The GDAD Interview series aims to explore the award-winning graphic design and advertising faculty. Each interview reveals the history of the teacher, the classes they teach, if they're working on any special group projects, and their perspective on creativity, learning, and art.
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Joey Cofone: How did you start drawing? What led you to where you are now, not so much in terms of teaching, but as an artist.
John Ruggeri: I think the fact that I was so quiet and shy, as far as I can go back. I remember spending a lot of time with my mother, so I was around a lot of adults. I was extremely watchful, just interested in how people gesticulated, their tone of voice, what they wore, how they smoked and held a cigarette. All this was fascinating to me. I found myself always with a pencil trying to copy what these people looked like. I didn't have much interest in going out of the four walls; I liked being indoors. I think that wanting to be protected, and feeling that I was good at something, even at four years old, drove me.
JC: Do you remember at what point you said, "This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life"?
JR: Four years old.
JC: Really? You loved it that much?
JR: This is totally true: Whenever someone mirrors a trait in you, that's what you're good at. My caretakers, my mother, my father, my grandparents—everyone whoever came into my sphere—always praised my drawings. It went without saying that my identity was being formed at four. The outside world did that to me, really, when you think about it. As individual as we think we are, the outside world is constantly impacting us, and it impacted me in a positive way. So I would say, all my life I knew who I was on that front. I'm John, the artist. There was never a question.
JC: You're given the task of taking these graphic designers, which, when I started, I remember someone telling me, "It's a weird thing, but most graphic designers don't like to draw." I know that there are many that do, but it seems to be true that the general feeling I get from graphic designers is that a lot of us don't enjoy drawing. With this in mind, how do you approach it in a way that engages these designers?
JR: Graphic designers, to me, seem very savvy. They come to me already having an understanding of the world, far more involved in the world than illustrators. On that front, they're more receptive. When they come into a drawing class they have nothing to lose, whereas an illustrator, cartooning, or fine art major comes into the classroom being self-protected. They don't want to let go of how they are. The graphic design students that I've had in the last decade, with this whole idea of breaking down everything in the world into a shape, they're much more open to that idea, to look at the world as if you were an alien.
JC: Would you say that graphic designers lean towards the conceptual, then?
JR: Yes, conceptual and I think you're more free because you have nothing to lose. You come into the class understanding the idea of me speaking graphics. You know, "the figure is a graphic." Everything you're looking at is broken down into positive, negative, vertical, horizontal, diagonal—all of that—and it's relating to you.
JC: There was a time a friend of mine came to visit your class, a non-artist. You happened to give a lecture that day on how we need to draw what we see, not what we think we see. I suppose, as visual artists, we've heard that before and understand where it's coming from, but I think we may forget how impactful that is, because my friend was blown away. He couldn't stop talking about it for days. How do you try to break that barrier down when you're teaching?
JR: It's complex, but it's not so complex. You have to split your attention down the middle, and give half of it to your ordinary momentum, which is what you're presently doing. For example, right now, we're talking and I'm aware of what I'm saying, that I'm looking into your eyes. As I'm speaking, I have to make an effort to also look at the your shape as some kind of abstraction, and not lose what I'm seeing. It's difficult to combine thinking and looking. What happens is, language is constantly moving in your head, it's the barrier you're talking about. Like you're nodding your head now, it's automatic, what's going on in that head of yours is chatter. It's making some kind of a critique.
JC: I'm labeling everything.
JR: Me too, as I'm speaking. Now it's not necessarily negative, it just means we have a commentary running all the time. When you become aware that that's going on all of a sudden there's a shift, and your associations calm down a bit. Words have taken a back seat. You can start seeing almost one step removed.
JC: So it goes from what we see to our hands without some sort of mental labeling and translation.
JR: Yes! That's it, very clearly.
JC: One last question. You teach a class where you take students all over New York City and draw. If you could take your class anywhere in the world, where would you go?
JR: I have no interest in travel. Going to another country does not interest me at all, I can find everything I need in this room. I must say, I feel this strongly, in my bedroom there's a crack that, no matter how much I paint the room, eventually it comes up. I prefer it to a sunset. I love the tension, the vertical of the door, I love the hinge in relation to it. [Points to a small pock mark in the desk.] If I didn't bring this to your attention, this poor soul would live in eternity never being seen. This little imperfection, we just validated it.
JC: That's beautiful. And I don't know about you, but when I see something like that I wonder how it got there. What's the story behind it? It makes it even more beautiful.
JR: Yes! I totally understand that.
JC: Thanks, John.
JR: Thank you.
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