I'm here today in the print room of the Museum in Oxford to introduce to you
eight drawing classes that are based on the ideas John Ruskin, this
is a drawing of John Ruskin, put forward in his book, The Elements of Drawing.
Here I'm surrounded by 20,000 drawings that have been collected by the museum
during it's history and they date from about 1400 through to the present day.
The point of these drawings isn't just they should be put on frames and
hung on walls but that they should be used as a teaching collection and for
us to learn about drawing and the way people lived in the past.
Now John Ruskin started an art school here in Oxford in 1871.
And as a way of putting that art school in motion,
he brought together a group of several hundred drawings that
were intended as a model for his students to study from.
Now the drawing course that I'm going to map out for you.
We'll, in fact, use many of these drawings as specimens,
as examples of how to do the exercises.
So, it is most important, in following this course, that you not only practice,
practice using materials practice, observing the world and making notes,
but also that you look at real drawings and see how those drawings were made,
because we don't draw the way we do today, just because we invented it yesterday.
It is a very slow and gradual process of society,
finding ways of making images and developing them on paper.
So let's start work.