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Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor QUOTES

Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor QUOTES

1 " Daily practice with images both written and drawn is rare once we have lost our baby teething begin to think of ourselves as good at some things and bad at other things. It is not that this isn’t true, but the side-effects are profound once we abandon a certain activity like drawing because we are bad at it. A certain state of mind- (what McGilchrist might call “attention”) is also lost. A certain capacity of the mind is shuttered, and for most people, it stays that way for life. It is a bad trade. "

― Lynda Barry , Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

2 " There's the drawing you are trying to make and the drawing that s actually being made- and you can't see it until you forget what you were trying to do. "

― Lynda Barry , Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

3 " In a classroom of students with varying levels of drawing experience, this way of drawing brings us to a common starting place that is like the starting place we all share: our first drawings of people made when we were little. "

― Lynda Barry , Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

4 " I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned— but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong.

What was it?

This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force— thinking I was showing them a short-cut—— this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities.

I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, “spend time on this assignment.” That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? "

― Lynda Barry , Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

5 " Non-photo blue pencils...

After about a week of using them the class is smitten.

It looks like thinking, this color of blue.

Like words before you say them. "

― Lynda Barry , Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor