HOME INTERDISCIPLINARY ART LESSONS "Once upon a time, it was customary for educated persons to include both literature and painting in their studies, and to consider writing and drawing to be desirable skills...People communicated by letter, entertained at home with amateur recitals, and when traveling abroad recorded memorable moments in their diaries, or rendered notable sights through pencil, ink, and watercolor sketches. Music, painting, and poetry were graces expected of men and women of refined taste everywhere. The same hand might employ a pen or pencil to figure accounts, confess love, or depict a scene, and in most cases the hand's skills would have been learned in school as a matter of course.. The pen and brush resembled one another, paper and canvas were as twins, and each were worked upon or directed by educated fingers no less than the flute, the recorder, or the piano were." -from William Gass's "La maison d'en face or that Other Art"