Drawing

Drawing Department Objectives

“One must know how to draw before one becomes an artist. It is because the ability to draw is the basis for the art. These skills should be developed from early years so that the artist as soon as he starts thinking and feeling, could express and convey his thoughts accurately and without any hindrance, so that the pencil could run at an artist’s will and thought.”

K. Brullov

Drawing department aims to fulfill the educational tasks. As the drawing is the basis for the visual artistic activity, Russian Academy of Art puts particular emphasis on the forming and developing students’ knowledge and skills in the field of the academic drawing.

The fundamental principle for the drawing classes is analytical approach to performing the work. The work on drawing should progress methodologically, stage by stage. The students who follow strictly and diligently professors’ directions, developing their work stage by stage, will be able to advance their skills in the academic drawing.

Our professors help students to go through all the stages in drawing gradually and methodologically moving from initial stage, that is ability to see proportions and perspective, to more complex ones like working with tone and details and finally, to conveying one’s artistic vision.

At the drawing classes students learn how to compose the objects within given format, how to see the model three-dimensionally, how to convey proportions, to find tonal solutions arriving at the level of the fine details. In this way the work progresses from general to particular.

In other words, students progress from the ability to perform the sketch to mastering multi-session drawing with developed details. In the course of educational process professor imparts academic knowledge on performing the drawing.

The process of learning to draw also includes taking classes in sketching human figure from life (short poses) and figure study drawing (longer poses). Such exercises help students to train the eye and develop ability to quickly capture proportions and motion of the model.

The great Russian artist Iliya Repin once said: “Never-ceasing drawing from life is the highest and the surest school”. That’s why Russian Academy of Art’ program is based on the drawing from real life and not on the mechanical copying of that. This method has been proven effective by the generations of the greatest artists starting from Renaissance.

Goethe wrote: “One shouldn’t forget that if you push your pupil without sufficient artistic knowledge and experience to learning from real life, you will lead him away from both real life and art”. At the Russian Academy of Art students are taught how to draw by being immersed in the art of draftsmanship stage by stage. Individual approach applied in our Academy gives the necessary knowledge corresponding to the students’ level and enables them to effectively progress in their work.