Why drawing at all
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida added something to the curriculum that no other body-work school had ever attempted: a drawing studio that ran in parallel with the table work. Students drew blocks, then gesture-drew human figures, then drew each other. The premise was simple and radical at once: a practitioner who cannot see a body in three dimensions cannot do the work, and the test of whether you can see it is whether you can render it. She did not stage this as art appreciation or as a creative outlet. She staged it as the discipline that builds the eye the hands depend on. In one of the conversations preserved on the Part III leftovers tape, a student named Joe pressed her on whether the drawing classes should follow a fixed program — should we be told today we are drawing blocks, tomorrow gesture, the next day figures? Ida's reply turned the question on its head.
"Well, I think my view of this is that that's a mistaken point of view about what drawing is. That if you you have it in your head, it's not in your head. It is in a constant I mean, Rembrandt drew every day for two to four hours every morning of his life. And this this this is one of the great masters. And to stay in touch with humanity, which is what he was reaching for, he kept drawing. And that was his way of staying in touch. And to get the idea of touching with a pencil was something you have to be there to do. It's not it doesn't work in the head. It just doesn't work there. The touch is here. The touch is there. That's my view of it. Well, I think I think back of all I think in terms of drawing for, in relation to Rolfing, we have to keep in touch with the actual factors that Rolfing is dealing with."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, responding to a student who wanted a syllabus for the drawing exercises:
The Rembrandt reference is not decorative. Ida is arguing that the act of touching the world through a pencil is the same kind of act — neurologically, structurally — as touching it through fingers. Both require a perceptual loop that runs through the eyes, into the hands, and back out into a mark on a page or a change in fascia. To get the idea of touching with a pencil, she says, was something you have to be there to do. It doesn't work in the head. The same is true of the work itself: no amount of reading anatomy will substitute for the practitioner's hand actually making contact with what is under it. Drawing rehearses that contact in a lower-stakes medium.
The pencil and the hand recognize the same thing
The central doctrine — the one that gives this topic its weight in Ida's late teaching — is the parallelism between what the pencil recognizes and what the hand recognizes. If you can see, through a pencil, that a person's ankles have collapsed and what that collapse is doing further up the body, then you have the perceptual apparatus required to do something about it manually. If you cannot, no amount of technique will save you, because you will be applying technique to a body you cannot actually see. In a discussion in the Part III leftovers, a student named Marjorie's case came up — a woman whose ankles a colleague had been unable to read — and Ida used the example to land the doctrine.
"about if you have the recognition of how you could do this with a pencil, you would also have the recognition of how to approach it to do it with your hands."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder leftovers, on what the drawing exercise actually trains:
This is a strong claim and worth pausing on. Ida is not saying that drawing is a metaphor for the work, or a useful adjunct, or a way to relax between sessions. She is saying that the perceptual capacity itself is one capacity, expressed in two media. The practitioner who has not built that capacity through some discipline — drawing being one of the few she trusted — will see only what they already know to look for. The drawing studio in the 1975 class was her attempt to build that capacity in a generation of practitioners who, by her account, had been taught technique without ever being taught seeing.
"You can do this from now till the day the undertaker catches up with you and you really know something."
Ida, on the open-ended nature of the discipline:
This is also a structural claim about how the practitioner's skill develops. There is no point at which a practitioner has finished learning to see, just as there is no point at which Rembrandt finished learning to draw. The discipline is a continuous re-engagement with what is in front of you. Ida's vision for the practitioner's training included this open-endedness as a feature, not a bug — the work is not a technique to be acquired and then deployed, but a perceptual practice to be deepened over a working life.
