Previously located in the Central West End, Drawn Studio opened its new Maplewood location (2523 S. Big Bend) this month with the goal of bringing the unique offerings of founder Ryan Greis to a wider range of artists and St. Louis residents.
Greis is an artist himself, having spent a little more than 10 years illustrating for different newspapers and magazines around the United States (including some work for SLM). Greis also began some art detective work in 2020, helping public and private institutions find lost artwork. His most notable find is “Yacht Harbor” by Frank Duveneck, but he has gone on to find many other pieces for numerous institutions and private collectors.
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Greis opened Drawn Studio with the goal of helping current and aspiring artists pick up drawing techniques that took him years to learn on a much shorter timeline.
“Not a lot of people have weeks and weeks, and days on end, to stand in an atelier and draw for hours,” Greis says. “I know I’ve got a busy lifestyle, and many of the other people my age, and their kids as well, are involved in a lot of different things every day. I tried my best to condense the things that I wanted to get across in classes down to just a few days and a few hours at a time.”
Greis offers two “core curriculum” classes, which he teaches, titled Drawing the Head & Face and Drawing the Figure. The first focuses on portrait drawing, in which Greis teaches the fundamentals of drawing a human face, as is a prerequisite for the Drawing the Figure class. The second class expands upon the ideas and techniques introduced in Drawing the Head & Face to include the whole human body.
“I teach a lot of the fundamentals on not only how to draw, but how to essentially rethink what you’re looking at. We fall into these bad habits; when someone draws an eye, it’s the same way they drew an eye yesterday and the day before. It becomes this habit of thinking we’re drawing an eye, when really we’re drawing what we remember an eye to look like,” Greis says. “What I’m doing is unlearning a lot of what my students bring into the class and repositioning how they view what they’re drawing.”
In addition to the core curriculum, Greis also offers other classes and workshops. Morning Mugs is a three-week course in which artists meet once a week for three hours to work on drawing three different portraits of live models. Mornings at the Museum takes artists on a tour of the Saint Louis Art Museum, followed by a one-hour drawing session. Finally, H2D, or Hard to Draw, is a workshop that focuses on parts of the human body that are typically “hard to draw.” Currently, the workshop is focusing on drawing hands.
Drawn Studio’s space is also open to any current or aspiring art instructors looking to teach in a nontraditional space. Traditional institutions often control curriculum, compensation, and scheduling, whereas Drawn Studio offers art instructors a space to create their own curriculum, determine their own pricing, set their own schedule, and build their own student base. Art instructors can use the studio space to host classes, meetings, photoshoots, workshops, and more.
“This gives them an opportunity to, in an inexpensive way, come in and rent the space to teach classes, and along the way, they’re building out their curriculum, they’re acquiring their own student base, they’re promoting themselves, and they’re setting up transactions. So a lot of the business side of it they’re learning as well,” Greis says. “It’s a way to reach out to the art community and allow them to earn extra money teaching something that they’re really good at doing themselves.”
Greis hopes this new location in Maplewood will bring more current and aspiring art students and instructors from all over the region to take advantage of his unique techniques and share their own.
“It’s right on the cusp between St. Louis County and St. Louis City, so you’ve got a great mix of people,” Greis says. “Maplewood is a very creative community, so, for me, it was a great decision to move the studio to that neighborhood.”
More class and workshop information can be found at drawn.studio.
