Passion. No Blandisity. Two teachers from UC Berkeley don’t teach technique, at least not in the usual sense. They imbue their subject matter—and their students—with a new vitality. Their job is to breakdown barriers and change perspectives. Once you have insight you can dispense with the formulas. This is not your archetypal classroom workbook. It’s more of a playbook.
Inspired by his champion, Joseph Slusky, a longtime teacher at many schools in the Bay Area, but primarily at UC Berkeley, Chip Sullivan, a fellow Berkeley professor audited Slusky’s classes, took notes, notebooks full of scribbles, phrases, doodles, hoping to catch the essence of his inspiring mentor. Together they taught a popular introduction to drawing class at the College of Environmental Design. In the lexicon, they are both acknowledged as leading educators but those words belie their hands-on full immersion skills.
This manifesto is here to rally the tentative, rejuvenate the faltering and reward the determined. Slusky and Sullivan would say all that with words of their own—Vitalism, Visuology, the Vatic Line, the Nutritious Void, and that’s just one letter—leaving on the drawing board a publisher’s blurb sanctioned by Webster.
“…It forces the reader to go beyond that first impulse and dig deeper into the well, to go back and pull up the riches of the creative core within each of us, and explore the connection between the hand and heart…Like the realization of the passing on of genes and DNA, the creation of art from ideas is a powerful, unique art which gives shape and form to something that had been metaphysical before.”
—Alice La Pierre
“I bought it at the beginning of the semester and start ripping through it immediately. Each entry captures a minute aspect of what it is to draw and how to incorporate a spiritual component onto the piece of paper.”
—Tamy Chang
“The brief, fragmented style of writing is deceivingly simple–each idea is very dense with meaning and applicable to the beginning artist. Also highly quotable and fun!”
—Jenny S.
“You feel as if you would be in a real conversation with the author and artist. The varying letter sizes are refreshing and stress the important words. The ‘INTRODUCTION’ was very helpful to see where inspiration comes from how it develops. It reveals that artists do not have a God given gift that comes from nowhere.”
—Pia Habehost
“I really enjoyed reading it, and ended up finishing the entire book in one sitting!”
—Jerry Jai
“‘The Nutritious Void’ serves to wake the reader up to the realization that it’s not just what you draw, but how you draw it. Your marks help to create a cohesive whole and aids the subject in the process of Inhabiting the Page.”
—Michael Lollar