Turner Brooks

The first day of class I would get the students to arrange their chairs in a circle and then take off their shoes and throw them into middle of the 7th-floor pit in an ungainly heap.

Drawing shoes has a long history at Yale. I think shoes are a wonderful subject matter for several reasons. They have an individual portrait-like character and personality. One views their outside and inside simultaneously so the observer is dealing both with the shape of an object and its interior space. Often making a transition between the inside and outside is a key part of the drawing. Shoes also have a tactile presence of both softness and hardness.

The pile of shoes is a rich subject matter as it involves the individual object and the collective herd of objects in relationship of one to another. The way they intersect and the spaces between them are as important as the objects themselves. Often the best drawings come when I tell the class to draw the shoes while looking at the shoes and not at their paper. Here the forms of the inside, outside, and in-between zones blur to become a wonderful fluid evocation of a landscape of shoes.

—Turner Brooks