Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

Essays on Drawing Practice and Research An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both tradit...

Author: Steve Garner

422 downloads 2255 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays by leading artists and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analyzing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Writing on Drawing is a forward-looking text that provokes enquiry and shared understanding of contemporary drawing research and practice. An essential resource for artists, scientists, designers and engineers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline.

Writing on Drawing

Writing on Drawing

Edited by Steve Garner

Garner

Writing on Drawing Essays on Drawing Practice and Research


Steve Garner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University. He is Director of the international Drawing Research Network. ‘This is an impressive achievement. As an academic who wishes to explore drawing as a cognitive process and as an artist working in the mass mediated world where the language of drawing has found a vital role, this book will be invaluable for me and to my students.’ Professor Mario Minichiello, Birmingham City University ‘The past decade has seen a change of attitude towards drawing. Its importance as an element in human intelligence is now widely appreciated. However, there has not been a clear picture of research in the field or an agenda for future investigation. Writing on Drawing fills this gap. It gives an insight into current work and it is clear that a paradigm shift is underway. Drawing is of course strongly identified with art and design but it is now being seen in a much broader context. The contributions to this book give a new insight into this fascinating activity.’ Professor Ken Baynes, Loughborough University

>H7C.,-"&"-)&*%"'%%",

Supported by:

%%

. ,-&-)& *%'%%,

www.intellectbooks.com

Readings in Art & Design Education


Writing on Drawing.qxd

5/8/08

16:19

Page 1



5/8/08

16:19

Page 2


5/8/08

16:19

Page 3


Edited by Steve Garner Series Editor: John Steers

^ciZaaZXi 7g^hida! J@ 8]^XV\d! JH6

First Published in the UK in 2008 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS163JG, UK First published in the USA in 2008 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E.60th Street, Chicago, IL60637, USA Copyright © 2008 NSEAD All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. Series: Readings in Art and Design Education Series Editor: John Steers A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Cover Image: Plan de Dessin, 1 st Edition: Autumn 2006. A drawing of the Bigger Picture of Drawing by Stephen Farthing. Graphics: Dennis Mariner. Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Indexer: Sue Vaughan Type setting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISSN 1747-6208 ISBN978-1-84150-200-7 EISBN 978-1-84150-254-0 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 5

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

6

Preface

7

Foreword – Re: Positioning Drawing Anita Taylor

9

Introduction Steve Garner Chapter 1 Steve Garner

13 Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research

15

Chapter 2 Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing Deanna Petherbridge

27

Chapter 3 Drawing Connections Richard Talbot

43

Chapter 4 Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Usefulness Ernst van Alphen

59

Chapter 5 Pride, Prejudice and the Pencil James Faure Walker

71

Chapter 6 Reappraising Young Children’s Mark-making and Drawing Angela Anning

93

Chapter 7 New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes Towards an Appreciation of Ideational Drawing 109 Terry Rosenberg Chapter 8 Embedded Drawing Angela Eames

125

Chapter 9 Recording: And Questions of Accuracy Stephen Farthing

141

Chapter 10 Howard Riley

Drawing: Towards an Intelligence of Seeing

153

Chapter 11 Anna Ursyn

Digital Drawing, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Journalism

169

Notes on Contributors

179

Index

183


5/8/08

16:19

Page 6

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The chapter by Angela Anning contains material first published in Anning, A. & Ring, K. (2004) Making Sense of Children’s Drawings, Buckingham: Open University Press. The material is reproduced with the kind permission of the Open University Press. Use of the Lucebert image ‘Zwevende Boer’ (Floating farmer) in Deanna Petherbridge’s chapter by kind permission of Tony Swaanswijk-Lucebert and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Richard Talbot acknowledges the financial support of AHRC in this research and Newcastle University in paying DACS’ visual creators for the use of their artistic works. Terry Rosenberg thanks John Rhys Newman for allowing access to his ‘fictions’ and allowing a selection to reproduced. Angela Eames acknowledges the time and enthusiasm of Michael Kidner in the research for her chapter. Anna Ursyn thanks her students for the artwork used in her chapter. Steve Garner