Drawing blocks vs. drawing the living
An exchange that ran through several afternoons of the 1975 class concerned the difference between drawing inorganic blocks (the introductory exercise) and gesture-drawing a living body. Two students, Joe and Jack, had had prior schooling in mechanical drawing and resisted the block exercise as repetitive. Ida pressed them on what they had missed. The difference, in her account, was not a difference of difficulty but a difference of ontology: blocks are an aggregate whose whole equals the sum of the parts, whereas a living body is a structure in which the placement of one part determines where every other part has to go. The whole, in a body, is greater than the sum of the parts — and that greater-ness is what the practitioner has to be able to see.
"I mean, it's a It's just a different But, I mean, the other is definitely seen. Well, yeah. The other is definitely seen, but the other isn't definitely seen in a living structure. See, in a living structure, where you put one part determines where every other part has to go. This isn't so if you've got inorganic blocks. But in a living structure, everything determines everything else, And it is that relationship, that everything determines everything else trip, that gives you the whole being greater than the parts. If you're doing drawing a series of a series of mechanical drawings of blocks, you have a whole equal to the sum of the parts. But when you're dealing with a living structure, you have the whole much greater than the sum of the parts in accordance with the relations between the parts. And in that sense, your parts there are reflecting the greater whole, greater atmospheric whole of how is it placed in gravity, how is it placed in space, is it vertical, etcetera, etcetera. That's different and an entirely different trip because in order to make it convincing even there, have to compensate one block to another. And you see this whole business of drawing blocks is really a meditation on that same thing, what is a whole. What is a whole at various levels within the universe that you're dealing in?"
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder leftovers, on why drawing blocks and drawing a body are not the same kind of seeing:
Notice what this passage demands of the practitioner. To see a body 'seeingly' is to see it as a system of mutual determinations: this shoulder is where it is because that pelvis is where it is, the cervicals are forward because the rectus is short, the right ankle has collapsed and that collapse has reorganized everything above it. Drawing blocks teaches the eye to register relationship at the simplest possible level — five blocks, each one shifted to compensate for the others. Drawing a body teaches the eye to register the same kind of relationship in a far more complex system, where the compensations propagate everywhere. Ida's pedagogical claim is that you can't skip the block stage and go straight to the body, because the seeing isn't yet there.
See also: See also: T1SB (1975 Boulder advanced class, Tape 1 Side B) — Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube and the related notion that 'when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body,' which Ida cites as the structural counterpart to what gesture drawing teaches the eye to see. T1SB ▸
Gesture drawing as a meditation on the whole
Gesture drawing — the rapid sketching that captures movement and proportion before detail — became, in the 1975 class, the practice Ida valued most for advanced students. It is not concerned with accurate rendering. It is concerned with grasp: the practitioner's ability to seize the whole of what they are looking at before the parts come into focus. A student named Frances reported afterward that gesture drawing had become for her a meditative seeing practice, and she connected it explicitly to a balance she had been seeking between subjective seeing and the more measurement-based work the class also required. Ida endorsed this reading.
"But then when you use this gesture drawing of blocks, it was it just I mean, you don't gesture draw blocks. And that put a whole different gesture drawing is a concept of the whole, which is a free effort to get a grasp of the movement listed in the total. I know. I don't agree with these two boys at all. They've done that before, but they haven't done it seeingly. They didn't realize that they hadn't done it seeingly. Joe threw it away completely."
Ida, defining what gesture drawing is:
The structural point is that no inventory of parts will ever add up to a body. The practitioner who tries to read a body part by part — checking the ankles, then the knees, then the pelvis, then the shoulders — will miss what a single gesture-drawing glance can deliver: the integrated impression of how this person is held together, where the major compensations are running, what is pulling against what. Gesture drawing trains the practitioner to see the body at the level of organization at which the work has to happen. It is not a substitute for anatomical knowledge; it is the perceptual frame within which anatomical knowledge becomes useful.
