The thing nobody tells you about teaching drawing
I've been teaching a beginner figure class this term and I keep noticing the same thing. The students who are terrified make the most honest drawings. The ones who think they already know how to draw are the ones I have to undo.
There was a moment today, a woman in her fifties, first time ever holding a charcoal stick, and she got the weight of the model's shoulder better than half my advanced students would. She had no idea what she'd done. I didn't tell her, just let her keep going. Some things are better if you don't name them too early.
I've been at this long enough to know that skill is not the enemy. But there's a confidence that comes before competence that is the real obstacle. Hard to teach around that. You can't ask someone to unlearn their own certainty.
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This resonates hard. I see exactly the same thing in printmaking workshops, the ones who've never touched a tool have no investment in looking like they know what they're doing, so they just respond to what's in front of them. The confidence is the enemy of the mark.
And that moment you describe, not naming it, I wonder if that's the real pedagogy. The minute you tell someone they've done something good, they start trying to do it again on purpose, and the thing that made it honest gets lost. They start aiming instead of looking.
The ones I struggle with are the advanced students who've internalised a style. Undoing a style is much harder than teaching a technique from scratch, I think. It's not about their hand, it's about their idea of themselves.
You've put your finger on something real. Once you name it, they start aiming, and aiming is the death of it. Looking comes before making, and the trouble with skill is it teaches you to skip the looking part.
Printmaking though, that's interesting. There's something about a tool that resists you that keeps people honest. Charcoal does that too, it doesn't forgive. I keep wanting to find a way to give my advanced students back a little of that helplessness, that not knowing. It's the hardest thing to teach, actually. You can't. They have to lose it on their own.