5/8/08

16:19

Page 7

PREFACE

This book is the sixth in a planned series of anthologies dealing with a range of issues in art and design education. The previously published titles in the Intellect ‘Readings in Art and Design Education’ series are: Critical Studies In Art & Design Education Art Education in a Postmodern World Histories of Art and Design Education The Problem of Assessment in Art & Design Research in Art & Design Education: Issues and Exemplars Further titles are in preparation. This book departs from the format of earlier books in the series where the source of chapters was predominantly papers originally published in the [International] Journal of Art & Design Education. The chapters of this book are all previously unpublished. The National Society for Education in Art and Design is the leading national authority in the United Kingdom, combining professional association and trade union functions, which represents every facet of art, craft and design in education. Its authority is partly based upon a century-long concern for the subject, established contacts within government and local authority departments, and a breadth of membership drawn from every sector of education from the primary school to universities. More information about the Society and its range of publications is available at www.nsead.org or from NSEAD, The Gatehouse, Corsham Court, Corsham, Wiltshire SN13 0BZ, United Kingdom. (Tel: +44 (0)1249 714825) John Steers Series Editor


5/8/08

16:19

Page 8


5/8/08

16:19

Page 9

FOREWORD – RE: POSITIONING DRAWING Anita Taylor Drawing is a central and pivotal activity to the work of many artists and designers, a touchstone and tool of creative exploration that informs visual discovery and enables the envisagement and development of perceptions and ideas. Often categorised as a lesser activity than the main artefact or product, or otherwise remaining an intimate element of art practice, drawing has often been withheld from public viewing and the discourse in the field has often been marred by romantic visions of what drawing could and should be and how it might or might not be taught. Despite this conjecture, drawing remains a significant and important activity to many, is extensively encouraged if not taught in education and remains an important means of creative development, exploration and achievement. With a history as long and extensive as the history of our culture, the act of drawing remains a primordial and fundamental means to translate, document, record and analyse the worlds we inhabit. There are distinct ways in which drawing functions as it distinguishes and aids us in understanding our complex world. Through signs and symbols, by mapping and labelling our experience, it can also enable us to discover through seeing – either through our own experience of seeing, observing and recording or through the shared experience of looking at another’s drawn record of an experience. Drawing may have a transitory and temporal relationship with the world or it may provide a record of lasting permanence. It may be propositional, preparatory, visionary, imaginative, associative, factual, generative, transformative or performative. Drawing as an investigative, transformative and generative tool for the realisation and transference of ideas is at its best when the means of making are harnessed to the realisation of ideas and concepts, when it is fit for purpose and inventive within its means. To this end, the viewer of the work benefits from a capacity to interpret and ‘read’ the drawing, and to bring their own experience and understanding of language and perception to each drawing they see, be it a measured objective or realist drawing, an invented scene of the