"And I felt there was a lot of validation for the fact that seeing is subjective and it added a balance to me to the emphasis on measurement. And I began through the way in which it was being taught to be able to approach my own negativity toward measurement. I felt that a lot of the ingredients you had there in that spectrum were very valuable, and I think that having the auditors doing that in the daytime would be a wonderful way for them to integrate all the input they're getting in the class and to physically and spiritually experience themselves doing that. I felt as a process it was very valuable. And I think adding another process could be valuable too, but I think that the the way in which you had access to teaching that included that kind of exercise. And I saw your drawing after you did the the measurement thing. You know, I was struggling to with the measurement of these blocks."
A student reporting on her own experience with gesture drawing, with Ida's affirming context:
The student's report is worth quoting because it confirms, from a participant's perspective, what Ida was after pedagogically. The drawing exercise was not producing skilled draftsmen. It was producing practitioners whose seeing had shifted, and the shift was registered in their work on the table. Several students reported during the 1975 class that they were drawing spontaneously between sessions, that their evaluations of incoming bodies had become more dimensional, that they were noticing relationships they had previously missed.
Drawing as a tool the practitioner carries with them
One of the most striking outcomes of the 1975 drawing studio was that students began to draw on their own, outside the class, as a way of processing what they were seeing on the table. A student in the round-up discussion at the end of the Part III leftovers reported that she had begun drawing spontaneously, almost as a reflex of attention — and that the practice itself had become something she enjoyed and returned to. Ida treated this as the right outcome, the sign that the discipline had taken root.
"I found myself drawing spontaneously at times as if it were a tool that I had. And I enjoyed that very much."
A student reporting on the drawing studio's after-effect:
Drawing as a tool means: something the practitioner reaches for, the way they reach for a particular kind of pressure or a particular direction of stretch on the table. It is one of the working instruments of the trade. The student's phrasing — 'as if it were a tool that I had' — captures what Ida meant when she spoke of the practitioner's seeing as an active, deployable capacity rather than a passive receptivity. You bring the drawing eye to bear on a body the way you bring a knuckle or an elbow to bear on a fascial plane.
"I wanna get Joe Heller to see whether this experiment improved his seeing at all because I'm very sure that Joe's tunnel vision is question of his eyes rather than himself. How about you, David? Well, what it did for me was open up some more possibilities. I found that the most important thing was not what I drew but the fact of being there, you know, sitting there and doing the thing. The slight changes in the curves of the face created a whole different image. Joe, let me ask you, how many of those classes did you go to? Very few. So, of course, you couldn't be expected to have gotten an improved vision from them. I don't think so. Didn't it occur to you that that kind of exercise for your eyes might give you a much better seeing, little better seeing, better eye mechanics? The first few that I attended were very basic drawing things that I had done several times in school before, and I didn't get my."
Ida, polling the class on the drawing studio's effect on their seeing:
The diagnostic Ida applies here is worth noting. When a student has not benefited from the drawing exercise, her first move is not to question the exercise but to look at the student's perceptual equipment — and specifically at how they were using their eyes. Joe's tunnel vision recurs as a theme across the 1975 tapes; Ida treats it as a structural problem in his seeing, the same kind of problem the drawing class was designed to address. The lesson is that the drawing studio is not a one-size-fits-all add-on; it is a discipline whose value depends on what each practitioner brings to it and how much they engage.
Drawing as a teaching tool in the clinic
Drawing also entered Ida's teaching as a literal tool in the table room. In the 1975 Boulder class, working with a student named John on a body called Takashi, she repeatedly called for chalk and asked John to mark on the body itself — drawing the horizontals of the shoulders, the tie-up points, the lines of stress. This is drawing as live diagnostic notation, performed on the surface of the body the practitioner is about to work on. It functions both as the practitioner's own record of what they have seen and as a visible communication to the rest of the class about where the work is going to address itself.
