New York

James McMullen started what looks to be an interesting and worthwhile online commentary about drawing in The New York Times’ ‘Opinionator’ this week entitled Getting Back to the Phantom Skill. McMullen contends that drawing, for many people, “is that phantom skill they remember having in elementary school, when they drew with great relish and abandon,” which then “tended to wither in most students’ lives and, by high school, had become the specialized province of those one or two art geeks who provided the cartoons for the yearbook and made the posters for the prom.”

The first few columns of this series promise to offer a primer on the basic elements of line-making, perspective, structure and proportion, which McMullen hopes “will begin to rekindle the love of drawing for those readers who left it behind in the 4th grade.”

Follow the commentary as it rolls out over the next 12 weeks here.

Drawings above are from McMullen’s first post; the top one by him; the lower one by William Kentridge (from Stereoscope, 1998–99), courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, © 2010 William Kentridge.