10

5/8/08

16:19

Page 10

| WRITING ON DRAWING

imagination, a proposition for the three-dimensional realisation of a design, a decoration, a symbol, or a sketch of emergent ideas. This ‘literacy’ or fluency in visual language needs to be ensured and to be developed, nurtured, enhanced and challenged as an equivalently important means of communication to the predominance of verbal and written communication in our educational systems and cultures. Uses of drawing vary enormously, ranging from limbs marked with dotted lines and arrows indicating what is proposed to happen in the absence of spoken confirmation under anaesthetic in operating theatres to road-markings which define for us the rules and regulations of driving, to street-finders and ordnance survey maps which indicate the route and nature of journeys, road signs, underground maps, lines which tell us how to open packets, lines which define a football pitch, marks or signs which tell us what way up to store something, signs which declare poison, pictures which tell us what is being transported, the graphic language of advertising, product design information, safety guides in aircraft, cartoons in the newspaper, product branding, coats of arms, logos – in fact all those images that don’t require verbal or written translation. These images and information-bearing signs transcend the barriers of different languages and enhance communication in an increasingly global world. Images teased from raw materials, reveal the choices and decisions made when drawing, and consequently encapsulate and define the thinking process behind the act. The enduring history of adjustment and adaptation within drawings informs the reading of the final image; and through the act of drawing we are not only left a trace of the physical act but the trace of the thinking process, as images or marks are made manifest, and evidently expose decisions, indecisions and indiscretions of this thinking ‘out loud’. The ‘touch’ or imprint of a mark reveals whether it was made at speed, slowly, angrily, with love, with force, tentatively, ‘stuttering-ly’, gently, or as a notation, by an individual, personally or through printed or animated reproduction. The materials used to make the marks, and the surface on which the marks are made also inform us, not just about the period and timescale in which a drawing was made but the intention at the outset and any modification of this intention as the drawing has progressed. The range and growth of drawing initiatives can be seen as a significant and collective defence of drawing in all its pluralities. For example, the Jerwood Drawing Prize has been developed as a forum to test, evaluate and disseminate current drawing practice and to encompass and inform debates in education and in current practice. The array of exhibitions, projects, courses and organisations committed to research and practice in drawing in the United Kingdom has exponentially grown in number over the last decade. Having collectively raised the game and placed drawing back on the agenda – in schools, universities, in teaching and research, galleries and contemporary practices – perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the specific function of drawing at a point when maybe it has become consumed as a product to be marketed and as such has lost a central focus of its function. Clearly artists and designers will seek to define within their own practice whether there is a lucid distinction for them between drawing and their other activities through practice. From my perspective, having seen over 20,000 drawings go through the Jerwood Drawing Prize selection process with 36 different selectors since 1994, and having listened to and


5/8/08

16:19

Page 11

FOREWORD – RE: POSITIONING DRAWING |

participated in concentrated debate over the nature of contemporary drawing practice, the danger might be that one is left with a clear impression that drawing can be anything. This has the constituent problem that if drawing is everything, then it is also nothing – or at least nothing special. I would propose that the informality of drawing has perhaps been subsumed, or at least incorporated, into a more formal re-presentation of other objectives. This lack of informality may be something that allows for an apparently wider freedom and perhaps all distinctions being blurred gives credibility to even the most insignificant mark masquerading as spontaneity. Hopefully this isn’t the case, and that genuine creativity resides in a more complete investigation of purpose. The constant need to consume something new has threatened some deeply held values, and it has become apparent over the years that drawing tradition itself has become increasingly marginalised as it opens itself up to new market forces. While contemporary drawing responds to a broad, ‘boundary-busting’ remit it is essential to remember that critical development also needs to be applied to drawings clearly within those boundaries. Titian’s drawings are both little known and rare. For him they were a means to an end. Perhaps we should lament this lack of self-consciousness from an artist such as Titian who touched the surface of his paper in order to investigate an elusive world just beyond his reach. For him, drawing embodied knowledge not style. The chapters that follow in this book declare the territory of drawing as a rigorous and distinctive aspect of creative practice in art and design. Drawing and the debate around and through drawing is very much alive, very much on the agenda and very much in need of this deepening and developing framework within which to evaluate, disseminate and elevate the purpose and function of drawing. This framework needs to be located and re-positioned so as to support a critical examination of the terms of engagement within the field, and the discourse within it, through written, verbal and most essentially, visual means. ‘a great drawing is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace, or probing authoritatively the unknown.’ Brett Whiteley (1939–1992), Tangiers Notebook 1967. Professor Anita Taylor is Dean of Wimbledon College of Art and Director of The Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts London and The Jerwood Drawing Prize Project.

