations of the Cuban missile crisis can be heard again. President Dmitry Medvedev has warned that Russia will deploy short-range missiles near Poland to counter U.S. military plans in Eastern Europe.

Do these policies and actions make the world, or any single country, a safer place?  We presume that having missiles and nuclear weapons protect us, but as proliferation increases, we may become less safe. Missiles may no longer be needed to deliver nuclear weapons to a target. The old MAD strategy presumes all nations that develop nuclear weapons behave according to the logic of MAD. It also presumes that all nations with the ability to launch nuclear weapons care about the survival of their subjects and that nations, not isolated groups, will use nuclear weapons. Today, these presumptions are most likely incorrect.

On September 11, 2001 the country was attacked, not with missiles or nuclear weapons, but with our own commercial airplanes, and I’m asking questions that I didn’t ask at age 22 when I was mixing rocket propellant in that bunker in the California valley.   Total world spending on military effort in 2006 was $1.6 trillion dollars. Nearly half of this total, 529 billion, was spent by the United States.

*Is the concept of mutually assured destruction in any way relevant in today’s world?

*If so, how?

*Are we safer now than we were in 1962 or are we less safe?

*Will the unintended proliferation of nuclear weapons contribute, eventually, to their use?

*Might this proliferation be one of the consequences of the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961?

In April of 1967, six years after Eisenhower spoke, Martin Luther King said “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

US military spending per year is now about $711 billion dollars, plus another $200 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compare this to the yearly expenditures of $38 billion for k-12 education, $19 billion for humanitarian foreign aid, $6.8 billion for children’s health care, $6 billion for job training and $1.3 billion to reduce our dependence on oil.

What do you think?