"Again, if you're drawing a horizontal across at the tips of the shoulders there, See how much that is compressed and drawn in as opposed to the other side. Why don't you take a piece of chalk or something on his back? Somebody got a piece of chalk? What I see is this is almost counter rotated to that lower leg. Right. And that there's a that there's something carrying over down. You got a piece of chalk? Chalk is coming. Chalk is gone. John, I think that it will help, especially the auditors, to see the points of major stress pulling in there, you see, by taking chalk on the bottom and getting a technique for this. If you were making a drawing on a piece of A grease paper pencil would be ideal. Oh, yeah. But let's not get the pig eye on one. Well, you can see the shortening that's taking place here."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, directing a student to chalk-mark a body for the auditors:
This is drawing in its most literal form — chalk on skin — but the perceptual operation is the same one Ida had spent weeks teaching in the drawing studio. The practitioner registers a relationship through the eyes, and then renders it visible: in this case, with a stick of chalk on a living back. The rendering forces the practitioner to commit to a reading and lets everyone in the room — practitioner, auditors, and ideally the client — share the same diagnostic picture. It is the public form of the seeing that gesture drawing had been training in private.
"The thing that would be so enlightening would be to have a drawing of the body with an underlay of where where the deep hookup is."
Ida, to John, on what she has been asking him for over many sessions:
The 'deep hookup' is the phrase Ida used for the fascial relationships that lie below the visible surface of the body — the lines of pull that determine why the shoulders are where they are or why the rib cage rotates one way rather than another. A drawing that registers only the outline misses the work. A drawing that includes the underlay — the practitioner's reading of what is pulling on what — becomes a genuine working document. This is the drawing Ida wanted students to be making, and in 1975 she was clear that no one had yet produced one she considered adequate.
"a drawing. The thing that would be so enlightening would be to have a drawing of the body with an underlay of where where the deep hookup is. This this is my intention with the blocks relative to the body that we're by way of the blocks hopefully discovering the gross aberrations and then going into the anatomy books and supporting that by drawing and exploring what the possibilities are in a circular system. See how they affect each other. Then we'll really have a new anatomy."
Ida, continuing the same exchange, on what the drawing would actually be for:
The phrase 'a new anatomy' is significant. Ida is not interested in drawing as a way of illustrating existing anatomy. She is interested in drawing as a way of generating a kind of anatomical knowledge that doesn't yet exist in the medical-school books — the structural-relational anatomy of fascial planes and reciprocal tensions and circular determinations. The drawing studio in 1975 was, in this sense, a research program as much as a pedagogical exercise. Five years, she said, might be the timeline. What was being trained in students was both the perceptual capacity to do the work and the perceptual capacity to eventually write the book that would describe it.
What the drawing taught about the rectus, the cervicals, and the chain
On the same tape, working through Takashi's structure, the drawing exercise yielded a specific structural insight that Ida wanted the class to grasp. The rectus abdominis was pulling the cervicals forward — a fact visible in a gesture drawing of Takashi from the side, but not visible if you read the body part by part. The drawing made the chain explicit: shortness in the rectus pulls the rib cage down and forward, which pulls the cervicals forward, which means that work on the cervicals without addressing the rectus will not hold. This is exactly the kind of relational reading the drawing studio had been training.
"I think another thing that's noteworthy in looking at Takashi with respect to where we are on the map is that the rectus is also pulling his cervicals forward and you begin to see how the shortening in the front Good. Now continue with that, Jan, and turn Takashi around and with your chalk or with your fingers, point to where you see the the recti of dominion. The The rectus. Mark it, mark it, mark it. Must die. Yes. There is an intersection of fascial areas here. That the fascia which comes over the pectorals and so on is being held down by the shortness in the recti and where you see its influence is up here, that it's also bringing his cervicals forward. So when you start working to free this fascia in here that covers the rectus and making some separation between the pectorals and the rectus, you will begin to see his cervical vertebra set back probably for the first time. And I would project forward and say that this would be an opportunity to start doing some more work on his neck to sort of pick up that Wouldn't you just naturally do it if you don't project?"
