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.
It is a good piece of advice.