{"id":1918,"date":"2026-04-22T15:03:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T22:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/?p=1918"},"modified":"2026-04-22T15:04:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T22:04:50","slug":"on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-5-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/22\/on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-5-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 5: Transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This post is part of a series beginning with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/21\/tales-of-a-sabbatical-on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-1\/\">Tales of a Sabbatical: On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 1<\/a>. For February and March 2026, I was a student in\u00a0<em>CDSR 100 Introduction to Drawing\u00a0<\/em>(Continuing Studies) at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Throughout, I kept and analyzed a journal, in preparation for a\u00a0<em>Scholarly Personal Narrative\u00a0<\/em>(<a href=\"https:\/\/files.eric.ed.gov\/fulltext\/EJ1148441.pdf\">Ng &amp; Carney, 2017<\/a>) paper.\u00a0The question guiding my research is:\u00a0<em>What are my lived experiences of being a student in a new (to me) discipline? <\/em>I have posted part of my preparation, three attempts at narrative portraits (Rodr\u00edguez-Dorans &amp; Jacobs, 2020) with reflection in the style of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wiley.com\/en-us\/Becoming+a+Critically+Reflective+Teacher%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781119049708\">Brookfield (2017, Chapter 9)<\/a>. See<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/21\/on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-2-emotional-beginnings\/\">On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 2: Emotional Beginnings<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/21\/on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-3-practice-for-purpose\/\">On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 3: Practice for Purpose<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/22\/on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-4-i-dont-like-what-i-dont-practice\/\">On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 4: I don\u2019t like what I don\u2019t practice<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p>As I close this series, I will share my journal reflections from after our last class. First, I wanted to include a panel series of landscapes from Class #7. This series took me the entire 3h class period, and triggered in me an appreciation for repetition of images that speak to my heart. It&#8217;s a practice I have continued. This scene is a photograph I took standing on the footpath along Highway 3 in Osoyoos BC, looking South toward the US. It&#8217;s one of my favourite views.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1919\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1919\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1919\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Four panels of drawn same landscape. Distant mountains, water, then grass in the foreground.\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_-800x600.jpg 800w, https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/files\/2026\/04\/Rawn.CDSR100Landscapes.Day7_.jpg 1138w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1919\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Class #7: Practicing landscape with four mediums. Clockwise rom top left: compressed charcoal, conte, pen and marker, India ink (yes, India ink!).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&#8220;Which may be a nice place to segue into overall impressions of what I&#8217;ve learned about myself as a student. My goal was <em>to connect my heart to my students, to increase empathy for learning. <\/em>Learning is, at least for me, emotional. Deciding to attempt to learn something means acknowledging that there is something in me that could be <em>more<\/em> or <em>different<\/em>\u2026 it means <strong>being open to<\/strong> <strong>transformation<\/strong>. <strong>I couldn&#8217;t learn to <em>draw<\/em> without learning to focus my attention<\/strong> (on a line or shape or relationship), <strong>to see<\/strong> (a line or shape or relationship), <strong>to move my body<\/strong> (in a particular way using a particular tool) <strong>in new ways<\/strong>, <strong>to persist<\/strong> when things felt hard. I needed <strong>patience<\/strong>, got <strong>annoyed, unmotivated, extra-motivated, frustrated, joyful, inspired, surprised\u2026 <\/strong><em>all the feels<\/em>! But that&#8217;s learning. <strong>I felt vulnerable &#8212; I had to acknowledge I didn&#8217;t know something, and <em>lean into it anyway. <\/em>To push through the discouragement when it didn&#8217;t feel I was making progress, and celebrate the littlest of wins. