Ever since I was a boy in my native Camagüey, Cuba, my sense of the world and all there was to learn about it came from an intertwined "interdisciplinary" exposure to Cuban music (its rhythms and lyrics, both), stories read or told to me from the repertoire of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, and films or TV programs (both of adventure and of love). I treasured as much my collection of toy soldiers and dinosaurs as I did my books about Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, these for the most part quite lavishly illustrated. In short, I formed a strong image-based alphabet with which to "read" the world, enhanced in no small part by the adult conversations, mostly political in nature, which I sat in a corner to listen to in my grandparents' porch, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when that world began to fall apart, with the arrival in Cuba of Castro and his communist regime. 

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It is in great part for this reason that when I reached college age in the United States, and I began to explore a more classical, VISUAL side to the literature, history and science which I had to master for the college-entrance exams --- this more classical VISUAL side provided a large dosis of relief to me from all the dates, names, and equations in school that I experienced up to then. Fastforwarding what I wish to say in this essay regarding this expanded sense of learning and how it relates to learning how to draw in a more natural as well as intellectual way, please allow me to say that I had the great fortune of finding a challenging way to make a living, by teaching at the University of Miami's English Composition Department, the subject of, well, WRITING. In this capacity I not only taught the first-level composition classes to freshmen, but I had the honor of tutoring students of all ages who visited the Writing Center (or writing lab), helping them find thesis or topic sentences with which to strengthen their essays or reports. In these one-to-one sessions, my tutoring tutored me as well as the student who came to my table in these sessions, and I also found many a helpful technique or literary reference from the student's problem paper, with which my classroom work became more effective and even more free. 

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In those days (the 1990s), in fact, I turned my attention to illustrating various literary texts---including Ovid's Metamorphoses and Homer's Odyssey, as well as a small book of stories about the Cuban revolution, written by my late friend, Professor Ricardo Aguiar, or Rutgers University, who commissioned my pen & ink illustrations for his book.

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At the University of Miami Writing Center, our team of tutors and professors made the work of this department then quite successful and notorious in the best sense of the word. One of my colleagues was a writer in his 60s then, very much a story-teller in his own right, who at first godfathered me when I was initially hired by Ms. Pat Wellington and Mrs. Charlotte Perlin to join the institute. The said professor, Len, would often quote a phrase from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a phrase that I certainly remembered is said from the Freed Slave character, Nigger Jim, to the young Huck, as the two of them are navigating down the Mississippi River in their escape to Freedom. 

"Don't let school get in the way of your education," I would often hear Len exclaim during his own tutoring session in the large room where our work took place, and this fellow tutor would say cite this phrase to his "tutoree" to stress a very important point about rules and guidelines and their place in a well-constructed essay. Of course, Twain's phrase, which in the novel underscores the force of "Nigger" Jim's wisdom, vis-a-vis Huck Finn's lack thereof and the sense in this boy that he could thus lie his way through life and especially in his relation to this fellow escapee, Jim, --- this phrase could also be used successfully by a teacher, say, of writing, to warn students against too much reliance on rules or appearance, to the detriment of content and spirit.

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And this is the spirit and the idea behind the present web page about how to teach and learn to draw. The fact is, much of the learning I did in the course of my life came from live sessions before a subject, with my pencil and sketchbook in hand, and with classroom type lessons in my mind about how to "measure" the right size of objects I wished to draw, and how to place them in correct perspective with each other. But they also came from making errors, and erasing, or remembering something I had read regarding the subject or place I was sketching. For example, the drawing of the great, old wooden bed with its bedposts and the armoire nearby, and the small lamp, etc., comes from the same travel notebook which has the sketch of the boy with the white pants and no shirt, with the sailboat in back: from my Martinique sketchbook of 1986. As to the Moonlight Boy, turned into a large pastel painting, the boy from my sketchbook was positioned in a slightly different angle inside the page, and I toned down the atmosphere of the light (moonlight); but all this would come later, much later, after my trip to Martinique, when I would put together lessons learned in school, with travel notes, and with the narrative content I wished to impart to the scene.