Ida, working with Jan on Takashi, showing how the drawing reveals the rectus-cervical chain:
This passage is the clearest demonstration in the topic of what drawing actually does for the practitioner. It is not a contemplative practice or an aesthetic discipline. It is the perceptual tool that makes the structural chain visible — the chain from rectus to rib cage to cervicals — and that lets the practitioner sequence the work accordingly. The student who can see this chain through a gesture drawing can address it through their hands. The student who cannot see the chain will keep working on the cervicals and wondering why nothing holds.
The seeing eye, the seeing hand, and the problem of equipment
A recurring theme in the 1975 leftovers is that some students could not benefit from the drawing studio because their visual equipment itself was compromised. Tunnel vision, lack of binocular coordination, untrained eyes that had dropped out of school art classes — these were perceptual deficits the drawing exercise both revealed and partially addressed. Ida was clear that this was not a side issue. The practitioner's eyes are their first instrument, and an uneducated set of eyes will produce uneducated hands.
"Well, I think I think back of all I think in terms of drawing for, in relation to Rolfing, we have to keep in touch with the actual factors that Rolfing is dealing with. For example, right here, I think that the relation of people's eyes makes a great deal of difference, and that people who have no coordination between the two eyes will not be seeing the same or as easily. They have to go through a whole period of training where they interpret what they see between those two eyes. Now you see in an ordinary art class, the people who have trouble with their eyes don't get in there with that kind of trouble with their eyes. They don't get in there. It's too hard for them. They drop out, etcetera, etcetera, before they get there."
Ida, on the equipment students bring to the drawing class:
This is a striking inversion of the usual logic of pedagogy. Most teachers assume the eyes work and the question is what to do with them. Ida assumes the eyes may not work, and that the first job is to find out what is in the way. Joe's tunnel vision recurs as the test case; Ida returns to it in multiple passages across the 1975 tapes. Her diagnostic is that no amount of drawing instruction will help Joe until the underlying perceptual problem is addressed, and that the drawing class itself is one of the few settings in which the problem becomes visible at all.
"not be seeing the same or as easily. They have to go through a whole period of training where they interpret what they see between those two eyes. Now you see in an ordinary art class, the people who have trouble with their eyes don't get in there with that kind of trouble with their eyes. They don't get in there. It's too hard for them. They drop out, etcetera, etcetera, before they get there. But here, you have a relatively captive audience, and you have to begin to understand what is the physical equipment with which they're coming to that drawing class too. I think all of those we need to know and we need to explore, John. I think Joe's situation is is typical of it. Somebody didn't get busy and really make him use his eyes make him use his eyes as interpreters."
Ida, continuing the discussion of perceptual equipment in the drawing class:
The implication is large. If the practitioner's seeing depends on binocular coordination — on the eyes' ability to deliver a single, three-dimensional reading of what is in front of them — then a practitioner with poor binocular coordination is, in a structural sense, partially blind to the work. They will see a flat picture and try to make three-dimensional changes in it. Drawing, especially block drawing and gesture drawing, requires the practitioner to register depth, and in registering depth on the page, to retrain depth perception itself. This is one of Ida's quieter but more radical claims: that the drawing studio is rehabilitative for the practitioner's perceptual apparatus, not just instructive.
The two-dimensional and the three-dimensional
Joe — the student whose tunnel vision Ida kept returning to — offered, in one of the final discussions, a suggestion that struck Ida as one of the most useful contributions to the curriculum. He proposed that the drawing exercises be paired with sculpting exercises on the same subject. His own French-school experience had been that rendering a figure on paper was one thing; rendering the same figure in three dimensions was another thing entirely, and that the failure of his own training had been the absence of a bridge between the two. Ida agreed immediately.