11


5/8/08

16:19

Page 12


5/8/08

16:19

Page 13

INTRODUCTION Steve Garner Drawing today is characterised by diversity. While this is healthy it also hinders the emergence of drawing as a distinctive domain. Drawing practice and drawing research are increasingly viewed as symbiotic. Traditional boundaries, such as between art and design, have been eroded. Today drawing is of interest to communities in computer science, history, psychology and education as well as the fine arts. But if drawing is to emerge as a distinct domain those who operate within it need somehow to document its corpus of knowledge. In short we need a map: to chart relationships between disparate drawing fields, to facilitate communication, to suggest the borders where the drawing world abuts the worlds of other disciplines, and to suggest where we might or should explore. This collection of invited essays emerged from my dissatisfaction with this mapping process. Like the maps of the early cartographers the attempts at representing the world of drawing have reflected less about what we know and more about what we don’t know. Some phenomena have been mapped better than others. The study of drawings made by children is more mature when compared to, say, the study of drawing within computer-mediated team working. Partly this is because the former has a longer history but the study of children’s drawings has also benefited from contributions from a broad range of disciplines. Creative tensions have given rise to rigour in methodology and specificity in language. Consequently, our maps of the world of drawing vary in their level of detail, and often fail to reveal relationships between islands of knowledge. In planning and editing this collection I have attempted to chart a complex drawing world – a complexity compounded by a desire to combine writings on drawing practice with writings on drawing research. Where possible I have sought contributions from people who consider themselves (and in some cases they have an international reputation as) both drawing makers and drawing researchers. Just like the cartographers, I have had to wrestle with the need to represent a domain characterised by diversity. In this collection some land is necessarily left unmapped, and some detail sacrificed in the search for a bigger picture.


14

5/8/08

16:19

Page 14


In my own chapter I raise the question ‘what is drawing research?’ and some answers are embedded in the various contributions to this book. Deanna Petherbridge reveals why a search for definitions is an understandable but ultimately frustrating occupation for drawing researchers. Her expert dissection using contemporary and historical examples provides some much-needed footings enabling researchers to improve their engagement in the subject. Ernst van Alphen approaches the subject of definitions obliquely, seeking to characterise the plurality rather than define singularities. His close analysis of the writings and drawings of key thinkers of the twentieth century illustrates what the acts and outputs of drawing can mean. Stephen Farthing’s chapter concerns the neglected capacity of drawing for representing the world as the maker sees and/or imagines it. Flexibility in our notions of accuracy can stimulate new drawing and new insight. As Angela Anning reminds us good drawing research today stands on the shoulders of past work. Her own chapter charts some landmark studies of children’s drawings as the foundation for her own work, but there is also a well-placed warning about accepting too readily the features and priorities of the domain charted in the research maps of others. And what of methodology? Richard Talbot is one of the few contributors here to offer an analysis of his own drawing process. He avoids the trap of self-indulgence, comparing his concerns for representation with those of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Angela Eames bases her chapter on an interview. She reveals how illuminating dialogue and post-interview analysis can be. Terry Rosenberg’s contribution similarly features a central subject, but this time preceded by a personal construct concerning creative thinking. Anna Ursyn and Howard Riley demonstrate an important synergy between research and education. Both illustrate their chapters with examples of student work in various media. James Faure Walker reflects on commercial advertising from the early twentieth century, but in doing so he inspires us to reconsider principles and practices of drawing today. Drawing research is alive and well. Along with drawing practice it is changing and evolving. They are what drawing makers and drawing researchers make them into. And that’s the point of this book. It is supposed to be stimulating and challenging. It is supposed to highlight common ground whilst celebrating differences. It presents an appeal to contribute to a better understanding of drawing. The authors in this book seek to inspire others to contribute to moulding this emergent domain through research, practice or both, whether this be mapping a small section of our metaphorical coastline or reconstructing our atlas. If drawing research is to be recognized as a distinct domain, one that operates across the perceived but outdated divide between enquiry and practice, one that has its own robust and flexible methodology, one with its own knowledge base, then there is much to be done. A map is the first prerequisite.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 15

