Speed Chapter 6: "Academic and Conventional"

On the GJ Book Club, we're studying Chapter 6, "The Academic and Conventional" in Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing.

The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in italics, followed by a brief remark of my own. If you would like to respond to a specific point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.
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In this chapter, Speed is searching for the "real matter of art" that raises it above correct, accurate, but lifeless drawing.

1. "dull lifeless, highly finished work, imperfectly perfect" 
Speed later speaks about the mistake many art schools made by limiting themselves to "training students mechanically to observe and portray the thing set before them to copy." This is a familiar criticism that we hear today about students coming out of modern-day atelier training.

2. "freer system of the French schools"

Drawing by Harold Speed

Speed says that in many English schools, except for the Royal Academy, "artists were seldom employed in teaching." At the R.A., a distinguished visiting academician would preside for a month at a time. That method led to some puzzlement among students who wanted a definite system.

3. "These accurate, painstaking school studies are very necessary as a training for the eye in observing accurately."
I'm glad he said this, because too often one hears complaints about academic drawing from those who can't do it, and too often, "artistic" styles are used to justify art that is not disciplined.

3. "Dither"
Speed says, "It is difficult to explain what is wrong with an academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and a fine drawing." He introduces the concept of "dither," a Scotch word meaning the looseness or play of machine parts that allows an engine to move. In art it would mean the search for variety and the quality of "a live, individual consciousness."

4. The fact is: it is only the academic that can be taught.
I don't think Howard Pyle would agree with this. Pyle had students like N.C. Wyeth enter his summer school for illustration, and he taught them how to see with the mind's eye, and how to make their compositions more forceful. Most of Pyle's students had already had Beaux-Arts style cast drawing and figure drawing experience, but he showed that non-academic skills (such as storytelling skills) can indeed be taught.

5. A drawing is not necessarily academic because it is thorough, but only because it is dead.
Important distinction. Tightness or comprehensiveness isn't necessarily bad. Two people can each work methodically on a drawing for weeks, and one can be artistic, and the other not.

6. Madame Tussaud's Waxworks
Speed invokes the wax museum figures to criticize work that is overly realistic without selectivity and expression. The same sort of criticism has been addressed recently to certain CGI animated films or visual effects that have too much realism. Speed says that even if one departs from naturalism and delves into more abstracted forms, the artwork must be sincerely felt by the artist for them to have any emotional effect. That's a problem faced by artists who unquestioningly adopt the Disney or manga cartoon character formulas.

7. The struggling and fretting after originality that one sees in modern art is certainly an evidence of vitality, but one is inclined to doubt whether anything really original was ever done in so forced a way.
As true now as it was a hundred years ago.

8. Every beautiful work of art is a new creation, the result of particular circumstances in the life of the artist and the time of its production, that have never existed before and will never recur again.
This is a good reminder to all of us who admire past styles. We can learn from Rembrandt or Velazquez, but we can't see fully into the heart of those artists because our worlds are so different. The risk is that all we'll absorb from them is the external features of style, the very thing we're trying to transcend. Any work that we create should respond to the unique features of our own time and our own individual chemistry. By this argument, all work is contemporary and all work has the power to surprise its viewers.

Graphite drawing by Adolph Menzel

9. It is through these materials that he has to find expression.
Speed uses the example of the treatment of hair by sculptors. He says that artists should be fully engaged with the materials they are using, whether it is stone or bronze or oil, graphite or charcoal. An experienced artist knows the range of possibilities of the medium they're using, and selects the aspects of nature that can be translated into that material with the tools at hand. The drawing above by Menzel is a great example, one that transcends the conventional, is full of life, and is perfectly suited to the materials he was using.
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The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:
1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)
2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.
3. Free online Archive.org edition.
4. Project Gutenberg version
Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.
and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)
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GJ Book Club Facebook page (Thanks, Keita Hopkinson)
Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)

Overview of the blog series
Announcing the GJ Book Club
Chapter 1: Preface and Introduction
Chapter 2: Drawing
Chapter 3: Vision
Chapter 4: Line Drawing
Chapter 5: Mass Drawing
Chapter 6: Academic and Conventional
Chapter 7: The Study of Drawing
Chapter 8: Line Drawing, Practical
Chapter 9: Mass Drawing
Chapter 10: Rhythm
Chapter 11: Variety of Lines
Chapter 12: Curved Lines
Chapter 13: Variety of Mass
Chapter 14: Unity of Mass
Chapter 15: Balance
Chapter 16: Proportion
Chapter 17: Portrait Drawing
Chapter 18: Visual Memory
Chapter 19: Procedure
Chapter 20: Materials