Draw It with Your Eyes Closed Quotes

“Reading Paul Thek’s “Teaching Notes: 4-Dimensional Design,” I realized that an artist defines oneself by her questions, and that asking “What are your questions?” was more apt than asking “What is your work?” So the assignment became to write our own sets of “Notes”—an unselfconscious way of producing personal manifestoes.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Assignments are supposed to broaden your ideas about what your work can be, and to teach you how to solve problems in art. But they also, possibly, acclimatize you to the idea that failure and humiliation are part of the deal, and that without them you can’t be sure you’ve really exhausted a possibility. Maybe that’s the real lesson?”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“The best I could figure what art school and its assignments teach (and with great success!) is not how to be an artist, but how to act like one.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Make a large folded-paper airplane, paint on it a slogan which you think will revolutionize your life.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“It is in the doldrums that our talents are most needed. The best training for desperation is to know early the feeling of no guidance. In photography the squeak of intention destroys serendipity. Don’t summon the demon of overdetermination. Stand there, present in the world, and make work.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“When I taught photography, briefly, back in the late 90s, the most interesting thing someone said at the bar the night before class would become that day’s assignment. If, say, a painter told me about the saint who made the devil kneel and hold the Bible, then my assignment to the class would be: Make the devil kneel before you, so you can read him the word of God.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“9. Build a shrine and paint it.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“4. Make a protest painting. 5. Read an obituary (without a picture) and paint a portrait of the person described.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“we understand these assignments not as “that which will produce work of value,” but as “that which will allow the work to happen, perhaps producing the conditions through which something of value might take place.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“These wonderings/wanderings by the students span poetry, experience, and politics. They remind us of the multiple meanings in the “facts” presented to our senses. Art is immersed in the welter of description and the pronouncements of desire.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“no talk about drawing, about great artists, about the history of art,” or about any other subjects which tend to establish verbalisms instead of drawing reactions.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“But can a training regimen be designed to teach artists how to turn off their minds in the studio and become one with their process?”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Indexical drawing (“index” in the sense of Pierce’s semiotics: a sign whose signifier and signified have a real and often physical relationship to one another prior to interpretation. Like, you might explain when introducing the assignment, smoke coming out of the window of a burning house, lipstick on a wine glass, or the Cage / Rauschenberg tire-track print made by a moving car)”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“must reason your way through the problem. Using line only, draw one simple geometric shape, such as a square, triangle or circle. Without overlapping or intersecting, draw a different shape. Now, draw another. Choose your favorite. Make the other 2 like your favorite. Enlarge one of the shapes. Reduce one of them. Make one shape touch one edge of the page. Make the other”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment