Jacob Romeo Lecuyer Teaching philosophy
In my mid 20’s while living in San Francisco I began
training with a master painter named Vranas. In a thick Greek accent Vranas
used to tell me emphatically “Art is not technical Jacob. IT IS PHYSICAL!” His
statement was Hyperbole of course, because making art is both a physical and
technical exercise. The meaning of his statement however, that art while being
partly technical is primarily physical, has been foundational in my teaching
philosophy. I’ve come to realize that the person who is most likely to develop
into a professional within the field of illustration and the entertainment arts is
the person who doesn’t just observe art, read about art, and engage in
conversation about art, but is the one who persistently creates it. Though I
spend a great deal of time in the classroom lecturing about art theory and
technique, I believe my most impacting role is that of a Coach. All the art
theory I can cram into a students head doesn’t mean much if they are not
physically producing a tremendous amount of art. I am a coach, and since I care
for the players on my team I must motivate them to train hard and effectively.
Practically that means motivating them towards daily drawing and painting. I
believe that any student whom I don’t coach into developing this practice will
be very unlikely to “play in the majors”. But there still remains the question
of how to train. My secondary role as a teacher addresses this question.
I am a Coach but I am
also an academic instructor who conveys technical information. Because I get to
see an individual student for relatively little of their academic life, my
teaching career has been a quest to boil down the most relevant information
into the most pure concentrated forms. I want every hour that a student and I
spend together in the classroom to be as effective as I can make it. To this
end I teach four elemental principles to students training to enter the
entertainment industry: structure and gesture, contrast and dominance/hierarchy. A student training under
me comes to understand Structure: draftsmanship, anatomy, and surface
rendering. To balance the inherent coldness and formality of this structure I
place great emphasis on gesture and
rhythm. These two fundamental
elements sit like weights at the opposite end of a pendulum. In conjunction
with structure and gesture my students are trained to understand the design
principles of contrast and hierarchy. My student is instructed to observe and take design inspiration
primarily from the natural world. “What” I ask “do we observe there over and
over again!?” Contrast and hierarchy: contrasts in shape, color, line, value and the way in which these
elements are composed together. In the branches on a tree, the stripes on a
tiger, segmented forms of an insect there is always Hierarchy: Big, medium,
small; high-key, mid-key, low-key; warm, cool, neutral, etcetera, etcetera. I
train students to take their structurally stable, and rhythmically sound visual
development work and integrate it into the pattern of design matrix we observe
in the universe, which surrounds us. This results in timelessly good design.
Good design happens when my student learns to incorporate contrasts in value,
composition, color, shape, and line and has set those contrasts constrained
within a clear design hierarchy. I demonstrate the principles of contrast and
dominance and the hierarchy of good design through methodical demos, by
teaching them how to observe these patterns in nature and through the artifacts
left to us by great narrative painters, animators and visual development
artists like Sargent, Rembrandt, Wyeth, Eyvind Earle, and Milt Kahl.
The student artist training to enter the world of the
entertainment industry must achieve technical mastery of color, line, value,
shape and composition, but that mastery cannot be solely intellectual. It must
be learned through muscle memory, through thousands of hours of drawing and
painting. I am an academic instructor who must convey technical information to
my students. I am also a coach offering strong, but kind words of encouragement
to keep going when their physical discipline of daily drawing and painting
fails. A professional in the entertainment arts is a master of technique, but
is first and foremost a master of the physical disciplines of daily drawing and
painting.
