Do You Really Need So Much Knowledge?

This is one of three plates that I painted today at the studio. (The other is at Rosa Craft if you're interested in clicking here to see it.) I call this plate the Catfish Sampler. It's got a cat and a catfish and various sampler components (mainly, the alphabet). I'm still working the Lynda Barry-inspired vein. The catfish is an image taken from a book of sixteenth century woodcuts. Every time I flip past it, it catches my eye, but never enough to carve it into a piece. It works fine as a simplified brush painting. The cat is from a vintage embroidery pattern, wonkily free-handed onto my plate. The alphabet is self-explanatory.

I read recently in The New York Times that there is now some controversy over teaching children how to write in cursive. Some schools aren't teaching it anymore, reasoning that most students don't need it in this day and age of texting and online communication. The commenters were uniformly outraged at this idea that children don't need to know how to write in cursive. The discussion reminded me of when I was learning the Russian alphabet and I read that many Russians no longer know how to write in cursive. They print everything, so this archaic cursive system is not part of their everyday experience.