[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

Observational drawing...never heard the phrase. But now, it'll suddenly be everywhere. Your little piece here also reminds me of some other dead white guy who said that if you look for the beautiful in your travels and you don't bring it with you, you don't find it (pace, whoever you are, for my gracelss rendition). And, of course, Locke's remarks about people who never travel beyond the smoke of their own chimneys. No time for google, but I suspect they're both findable. And Plutarch, of course, also earns his place in anyone's backpack. And finally, I googled semester at sea. Maybe I'll apply. It was going to be the Peace Corps (or a Canadian equivalent), but this sounds lovely. Tell us more, John. 

Ursula
always in bits and pieces

David Ritchie wrote:
You could combine the Geary approach and the Stange approach (with possibly a dash of Evans' choices) merely by handing them a line from Pliny the Younger, "Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye."
You may thereafter be bombarded by requests for refunds, at which point you will introduce them to observational drawing, one of the standard classes for a British naval officer in the eighteenth century (I'm plucking this from memory, but I could find a reference for this claim if you wish). The class was required not only by the need to map strange shores, but also because it caused officers to look closely and to report what they saw.
The value students should find in observational drawing is not so much the beauty or other virtue that turns up in what they produce; it's in the long or slow, dispassionate or passionate investigation.
In some of the eighteenth century drawings I have in mind, you can see that cultural assumptions are hard to escape, but you can also see people coming to terms with unfamiliar hard places and rocks and customs and forms of dress, none of which tourists are likely to see when they press the button of a digital camera and move on. 

David Ritchie,
ever sketchy in
Portland, Oregon

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