Bomberg was deeply suspicious of the idea that art could be taught through a fixed method, so a “how to draw like Bomberg” guide would probably have horrified him. He wrote that art cannot be taught, though draughtsmanship can be taught to those with a natural gift. Elsewhere he argued that artists should find methods that suit them and that drawing must be taught freely. Yet his students remembered very specific things he asked them to do.
The exercises below are adapted from those recollections. Some translate documented studio practices into activities you can try at home. Others are our own experiments with the ideas those recollections suggest, and we’ve flagged which is which. Each “Try it” is our modern version, not a Bomberg instruction.
The room
From 1945 Bomberg taught in a repurposed engineering room at the Borough Polytechnic, at first two days a week and from 1947 just one. Frank Auerbach, who joined the class in 1947, later remembered its towering ceilings, tiled walls, and a door that kept swinging like a saloon door long after you’d come in. In some ways it was a conventional life room: students worked in paint or charcoal at easels and desks arranged around a live model. What was unusual was the teaching. Bomberg didn’t open with demonstrations; he went round giving each student close, individual feedback. Occasionally he drew or painted directly onto a student’s work to make a point.
Here at the Borough Road Gallery we care for A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection, which brings together work by Bomberg and by artists shaped by his teaching. Looking through it, you don’t see a single Bomberg style. You see many different answers to the questions he asked.
You don’t need a model to try these exercises. A person reading, a chair with a coat over it, a few objects on a table, or the view from a window will all do. What you need is time, and a willingness to make bad drawings.
You’ll need: willow or compressed charcoal, a putty rubber or eraser, cheap paper such as newsprint or lining paper (lots of it), and a subject that stays reasonably still. Each exercise takes 10–20 minutes.
1. Turn it upside down
Documented: Janina Baranowska’s recollection
Janina Baranowska, whose story we told in our last post, remembered that one of the first exercises in Bomberg’s studio was to copy an illustration turned upside down. When she showed him the result, he praised it and handed her another inverted image to copy.
Try it (10 minutes): Take a photograph or a reproduction of a drawing and turn it upside down. Copy it without turning it back until you’ve finished. Because the image is harder to recognise at a glance, you’re more likely to draw the shapes in front of you than what you think a nose or a hand looks like. Baranowska remembered it as an exercise that freed an inexperienced eye from convention.
2. Use a bigger lump of charcoal
Documented: Cliff Holden’s recollection
Cliff Holden recalled what Bomberg did when a student’s drawing was too fluent and elegant. He handed them a great lump of charcoal and cited Modigliani and Augustus John as artists who would tie the drawing tool to their big toe to escape the domination of a facile hand. Whether either of them actually did this is another matter. It’s how Bomberg made his point, as Holden remembered it.
Try it (15 minutes): If your lines come out neat, take the thickest piece of charcoal you have and draw the same subject again. You could also try our own addition: tape a stick of charcoal to the end of a ruler and hold the far end. You may find detail harder to control. That’s the point: it shifts your attention to the big shapes and to where the weight sits.
3. Stay where you are
Documented: a contrast drawn by Kate Aspinall from the class’s practice
At the Slade, where Bomberg had trained, students built up an understanding of the body by drawing the model from different points around the room. Bomberg encouraged his students to do the opposite: stay in one place and make drawing after drawing, paying attention to how the body sat in the space around it and how looking at it affected them.
Try it (50 minutes): Set yourself up in one spot and make five drawings of the same subject, around ten minutes each, without moving your chair. The subject stays the same while your approach changes: start somewhere else each time, leave more out, press harder. By the fifth drawing you’ll probably be looking at relationships between masses rather than at things.
4. Look for the mass
Our interpretation of a teaching principle
The best-known shorthand for Bomberg’s approach is “the spirit in the mass.” He refused to define it, and his students each found their own meaning for it in their work. Aspinall summarises his “approach to mass” as treating composition as masses arranged on a flat surface rather than as an illusion of perspective.