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Learning in class was essential to my sustained motivation and learning, especially through periods of discouragement. <\/strong>I learned <em>more<\/em> in community because I learned from my neighbours who had different past experience and goals than I did. They also pointed out strengths I didn&#8217;t see myself, and helped me celebrate the little wins (including ones I would have been too hard on myself to admit). And they used materials, made marks differently &#8212; their techniques were different and I could learn from them. The curriculum also exposed me to things I never would have accessed before, especially the gift of live human models! Which was a revelation that led me to try mirror self-portraits (vs. photos), and plan for <em>en plen air<\/em> landscapes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I now look differently at the world sometimes <\/strong>because I&#8217;m thinking about the shadow or the lines or how on earth one could make <em>that thing<\/em> look 3D in 2D. I<em> wonder<\/em> in different ways, about different things. But practicing art as a place to <em>feel<\/em>, even through technique drills or repetition\u2026 perhaps even <em>because<\/em> of technique drills and repetition\u2026 this is a revelation to me. It feels like drawing, art, could be prayerful. That intimacy with creation, taking it in through my senses, transforming it through soul and then letting it move through me onto the page\u2026 just the idea leaves me feeling a sense of awe. And now that my art is just for me and for God, really\u2026 this learning is transformative in a way that anything I teach couldn&#8217;t be. At least I don&#8217;t think so.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Except it did transform me, to learn the scientific method as applied to humans, didn&#8217;t it.<\/strong> To learn how to see a complex human behaviour, and somehow come up with a way to distill it, try to capture it in a measurement, transform a human experience into numerical form, to patch it together in a story that tells us something about human beingness that wasn&#8217;t quite known before. I <em>did<\/em> learn to focus my attention, to see, to move my body (if learning software and calculations counts!), and to persist when things felt hard. It&#8217;s not as poetic, sure, and the results aren&#8217;t as pretty\u2026 but sometimes they are. And I guess that&#8217;s true for art too&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>In art class, there were drills to \u201cjust\u201d be able to use the tools and learn to see. That was transformative in a technical way. <strong>I felt more profound transformation when my art (drills\/work) was engaging a subject matter I cared about or couldn\u2019t help but care about: a human subject, my own image, a landscape I\u2019d photographed. My heart, my emotions, my motivation increased \u2013 somehow those marks now mattered more.<\/strong> I was being transformed. Today I\u2019m thinking about the <u>intent<\/u> of art\u2026 when it is intended to transform not just oneself (or lesser still to showcase one\u2019s skills) but to transform those who receive it.. that\u2019s what makes a piece (I think!) impactful. <strong>Or maybe one makes art to transform self, and if others are transformed, great, if not, great <\/strong>(Liz Gilbert&#8217;s Big Magic). Yet this is the (heart? dance?) art of teaching \u2013 we are called to create, to transform ourselves (to learn to apply tools) with full intent to transform others. Because learning <u>is<\/u> transformative in some way (even a little) or it\u2019s not learning at all.<\/p>\n<p>Hunh. More to explore here, that&#8217;s for sure. Research. Teaching. Art. It&#8217;s all <em>creating<\/em> something by observing and transforming those observations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h4>Epilogue<\/h4>\n<p>The next day, my friend Lesley sent me this quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>\u201cA person who works with their hands is a laborer; a person who works with their hands and mind is a craftsperson; but a person who works with hands, mind, and heart is an artist.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I\u2019ve looked it up and although it\u2019s widely attributed to St. Francis of Assisi there\u2019s no evidence for that. Instead, looks like Louis Nizer wrote it (or similar) in 1948. Whoever said it, this progression captures how I feel about teaching these days, at this stage in my career. <strong>The realization of the fittingness of this analogy was made possible through this art class because it gave me such vivid experience of the interconnected movements of hand, mind,<\/strong> <strong>heart.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I am deeply grateful to the Instructor, to all my fellow students in CDSR 100, especially my closest neighbours, and to my encouraging family and friends (especially RAB and CER). And of course, I remain grateful for this spacious time of sabbatical, so I could rediscover the transformative heart of teaching and learning. It turns out transformation has always been central to my teaching philosophy. Yet I see it through new eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post is part of a series beginning with\u00a0Tales of a Sabbatical: On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 1. For February and March 2026, I was a student in\u00a0CDSR 100 Introduction to Drawing\u00a0(Continuing Studies) at Emily Carr University of <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2026\/04\/22\/on-becoming-a-student-of-drawing-part-5-transformation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  On Becoming a Student of Drawing, Part 5: Transformation<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[676942,4828,4279,109017,4826],"class_list":["post-1918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-drawing","tag-motivation","tag-personal-experiences","tag-renewal","tag-teaching-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1918"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1922,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions\/1922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}