Segments on Graham Nixon Drawing Marathon and Political Polling

And polls are also done for some of the dotcoms voter dot.com is now sponsoring a poll called the battleground poll that's done by one Republican and one Democratic pollster. Both very well respected pollsters and their numbers are also very interesting. So we look at all of them and these news organizations have an interest in doing this because you can report the results of the poll as new as do they all ask the same questions not precisely the same question there's a slight difference in wording and sometimes that can have an effect. Plus they always alternate the order in which they even ask the candidates names. If you always ask George W. Bush's name first and then Al Gore's that will slightly skew the results so they rotate those they do everything they can to be a scientifically objective as they possibly can be. Even so you're going to get some slight variations even given the same poll from week to month to month. And that's why even if you use the exact same wording in the exact same method you will get slightly different results even if the public's mind is not particularly in flux. How much attention do the candidates actually pay to these polls. I think the candidates pay the most

attention to the polls they themselves pay for and which they direct at target populations they're especially interested in reaching. It might be women it might be African-American voters it might be people in a particular in economic group or people in a certain state or even a certain metropolitan area those polls can give them highly specific information they can use in making their advertisements and driving their campaign decisions. As far as looking at the public polls of the rest of us look at I think they pay a great deal of attention to that too partly as a gauge of the accuracy of their internal campaign polls. We haven't mentioned our organizational kind of polls does NPR. NPR does not do any horse race polling horse race. We don't ask people which candidates they're for either for president or for some other office. And we do not do a great deal of reporting of the horse race polls that are done. We don't for example in our daily newscasts report on each new poll that comes out partly because each and every individual poll Woods tend to have an indication of being exactly where the race is as

though we believed in each and every one of them as being the final word on that which I hope it's clear we don't we see them as pieces of evidence that have to be taken in a larger context each weighed against the other. It's hard to do that when just one poll comes out on a given afternoon and you're tempted to do a 45 second spot on that one poll so we try to just back off from that kind of reporting. We do however in concert with the Kennedy School at Harvard and some foundation support do polls on people's attitudes towards things how do they feel about the government. How do they feel about technology. How do they feel about the health care system in the United States. Is it giving them what they want. And we report on the results of those polls. But even then we try not to be strictly numerical about it we try to also do interviews with the people who have been polled and get a little sense of their humanity and what their view of the issue is fleshed out. And you noticed as someone who has been in this political business for a long

time they differ. In Pauli as the technology gets more sophisticated I think there's a case to be made that Poles have gotten more reliable and more scientific. If you set aside the inevitable outliers there are going to be a certain number of polls that are what the scientists call outlying results. If you put them on a chart one would be way up here one would be down way down there and the other polls would all be clustered in the middle. You have to set those aside but with that exception I think overall there is a community of pollsters now who are highly reputable highly respectable and they're highly scientific. One drawback though and one thing I think is deteriorating in polling and that is the problem with people who hang up. Increasingly people are not willing to be polled and the more that you have that reaction of people saying I don't want to take the time or I don't believe in you guys or I don't want to be bothered or I've got my telephone fixed so that it doesn't take on what it calls I don't answer any telephone numbers I don't know. That tends to skew the results. We don't

know exactly how but we do know that pollsters are worried about it. Ron Elving is NPR's senior Washington editor thanks a lot. My pleasure. This past Friday the PRI art museum in Seattle opened a retrospective of the work of English painter Graham Nixon with one of his intense drawing marathons at these marathons. Students draw paint and try to survive Nixon's critiques 10 hours a day for up to a week and a half at the time considered an Outward Bound program for art. Reporter Amy Tardif of member station WGBH see you recently attended one of Nixon's marathons in Florida and filed this report. Twenty two artists and their easels form a circle in a second floor studio. They surround an island of candy apple red and lemon yellow cloths covering a small stage adorned with equally colorful fruit and flower baskets a slender nude male model stands leaning against a brightly painted piece of wood. A nude redheaded female lays outstretched and his feet both have milky white skin. Not an ounce

of fat. It's something that is good to look at you know that somebody is going to look at what is really going to happen. Graham Nixon wanders from the easel to be's old Englishman sandy hair and beard are flecked with gray. He likes his clothes as bright as his sets but his manner was reserved and gentle as he observes helps jokes directs. The program. The route to work you're only going to be trying to describe your route to prove the truth of your thinking. From Washington recently Nixon is the dean of the New York studios school of drawing painting and sculpture. He's been called one of the leading figurative artists working today. His oil paintings and water colors are in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Royal College of Art in London among others.