"that I've been yearning to do myself. I had in my last year of drawing in the French schools, I had that experience of of, you know, doing drawing and then the teacher had us do a sculpting trip on the same subject. And I found that it was such a totally different Although I was able to render the drawing fairly well, I was completely lost at first in trying to represent the same thing in the three dimension space. And he never really had the breakthrough between the two dimensional and the three-dimensional, and this is what you see in his processing here. See, always it's the straight line. It's the limited line, not the volume. I've been we've been screaming at each other about that ever since the first day you got into the class. Now it's anybody's guess whether this kind of a technique would remedy it, but god knows it would be worth playing with. And it would I think that's a really valuable suggestion. Yes. Very valuable. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really valuable suggestion you've given, Joe."
Joe, in the Part III leftovers, proposing a sculpting component; Ida endorsing the diagnosis:
The exchange is revealing in two ways. First, it shows Ida treating the drawing curriculum as a live, unfinished project that students could and should contribute to. Joe's suggestion is taken seriously, not because Joe was a star student but because he had identified the specific perceptual gap the drawing studio had not yet bridged. Second, it names the gap: the difference between rendering a contour and registering a volume. A practitioner who only sees contours will work the surface of a body and miss its depth. A practitioner who can see volume will be working with the body's actual mass and the fascial relationships that organize it.
Seeing the change in living time
One of the most remarkable reports from the 1975 drawing studio came from a student who had been sketching while watching Ida work on Takashi. The student described seeing, in real time, structural changes propagate to places no one would have predicted — the part in Takashi's hair shifting as Ida worked a specific rib. The drawing discipline had given the student access to a register of perception that ordinary watching had not. This is the strongest endorsement Ida received during the class for what she had been trying to build.
"And if if you had been there, you might have experienced something more because it it really came in later. A a very personal place. And one morning after one of those classes, was watching Ida Rolfing Takashi, and she was doing a shoulder girdle hour on him. And I was watching and I started sketching it and I suddenly saw something I know I would never have seen. And I saw the part in his hair change shape and move over. No way. But, you know, when you were on a certain rib, and I know that I wouldn't have seen that. Now that's you know, I wonder whether we can make some money out of that. It's like a boob beauty shop for changing all women's parts are by by working on their ribs. Why don't we try that? God knows we need money. He isn't the only one that knows it either. What? Who are unleashing the world. You see, these are the kinds of things that absolutely fascinate me as to the possibilities of visual experience and and mind seeing that that is just not available to anybody anywhere in the world right now. And I think that we have here within this this work the potential for something that's far out, really.
A student reporting a perceptual experience during a drawing session watching Ida work:
The student's experience is the kind of report that Ida treated as confirming evidence for the drawing curriculum. The discipline had done something to the student's seeing that the student herself could not have predicted, and what it had revealed was precisely the kind of distant structural connection — work on a rib producing a visible change at the scalp — that constitutes the working hypothesis of the entire practice. If the body is a single fascial whole, changes in one place must propagate everywhere. Drawing trained the eyes to register the propagation.
See also: See also: UNI_072 (Open Universe Class 1974) — Ida's broader teaching on body image, on how kinesthetic feedback integrates sensory input, and on how 'the physical body is created by you at any moment' as the conceptual frame within which the practitioner's drawing-seeing operates. UNI_072 ▸
Drawing in the 1976 advanced class: horizontals and dynamics
By the 1976 advanced class in New Jersey, Ida had absorbed the lessons of the 1975 drawing studio into her broader teaching about how the practitioner should see the body's three dimensions. She no longer ran a separate drawing studio in the same form, but the language of drawing — of horizontals, of the visual registration of dynamic structure — had become a regular feature of her advanced-class teaching. In one passage she compares two ways of drawing the same body: as a static, well-balanced figure (technically correct but inadequate) versus as a dynamic structure whose horizontals function as hinges.
