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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 19, 2004
Drawing master
Normally I hesitate to recommend a film by a friend (some wouldn't) so take this first sentence as my hesitation. In fact I rather despise the person in question and he knows it so my admiration of his work can be accepted as sincere. The film is "The Drawing Master" directed by Nik Sheehan and I saw the premiere in Toronto last week. It is a documentary about Paul Young another friend deeply admired as a surviving dinosaur. He recently retired as the last drawing master in the Ontario College of Art & Design or "OCA" as it used to be called the province's foremost public art school. Mr. Young is one of those people on whom I would have the Order of Canada bestowed were I a bagman for the Liberal Party; someone who has made a detectable difference in many lives and that difference chiefly positive. But Canada has become an upside-down country and the OCA itself illustrates the inversion wherein persons of real merit sink to the bottom and the sleaze floats to the top. So I am writing about an extremely well-made and scripted cleverly paced shot sound-tracked and edited account of one of our "last men". (The film gobbled all usual licence fees and should soon be coming to a TV screen near you.) In the "olden days" you wouldn't think of graduating a person from art school who didn't know how to draw any more than you would give a B.A. to a person who could not read and write. I sometimes wonder whether such a person should even be entitled to the vote for the ability to draw is closely related to the ability to see what is in front of your eyes. But as I report the wisdom of the OCA has been to technologize draughtsmanship to figure that these days anyone with a laptop digital camera and the appropriate software can capture any view in right perspective. This shows no understanding of what is involved for it is the merit of a real draughtsman to see things inside-out to hold what no machine can even touch. So the last drawing master has been retired the last of a long succession passing down through the centuries and there won't be another. People who want to draw will have to teach themselves for the school isn't teaching anymore. Heretofore as Mr. Young says in the film in his wonderfully abrupt and curmudgeonly manner to a class of awestruck kids everything in our environment that was not made by God was first sketched by a draughtsman. The ability to draw is intrinsic to any kind of craft that results in the production of objects and more than eyes are involved. There is a mind operating in the hand as well as the head and it feels its way into shape and volume while the eyes feel colour and shade. The hand "renders" -- it repeats recites gives back -- often things no eye has ever seen. Whereas any child on his potty knows how to "create". Mr. Young came from a generation of artists who were unashamed of commerce and felt no ideological conflict between the "lowest" sort of paid hackwork and the "highest" fine art. They were broad men who could touch the two extremes. For again: one does the best one can in the medium and time with which one works and to the end required. My own father graduated from OCA into industrial design did all kinds of wretched work for a living yet never compromised on an issue of craft (telling a few bosses where to go). Mr. Young is multi-faceted has played jazz in clubs has soldiered has annotated an astounding collection of recorded classic music drawn animals for a living and has been through forty years the anchor of a smoke-caressed Tuesday drinking table -- most of them in the now-defunct Beverly Tavern scenes from which the film also memorializes. (The universal smoking ban is putting an end to such free-spirited conviviality.) He has been an evangelist for civilization. Nik Sheehan's film somehow captures all this and more in the space of less than an hour and with access to its subject only in the present when his career is mostly behind him. It captures in a single movement the nobility of the draughtsman and the plain everyday nature of his work in a world full of miracles. I hope everyone can see it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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