1 TOWARDS A CRITICAL DISCOURSE IN DRAWING RESEARCH Steve Garner For a while now, I’ve been thinking about drawing research. I think about it when I’m drawing and I think about it when I’m researching. And there’s the rub. What are the characteristics of drawing research that distinguish it from the broad phenomena of drawing and research? If there is to exist a drawing research community, what activities do we engage in that distinguish us from those engaged in the many manifestations of drawing and other types of creative practice? Do we claim a distinct knowledge base, is it an issue of approach or method or do we think about drawing differently? What types of outputs might a drawing researcher generate; drawings, writings, both, something else? This chapter takes the form of an enquiry. It offers many questions and few answers but in doing so it seeks to begin a consolidation of a foundation for drawing research. It acknowledges that drawing research is a very young, some might say immature, discipline. It would be too ambitious for one chapter to seek to bring any maturity to the discipline but it does appeal for the drawing research community to look up into the middle distance to identify what might be done through our work and our discussions to bring about a maturity. One group of related questions that inspired this piece concern the desirability or otherwise of an agenda for drawing research, and of what such an agenda might consist. This has not proved straightforward to address. It’s clear that people who make drawings, or those with an interest in the drawing outputs and processes of others, have their own personal motivations. Some of these say they have no need for a broader articulation of a drawing agenda. Perhaps they are suspicious of anything that might work to suppress their personal creativity, insight or uniqueness. But is an agenda merely a crutch for those who cannot formulate their own research enquiry? I offer an alternative perspective. The definition of possible agenda items has, for me, become an important objective but perhaps even more important, as preparation, is the stimulation of a critical discourse that embraces the notion of an agenda for drawing research. So this chapter is concerned as much with critical discourse as an agenda. However, I do offer some thoughts on a possible agenda. One that is flexible


16

5/8/08

16:19

Page 16


rather than prescriptive, one that facilitates dialogue and constructive comparisons across diverse activities, an agenda that might assist the construction of a shared knowledge base of, for example, issues, principles, priorities and working methods of drawing research. Drawing and research When I first became interested in drawing research, as a postgraduate student in the early 1980s, I rather naively identified two communities. I saw drawing makers – artists, designers, scientists and many others – who made drawings for a variety of reasons. I also identified a group of people who studied these outputs – perhaps so as to distil their functionality and to incorporate this into curricula for schools or colleges of art (as they invariably were in those days). The publications of the time on drawing seemed to reinforce this basic categorisation; the many ‘how to’ books offering step-by-step guidance on developing drawing skills were clearly (to me anyway) outputs of the drawing makers and while the outputs of the drawing study-ers were more diverse including exhibition catalogues, books and papers on, for example, art therapy, anthropology and studies of children’s drawing, they were clearly (again, in my mind) not written by drawing makers. In 1982 I came across a book by William Kirby Lockard1 who set out to explain ‘why’ designers draw as well as ‘how’ they draw. Immediately I became aware of an entirely different paradigm for drawing research within which thinking about drawing and thinking through drawing exhibited relationships that I hadn’t previously considered. Once thinking had taken centre stage, a raft of earlier publications dealing with relationships between perception, conception and representation made more sense including Rawson’s seminal text simply titled Drawing,2 Arnheim’s Visual Thinking3 and going back to Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing.4 Today a more extensive drawing research community exists but we still wrestle with the relationship between drawing and research. In the twenty-first century we find ourselves building drawing research on a foundation of understanding laid down over several centuries by painters, architects, critics, natural scientists, social scientists, historians and social reformers amongst many others. In 1989 David Thistlewood noted the ‘extraordinary diversity of research activities in the field of drawing which have been taking place mainly (though not only) in Europe, North America and Australia over several decades’.5 But what use are we making of our accumulating research culture? Does it inform our new contributions? Very few people, if any, working more that fifty years ago would have thought to refer to their work as ‘drawing research’. They may have said they were drawing; they may have said they were researching; they might even have said, as Leonardo did, that they were searching through drawing,6 but the term ‘drawing research’ is relatively new. Is drawing also drawing research? Well the simple, but not particularly helpful, answer is yes and no. Some drawing activity is intended to be research, other drawing activity is not. Expression and enquiry are often closely bound together in the creative process – particularly in drawing – and it is not always possible to tell from the outputs whether a drawing was made as research or not. The use of drawing to explore ideas is well accepted. Artists and designers make and modify drawings as part of their creative process. Often these are intended as fleeting representations of possible futures before the time-consuming and costly tasks of converting a selected idea/sketch into a tangible artefact – a painting, an item of jewellery, a building – is begun. Scientists too model futures through their diagrammatic representations. What they have in common is the way drawing


