Drawing is our power to realize and transform.
Everybody can draw.
Drawing is a process for connecting to the energy of being, seeing, thinking, and doing which lives within each of us.
Everyone has the capacity to connect with this energy.
What is Drawing Practice?
Drawing Practice presents a set of workshops and exercises to help people cultivate their own connection to drawing.
The exercises in Drawing Practice are for everyone: for artists and non-artists; for teachers and students.
These exercises can be done successfully by people with no prior drawing experience.
They can be done alone or in groups.
Through a series of experimental drawings, participants will learn drawing fundamentals through direct experience.
Drawing Practice teaches an understanding of line and gesture, mark-making, composition, light and shadow, perspective, and pictorial description, not only as a means for making a beautiful picture, but as a way to engage in deep-looking, problem solving and connection.
Just as yoga, meditation, and exercise-routines can strengthen our body and mind, our Drawing Practice can be an integral part of our daily lives.
A strong drawing practice can empower us to realize Vision and Transformation every day.
How does drawing change our world?
Drawing is a method for focusing our awareness.
It is a perceptual tool which allows us to connect to the world around us and within us.
It allows us to see the unseen and name the un-named.
Each drawing allows us to record our present, to investigate our past, and to envision our future.
The process of drawing is one of the most powerful tools we have as thinkers and as makers.
We will, quite literally, draw our future into being.
This digital device, the chair you sit on, the room you sit in, the clothes that you are wearing… these were all drawings before they became things. Drawing transforms ideas into the physical objects and structures that shape our daily lives.
If we understand that the world which we live in today came from the drawings people made in the past, we can extrapolate that the world of tomorrow will be shaped by the drawings we make today.
About the Drawing Practice program
These presentations and exercises have evolved from workshops and lectures led by Benjamin Degen over the past 15 years.
This program exists, with deep gratitude, for the many people who have collaborated and drawn together in these workshops.
This program has been able to grow thanks to the institutions that have made spaces for these collaborative workshops to take place:
- Cooper Union
- Rhode Island School of Design
- Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art
- Fashion Institute of Technology.
- Brooklyn College. City University of New York.
- Purchase College. State University of New York.
- Brandeis University
- Vassar College
- Yale University. School of art Norfolk program.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The Brooklyn Museum
- Susan Inglett Gallery
- Pioneer Works
If you are interested in hosting or attending a workshop, please contact Benjamin Degen.
About Benjamin Degen
Benjamin Degen was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1976.
He uses image-making as a process for learning/teaching, connection, vision, realization, and transformation.
Degen received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 from Cooper Union.
His work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally, as well as in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, The Collezione Maramotti, The William Benton Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
Degen’s artwork is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Collezione Maramotti, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Tang Museum.
Benjamin Degen is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.
