Shape

385 Latin and Greek, and Mathematics
variation, etc. I can even use weights to get colors or other properties that interact as I
draw, perhaps as in the example on pages 290–291, or in my design with Hilbert’s
curve and in the similar ones in figure 1. The conclusion is evident—once I can copy,
I can calculate. (In fact this follows the letter of the law when triangles are copied in
rules for Turing machines.) And once I can calculate, there’s drawing and design, and
the many delightful things that shapes and rules imply.
Smith really got it right—copying works, even if shapes, schemas, and rules may
be a little more than he had in mind. It makes sense to go on from what others say and
do. But perhaps there’s more to this than blind luck and empty coincidence—there’s
also Smith’s marvelous idea that drawing can be taught like language and mathematics
in the classroom with worked examples and explicit instruction. And it’s no surprise
that this goes for what I’ve been showing for shapes, schemas, and rules. Does this
mean I’ve changed my mind? I’ve spent a good portion of this book arguing that
drawing isn’t language. What can I possibly teach without vocabulary and syntax?
Something is wrong. Well maybe not, vocabulary and syntax aren’t at stake. Teaching
drawing like language doesn’t prove that
drawing is language
It’s still a metaphor, although many accept it today as a heuristic or assume there’s
equivalence. And that’s where the problem lies—not with teaching but with heuristics
and equivalence. Certainly, all of the schemas I’ve described are things to teach in
the classroom and to explain at the blackboard. There’s a lot of copying to do to write
schemas down and to try them out in exercises. And there’s also showing why drawing
isn’t a language, how mathematics describes shapes and rules, and how shapes and
words are connected when I calculate—it’s Latin and Greek, and mathematics in another
way. Many useful lessons are worth teaching in the classroom—there’s everything
in this book—before the vital transition into the studio to experiment freely
with schemas. The opportunities for creativity and originality seem to be unlimited
once you’ve learned to copy.
Of course, the idea of open-ended experiment in art and design is key in American
art education after Smith—in particular, with Denman Ross at Harvard and Arthur
Dow at Columbia University. Mine Ozkar traces the history of this—learning to draw
wasn’t rote copying, that is to say, blankly following instructions and blindly doing
what you’re told in the normal way you’re trained to calculate. There was seeing, too.
For a great while we have been teaching art through imitation—of nature and the ‘‘historic
styles’’—leaving structure to take care of itself . . . so much modern painting is but picture-writing;
only story-telling, not art; and so much architecture and decoration only dead copies of conventional
motives.
For Ross and Dow, ‘‘picture-writing’’—what a felicitous compound given what I’ve
been saying about drawing and why it isn’t language with letters and words—wasn’t
near enough for art. And ‘‘dead copies’’ of familiar devices—correct spelling—didn’t
work in design. Never mind that words are easy to mix up—imitation and copying