5/8/08

16:19

Page 17

TOWARDS A CRITICAL DISCOURSE IN DRAWING RESEARCH |

supports a personal dialogue of enquiry and conjecture whilst offering the opportunity for others to engage with ideas through the representation. In this sense drawing is clearly part of a research process. A small sidestep to a recent thread of discussion on the email forum of the Drawing Research Network7 might be useful here. This particular thread concerned the role and nature of life drawing in universities and schools of art. Early in the discussion Margaret Mayhew made reference to a recent PhD thesis by Karen Wallis.8 This PhD took the form of an investigation into the transformational and interpretative processes between looking at a naked body, the construction of a representation and its observation by others. As Mayhew summed up, this was research into ‘what it is that is obscured or left out in the process of viewing the nude painting (or drawing) as another person – exploring drawing as a means of tracing that act of spectatorship and recognition’. Mayhew goes on to comment: It has really inspired me to keep thinking of ways in which life drawing can be practiced as a critical and reflective form of investigating ourselves and the way we encounter the world around us and other human beings – rather than a fixed recitation of rigid conventions that foreclose any possibility of challenge or surprise.9 So drawing research not only informs practice it can inspire it too. The questions and challenges articulated by others can stimulate the critical and reflective capacity that is seen as essential to practice. Perhaps it is unsatisfactory to represent drawing research by reference to a written PhD thesis – or even a written comment on an internet conference. The danger lies in consolidating the belief that to be drawing research a drawing activity or drawing output has to be converted into, or accompanied by, some form of verbal or written explanation. Drawing research presents a powerful opportunity to demonstrate the ability to generate new knowledge about the visual and to communicate this through visual imagery – to challenge, as John Berger did three decades ago10 the assumption of supremacy of the written word in visual research (and I say this deliberately in a collection of written essays). As a community we reveal our priorities and values in the way we represent our findings. Yes, there will always be a place for the book or conference paper but there might also be other rigorous, innovative, perhaps non-verbal ways of disseminating drawing research and we have a duty to explore these. We need to better embrace imagery in our drawing thinking – in what some artists and designers might call ‘problem finding’ and ‘problem solving’, although what form drawing research problems might have and how they might be ‘solved’ is open to debate. As drawing researchers in the twenty-first century we find ourselves part of a broad and diverse community whose focus is our visual culture. It’s understandable that many drawing researchers are directly involved in the culture of making and teaching art and design – perhaps as fine artists, sculptors, graphic designers or architects – but there are others outside of this ring. In Working Images, an interesting collection of essays by various visual anthropologists published in 2004,11 the role of drawing in their research emerges clearly. Afonso, for example, highlights situations where anthropologists make drawings as part of their data gathering in the field in

