Teaching Drawing: The Personal Approach of Charles Cajori
By Gerald M. Monroe
Charles Cajori has had a distinguished career as a draftsman and painter; his work is represented in numerous public collections and, during the past twenty-five years, he has exhibited in fifteen one-man shows and dozens of group exhibitions. He has also had a long and distinguished career as a teacher of drawing. From 1956 to 1965 he taught at Cooper Union and since then at Queens College of the City University of New York. Although he enjoys a reputation as a thoughtful and gifted instructor, Cajori is deeply skeptical of what he considers "professional" art teachers in the training of fine artists. Over the years he has observed with interest those of his colleagues who carefully lead students through a thorough, increasingly complicated, program, exposing them to a wide range of media and techniques, but he rejects the process for himself. Cajori views his role as that of creating a situation that provides a way into what he believes to be the central issues of art, through which the students become aware of their own relationship to those issues. Only an artist whose life and work are intimately connected can provide the matrix that makes the teaching process credible; it is through his work that he understands where he is and the meaning of who he is. For Cajori, the bias that emerges from his own experience is neither a detriment nor a weakness; his attitudes as an artist and his convictions about the essential nature of art are the foundation upon which his approach to the teaching process is based.
In 1939 Cajori attended Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, where he studied with Boardman Robinson. Near the end of his time with Robinson, Cajori sought reassurance from his mentor-did he have the goods to make it as an artist? Robinson, wise enough to realize he could not give that assurance to any student, replied: "Well, if you like the life, do it!" The answer signified to Cajori that a career as an artist would be one in which there were authentic and intimate connections between his life and his work. As a teacher, he tries to point to those connections, the difficulties as well as the rewards, not as a declared philosophy or as a set of principles, but as insights naturally occurring out of the working process.
In Cajori's class the students begin to forego preconceived notions of spatial relations; gradually, a system rooted strictly in observable information emerges. Vision is stripped of , its common function of mere recognition of things and places; the eye is trained to see freshly, acutely, analytically, Because of the physiological nature of eyesight, the actual focal area when looking is extremely limited; in order to "see," the eye must track through space moving from place to place. The ceiling pipe, previously perceived as straight, bends as it yields to the shifting glance of the student's eyes. "Look at the window," Cajori tells the students, "and notice how the sky clings to the pane.'' Drawing in his class is a matter of locating correct relationships, clearly a problematical business in which each new location discovered requires reassessment of preceding ones. The procedure, involving endless and inconclusive analyses, is too irrational to form a precise pedagogical system, but, in engaging the problem of structuring space and time, the students become aware that they are being drawn into issues of great profundity. They have been sensitized to the scanning action of the eye-how visual information is perceived in intervals and in varying rates of time and how the resulting spatial structure becomes tense by virtue of that participation in time. As those structures undergo transformation, the students' notion of drawing is challenged and - for those who reflect deeply on the implications - their own position in the world is challenged .
The class may work from a still life or a model, often producing a single drawing for the entire session. Cajori regrets the university credit-hour system that has shortened the studio time; he would prefer that the students have the opportunity to work a full day on one drawing. Since the relationships that are
perceived and recorded in the drawings are in constant flux, the media, which must be erasable, is usually charcoal or pencil. Cajori, himself, arranges the still life, a simple Morandi-like arrangement - forthright,
concise, no romance, no cornucopia. He avoids profusion, complexity, and implications of anecdote. The setup is discussed and the students are asked to analyze relationships, not to draw objects. They are to draw the entire scene, to account for all the relationships that encompass the field. Once the drawing is started no one may change his position. (Giacometti, who followed a similar procedure, marked everything: the model, the easel, and his own place-a procedure evidently derived from Cezanne.) The emerging structure depends upon the steadfastness of that focusing eye; if the position of the viewer were to be altered, all would be lost. The drawings are generally, but not necessarily, linear. Instruction is one to one and collaborative. Cajori examines the set-up from the exact position of each student, challenging his judgment as to the "correct" one. Although the locations are obviously equivocal, continuous revisions based on intense observation more or less objectify the process. Eventually experience and a shared vision tend to narrow the difference between students' drawings. At the end of a drawing session, students may be asked to do a ten-minute drawing of the same arrangement on which they had concentrated for three hours. Not surprisingly, when the long analysis is integrated into the freshness of the quick sketch, the later drawing proves to be the more interesting one.
At some point in the semester, the process of incessant correction results in a shredding of the image, and, after a while, there is a noticeable uneasiness among the students. Cajori responds by discussing reproductions of artists who seem relevant to the experience of the students: Cezanne, Matisse, and Ingres receive particular attention; others might be Rembrandt, Piero, Mondrian. (For Cajori the essential element is the sense of mass, and, after Cezanne, the major artists who exemplify it are Matisse, Mondrian, and Giacometti.) What was once unseeable is now apparent: the rendering of space and time is the source of that palpable energy that bestows life to the work. All that laborious investigation of relationships brings home the sense of drawing as a metaphor for the interplay between the world and the artist. Glimpsing that potential, the student must begin to assert preferences-possibly to forego the analytical for a freer mode.
On occasion, Gajori decides it would be useful to complicate the process. In a home assignment consisting of a three object still life on an unadorned table, he will ask the students to draw the pressure on the objects - the wall upon the orange, the tabletop upon the cup, and so on. As usual, the entire field must be accounted for with the table pushing up, the wall pushing forward, and the objects twisting. The drawing becomes a register of a density, of a substance - in Cajori's terms - spatial.
As a break from the sheer intensity of relentless observation, an assignment is introduced that is seemingly antithetical to the stricture of direct viewing. During a session when the students are working from a model, Cajori will have them draw as if they were on the opposite side of the model. Again, the entire field must be utilized, including the students themselves and their surroundings as "seen" from the opposite side. Relying upon their analytical knowledge of how space is structured, but no longer supported by direct observation, the students must dip into their imaginative resources opening them for the emergence of personal expression.
To the casual observer Cajori's methodology may seem cerebral, at some distance from feeling. Cajori would vehemently deny the allegation. The intricate probing into the space-time continuum relies on a full play of the senses and the drawing becomes a record of the process, an evocation of its sensuousness. In his own work, Cajori has never relinquished the pleasures of the sensuous; the same
conditions exist for his students. They have the· freedom to explore their own connections, their own mode of expression. They may continue a close observation, take liberties with it, or move entirely into the imagined. We are reminded by Cajori that Bonnard needed to flee the motif lest he be overcome by it, whereas Cezanne relied totally upon it. One brings to the world what one wishes. In Cajori's words, "In that interchange between the two - the observed and the imagined - it is not the detail of surface appearance which passes back and forth, rather the kinetic conjunction of things, how they conspire and go together."
