Artist Pablo Picasso is famously quoted in expressing, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”
As one perpetually curious by creativity’s impact on learning, I’ve read these words throughout multiple phases of my teaching and learning. However, the one that resonates with me is from my early classroom days teaching high school drawing and painting. At the time, I leaned into this statement to enthusiastically pump up students about the basics or the rules. While I love drawing, the fundamentals and time spent drawing in a Drawing 1 course is, like all things as a beginner, a little challenging. Your first drawings (even for very talented visual artists) have to start somewhere, which is frustrating and why many folks resort to “I can’t draw”.
So this quote felt like a beacon of hope to students – that their rule was to dive into the learning process, so that one day, their skills would reach the real fun of “breaking them like an artist”. I’d share with them my first sketchbooks and we’d celebrate the awkward first drawings and “failures” because that’s the practice of becoming an artist - you need to learn the rules like a pro.
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