Try it (15 minutes): Don’t start with an outline. Look for where the weight of your subject seems to gather, and start there if it helps. Work outwards in tone, using the side of the charcoal or your fingers. Let edges stay soft or disappear. Ask yourself where the form presses down and what holds it up.
5. Watch the light change
Documented: Cliff Holden’s recollection
Holden remembered that Bomberg paid close attention to the pose and to the way light changed the relationships between forms. Rather than relying on elaborate lighting, he asked students to notice the differences between soft morning light, midday brightness, the flattening effect of passing cloud, and electric lamps.
Try it (three sessions of 10 minutes): Draw the same view or object at three different times of day, or once in daylight and once by lamplight. Put the drawings side by side. The subject hasn’t changed, but the masses have.
6. Find what it’s like
Documented anecdotes, adapted into our own exercise
Bomberg’s feedback was often oblique. Roy Oxlade remembered him looking repeatedly between Oxlade’s drawing and the model, then lightly sketching two dome shapes and saying that the dome of St Paul’s looks like one and not the other. He was talking about a human body. Dennis Creffield recalled Bomberg pushing him to pay closer attention to light by quoting a line of poetry or a phrase of music.
Try it (15 minutes): Before you draw, find an analogy for your subject: a shoulder might be a hillside, a back a wall, a head a dome. Draw with that analogy in mind. If you want to go further, try a second drawing while listening to a piece of music, and let it set the pressure and pace of your marks.
7. Rub it back
Documented practice, with a historical interpretation
Rubbing an eraser over built-up layers of charcoal, creating smears and voids, became a crucial technique for many of Bomberg’s students. Bomberg himself rarely used it until around 1954–6. Kate Aspinall cautiously suggests he may have taken it up after watching his students put his ideas into practice, while acknowledging this is hard to prove. Our own Ronda-el-Castillo (1956) is a good test for the eye. At first glance it looks rubbed back, but on close inspection Bomberg has instead carefully protected areas of the paper while layering tone.
Try it (two drawings of 15 minutes): Make two drawings of the same subject. In the first, only add charcoal: build up tone layer by layer and protect the areas you want to stay light. For the second, cover the whole sheet in an even layer of charcoal first, then use the eraser to recover the light areas, drawing by taking away as much as by adding. Compare them. Which one feels heavier?
8. Throw yourself in
Documented: Miles Peter Richmond’s recollection
Miles Peter Richmond remembered “throw yourself in” as one of Bomberg’s constant phrases. He meant putting more energy into the work, because what mattered was an active exchange of energy between the model and the student.
Try it (20 minutes): Set a timer for two minutes and make a quick drawing using your whole arm, standing up if you can. Then do another, and another. These are quick experiments, not finished works, so don’t judge any of them until you’ve done ten.
A word of warning
Bomberg’s students also knew the risks of devotion. Leslie Marr remembered a batch of students’ drawings getting muddled together, and Bomberg cheerfully comparing it to the old apprentice system, in which all the apprentices’ drawings look the same. Marr found the remark unsettling. None of these exercises is meant to make your drawings look like Bomberg’s. Leon Kossoff said that what Bomberg gave him mattered far more than any technique: Bomberg made him feel he could do it. That might be the best reason to try them.
Have a go yourself. Choose one exercise, give yourself some time, and see what changes when you approach a familiar subject differently. We’d love to see what you discover.
Sources consulted: Kate Aspinall, “Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy,” Tate Papers no. 33 (2020); Leon Betsworth, “David Bomberg and the Borough: A Different Class,” The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016); Cliff Holden, “David Bomberg: An Artist as Teacher,” Studio International 173, no. 887 (1967); Roy Oxlade, “Bomberg and the Borough: An Approach to Drawing,” MA thesis, Royal College of Art (1976); Borough: David Bomberg and his Students at Borough Polytechnic (Waterhouse & Dodd, 2015); Jarosław Koźmiński, “Janina Baranowska (1925–2022),” Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK (2022).