"been a good artist and you're drawing a picture of Charlotte as she stood there, said, Mine, that's a fine, well balanced woman. But it wasn't a sufficiently dynamic woman. You see, this dynamic element depends on the horizontals. There are other elements that depend on the verticals. And when you get into the advanced hours, you begin to need to see, need to feel really horizontals because it's those horizontals that act as hinges. And those hinges should be straight horizontal. Now are you looking at these pictures and seeing them while you're just listening? What I'm talking about is not anatomy. I don't know what to call it. It's just horse sense, I guess. It's the application of the sense of dynamics. And right there your information about anatomy falls down."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, on the difference between static and dynamic seeing:
The 1976 formulation refines the 1975 doctrine. The drawing studio had taught practitioners to see relationship; the 1976 teaching specifies what kind of relationship matters most at the advanced level. It is the horizontals — the planes at the knees, at the elbows, at the shoulders, at the pelvis — that determine whether a body is dynamically organized or only statically stacked. A drawing that captures these horizontals captures the body's structural availability for movement. A drawing that captures only the vertical line captures something less alive.
"This feeling of where that body belongs in space, This feeling of where horizontals are. Yesterday, can you remember what Charlotte looked like as she stood before you for evaluation? She was beautifully stacked but you didn't have the feeling of the various horizontal hinges on which which she you had had to to move. Move. Does this make sense to any of you? Do you know what I'm talking about? But she was beautifully stacked. Mean, if you've been a good artist and you're drawing a picture of Charlotte as she stood there, said, Mine, that's a fine, well balanced woman. But it wasn't a sufficiently dynamic woman. You see, this dynamic element depends on the horizontals. There are other elements that depend on the verticals. And when you get into the advanced hours, you begin to need to see, need to feel really horizontals because it's those horizontals that act as hinges."
Ida, continuing in the 1976 class, on what notetaking and drawing do to the practitioner's seeing:
The pairing of notetaking with drawing under the same rubric — both are ways of putting perceptual information through the muscular system — clarifies what Ida thought drawing was doing neurologically. The eyes alone are overloaded. They take in more than the practitioner can metabolize. The hand, by contrast, has a slower bandwidth and a closer connection to the practitioner's working understanding. To draw what you see is to filter it through your own body, and what passes through is what you have actually understood. The unfiltered visual flood doesn't stick.
Drawing and the problem of teaching
Ida returned, in both the 1975 leftovers and the public tapes, to a problem that the drawing studio had brought sharply into focus: the absence of adequate anatomical drawings of fascia for teaching purposes. The standard anatomy textbooks rendered muscles and bones but did not register the fascial relationships that the work actually depends on. The training of new teachers was being held back, in her view, partly by this absence. She had no artist she could call on to make the kind of drawing she needed.
"And so that this becomes a problem for some of you, whereas actual processing becomes a problem for many of you. The problem of teaching and what is missing in the teaching picture and how to supply it and what kind of pictures we can get and where we can get an artist who can make a picture of fascia which conveys the idea of fascia. Now this becomes a major problem, and I don't know of such a man. Bob Lennon cannot do it. This I know before I start. I don't know of any artist who knows enough about bodies that even by putting him through what you've been put through here, it's going to really convey it to him. How about Jovan? Does she draw as well as stuff? She claims she doesn't. She's been absolutely unwilling to take on any of that drawing work. She doesn't even do such a thing as correct Landman's drawings when it's perfectly obvious to me what's wrong with them except I can't do it. And I would have expected that Giovanna could."
Ida, on the public RolfA5 tape, on the gap between what the training needs and what visual materials exist:
This is the larger horizon within which the drawing studio fits. Ida was not running it just to make better individual practitioners. She was trying to seed a generation of practitioners whose seeing was developed enough that some of them, eventually, would produce the visual materials that the training itself needed. The new anatomy she spoke of in the 1975 class — the relational, fascial, dynamic anatomy that does not yet exist in textbooks — could only be produced by practitioners who could see it. And practitioners could only see it if they had been trained to draw.
