Advice that should be given

One of the most mem­o­rable moments of design school was when the lead pro­fes­sor (Frank Cheatham) said, “If you are here to learn to draw bet­ter horses, then you are in the wrong place.”

That always stuck with me. When we enter a learn­ing expe­ri­ence with too strong an idea of what we want to get out of it, we will prob­a­bly not learn very much.

Some­how I wanted to work that thought around to my next idea, but I couldn’t fig­ure out how. Maybe it’s that the above advice should have been given a long time ago to a young per­son I know. They are in a pro­gram that is just not suited to them. They are so far down the road that it’s too late to do some­thing else. They seem to be happy enough (though the course of study is quite a chal­lenge), but no one has ever given that advice.

They are (prover­bially) draw­ing a lot of horses. Hours and hours, days and days, spent draw­ing more horses.

I’m a bit ashamed that I did not have the courage to say something.

Would you have said something?

The horse paint­ing — it’s copyright-free from Dover Pub­li­ca­tions. And the artist must have enjoyed cre­at­ing it.