Drawing From Turner

'Drawing From Turner' was an exhibition at Tate Britain, designed to test the worth of copying fine examples from museum collections as an active component within a drawing currriculum today. Farthing led this collaborative project, with Nicola Moorby, Collections Registrar - Prints and Drawings Tate Britain, and Professor Maryanne Martin, Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Today within tertiary fine art education there are few shared assumptions concerning the value of teaching drawing as a discrete subject and of drawing course curriculum content. A group of 24 artists, students and graduates were invited to forensically draw from one of thirty drawings by Turner selected by the organizers from the Turner Bequest. The goal was to better understand the role of copying in the process of developing drawing skills. The methodology was dependant on each participant submitting to a practical exercise then completing a questionaire designed to interrogate the worth (in their minds) of that exercise. The primary outcome was the exhibition of the origional Turner drawings and the copies, with text panels that recorded the participants’ responses to the research question. The exhibition catalogue explained the methodology and contained an analyisis of the questionaire