"With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it. I do think that sooner or later, someone of us has to be smart enough to really trace out facial patterns of the shoulder girdle and facial patterns of the hip girdle. Because you see this is what we've been dealing with. And then there is the problem of the connection between say the tenth rib and the crest of the ileum which is another fascial problem. But how do these hip girdle fascia fit together with the fascia that enwraps the obliques for instance? Now if the fascial patterns were as clear to us as the muscular patterns are, I think there would be a great deal less problem in teaching this if there were a book to which we could refer about how those fascial planes run as we refer back to our anatomies here as to how the muscular patterns run. It might be that it would be easier to turn our practitioners who understood they were dealing with facial bodies."
Ida, continuing on the public tape, on the verbalization problem and the absence of fascial maps:
The poignant thing about this passage is that Ida is acknowledging, in the public tape, the limits of what she has been able to build. The drawing studio is a partial answer to a problem she has not solved. The fascial maps do not exist. The teaching is harder than it needs to be because the visual record is missing. What she has done is train practitioners to begin generating that record from inside the work — and she has identified drawing as the discipline most likely to develop the kind of seeing that could eventually produce it.
Coda: drawing as the practitioner's open-ended discipline
What emerges from these passages is a coherent late-career argument about drawing as one of the few disciplines that builds the practitioner's actual working capacity. It is not an art-school adjunct. It is not a hobby. It is the parallel medium in which the perceptual operation of the work gets rehearsed and refined. The pencil and the hand recognize the same kind of structural relationship, and the practitioner who develops one develops the other. In her final summary statement on the studio, given in the Part III leftovers, Ida laid out the position in its full open-ended form.
"That's a that's a point because my feeling was there wasn't what you were giving us was a suggestion. We needed to go out and work at it for a couple of hours a day or something, and it just wasn't time to do that. Right. Yeah. Well, but wanna do so. It was like No law that says you can't go back to your own workroom and and as people go in and go out, register what has been going on. Yeah. You can do this from now till the day the undertaker catches up with you and you really know something."
Ida, closing the Part III leftovers discussion, on what the drawing discipline becomes after the class ends:
The practical instruction is the central point. Drawing is not something the practitioner does in a class and then leaves behind. It is something the practitioner does in their own workroom, in front of their own clients, for the rest of their working life — and that continuing engagement is what actually develops the seeing that the work requires. The 1975 studio was a beginning, not a completed program. Ida treated it that way and expected her students to treat it the same way. The discipline, like the work, is open-ended.
See also: See also: RolfA3Side2 — Ida's discussion of how seers perceive 'an energy body' and the matching of pattern body to physical body, which provides the perceptual frame within which the practitioner's drawing-seeing eventually operates at its most developed. RolfA3Side2 ▸
See also: See also: UNI_044 (Open Universe Class 1974) — broader Ida teaching on how fascia is the organ of structure and on how the practitioner's hands experience the warming and melting of glued fascial planes; relevant context for the claim that drawing trains the same perception the hands deploy. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: B3T5SA (1975 Boulder advanced class, Tape 3 Side A) — Ida and a colleague on the relationship of practitioner to client and on the projection of awareness toward another being, which complements the drawing material on how the practitioner's perception reaches out into the body. B3T5SA ▸
See also: See also: 76ADV281 (1976 advanced class) — Ida pressing students on whether their study of fascial planes has changed their working perception of the body, which extends the drawing argument into the advanced practitioner's mature seeing. 76ADV281 ▸
See also: See also: UNI_064 (Open Universe Class 1974) — Ida on spontaneity at different levels of training, from undirected to artist-grade, which clarifies what kind of spontaneity she meant when she endorsed students drawing 'spontaneously' as a tool. UNI_064 ▸
See also: See also: 76ADV261 (1976 advanced class) — Ida on visualizing fascial planes and on the role of muscular activity in forming the practitioner's mental image of the work, which is the late-career extension of the drawing curriculum's central claim. 76ADV261 ▸