He came up with the idea for art marathons in 1988 to introduce new students to the rigorous program at the studio school marathons are devoted exclusively to either drawing or painting. Participants work almost eight hours each day stopping only for the models to rest. Then comes a two hour critique session. Time to forget the lessons that have been learned the previous day. So that is you know going to nine every day pretty much. So when you go to sleep thinking eating drinking it's always about you know painting or drawing depend on which American Idol when you start to get where you left off the next morning so-and-so is based in the Congo seven days rushing doesn't mention you were doing a normal semester and so the concept seems a natural for Graham Nixon in his own studio in New York. He says he continues to rework refine and redefine several monumental landscapes he began years ago self-questioning artist would have released many of them to the marketplace already. But he's a perfectionist. Nixon says the marathon's

analytical atmosphere forces the same commitment from the students and forces them to look at the world differently. The program has to do with the process of looking. To innocents who are dealing with some school perceptual thinking which means we're trying to make a metaphor for the experience of cooking. People. Who come to join are the great American when we come back the next day saying my God I was looking at you know the street differently and I could see the negative spaces I could see the spatial configurations you know I was looking at the shades differently. That's when we realized the world was a different place to what it was just a couple of days ago. Each painter gets a large house the outer edges dotted with dollops of colored paint. Waiting waiting for the students to master their first exercise in understanding told Valiant's they're painting this brightly colored scene of flowers and foods and they get bodies in seven shades of gray. Some painters have trouble just finding those seven shades. Through me and through some of them going to write something about. Something.

Interesting. Some of the paintings are abstract. Some students are nearly finished by the end of the day. Others are still noting where light differs from dark. I think probably you're going to get what I'm doing Steve Schwartz is hiding his confusion behind a business like manner and of course this kind of trick which we're used to you're just opened up to mean that this semi-retired winters in Florida is an amateur painter is taking this on and his wife's insistence while he tries to get his shit straight. A classmate struggles to turn colors into contours would make him out right because he would have. Us. Model is the center of her pain but she had a lot of trouble Nixon calls the human figure one of the most mysterious objects for artists to meet your visors her to take it slowly to signify sort of the school work so I'm going

into. You can do if you can get the police to just go through trying to get Nixon believes painting correctly is a long term process. The artists aren't required to paint the entire Tablo today tomorrow they'll cut it down into three pieces. Attach them to three different canvases and repaint what they cut out. They'll divide another painting they've labored over into grids concentrating on improving one square at a time by the end of the session they'll have at least one finished painting as a whole seem very helpful. My 28 year old Chris is one of a dozen of Nixon's New York art students who travel with him for his marathons protos is wired. He dashes 10 feet back to his canvas which is covered completely in shades of gray mainly dark and you have to stop for an interview until a buzzer signaling a break for the model's rings. It's no wonder he's so tired after the week is over exhausted in the way that

during their third or fourth winter exhaustion is like talking about you know you. There are there are there probably are this very high altitude because my paintings are not the landscape the search has to be below me. Rather it was a sense of having concentrated. I've been painting for eight straight hours. This was his A-level painting marathon. Steve Schwartz is still recovering from his first he says he thought like any marathon that he was finishing. How did you feel when it was over. Your grandma won't be taking one after the drawing marathon in conjunction with his retrospective at the Frye art museum in Seattle. Nixon will conduct the painting and drawing marathons in Colorado Italy and New York later in the year. For NPR News I'm Amy Tardif in Naples Florida.