17


18

5/8/08

16:19

Page 18


New Guinea and Africa. Drawing is presented as offering anthropologists a ‘catalyst for observation, a path to reflexivity and a key to promote social interaction with local informants’.12 She illustrates her point with a quotation from Manuel João Ramos, an artist and anthropological researcher: When I travel alone, I cherish the feeling that time can be joyfully wasted. The act of drawing is a self-referential form of spending time. On the other hand, making drawings is a rather benign way of observing social behaviour; both local people and fellow travellers tend to react to my drawings in mixed ways where curiosity, availability and suspicion overlap. By drawing I provoke modes of interaction that humanise me in other people’s eyes.13 Some artists have adopted this anthropological approach to engage people in creating and modifying sketches, thus involving them in the process of constructing discourse and assisting the process of interpreting memory regarding, for example, social changes. Unlike the situation described earlier where drawing is used to support personal and internal creative thinking, here drawing is a tool for unlocking and externalising the understanding of others. Establishing a critical discourse The drawing research community is beginning to display some indicators of domain maturity; there are international drawing conferences, journals, professors of drawing, and PhD students. There are links between this community and other, more established research domains. But the drawing research community also displays characteristics of immaturity. In some ways it resembles design research a few decades ago in the disparate nature of its knowledge, the lack of common reference points, and the variable quality of analysis and articulation. As Sebastian Macmillan pointed out in his review of the 2005 symposium of the Design Research Society: We have all the components of a maturing academic domain (but) on the other hand we find ourselves reiterating the fundamentals: explaining what research is, having to justify it, and engaging at a very elementary level in the endless dispute whether design practice is a research activity.14 Drawing research today exhibits tendencies towards isolation, introspection and repetition as well as development, progression and a growing sense of community. One of the key indicators of a domain’s maturity is its ability to sustain a critical discourse and partly this relies on the existence of a suitable infrastructure. As a relatively new domain we don’t have a critical mass of participants, we don’t have the range of journals nor the number of conferences, in short we don’t possess the infrastructure for attracting and supporting a community. That’s not to say that individuals or local groups are not making significant contributions. It’s just that these individuals and groups rarely operate as a worldwide community. Potential contributors to a critical discourse are not being exposed to each other at a level and with a frequency that they could be. This was one of the aims of the Drawing Research Network (www.drawing.org.uk) when it was established in 2002 and its email discussion forum supplied under the JISCmail system now supports an international dialogue between hundreds of drawing researchers. Whilst there is discussion on the forum we are really only taking our first steps to scope out a critical discourse and establishing the framework for such a discourse has not proved easy. Perhaps


5/8/08

16:19

Page 19


we need to have some form of meta-discussion as a preparation for the discussion – a critical discourse about our critical discourse! Some drawing researchers question the value of it, particularly its value to drawing practice, as this contributor states: Critical discourse is as valid an activity as any other, but it is not clear it is a requirement for artists (except to get funding). Is it not the case that theorising has become just another thing that art students are taught to do, in the same way that once they were all taught observational drawing? A few will excel at the theoretical game, as a few did at traditional drawing; most will wonder what the point of it is. Critical discourse is just another fashion in art – artists don’t have to get involved with it anymore than they need to use oil paint to be ‘real’ artists.15 Other contributors have pointed out the value of building our own understandings on the foundations laid by others. More importantly there appears to be opportunities for critical discourse to embrace drawing practice as this note in reply to the one above suggests: My point is that the artist should not understand first but, by exploring, come to understanding. Not restrict himself to a process merely because it is traditional or regarded as proper, but push for a clearer experience of what drawing/painting/art is by finding for himself the extent of his/its possibilities.16 The inherent tensions in a critical discourse between artistic practice and intellectual analysis (in this case in a thread of discussion on life drawing) were concisely summed up by Alan McGowan a day after the above postings: I think there are two points here. Firstly that the experience of the art education journey in historical terms (from workshops, academies, ateliers, colleges/polytechnics and into universities) is not a comfortable one and many people feel that much has been lost on the way. It is very possible that the priorities and values of universities are not consistent with those of artists (who for instance may be, possibly must be, intimately engaged with sensual and emotional considerations rather than rational ones). This ‘ill-fit’ can reveal itself in many disgruntled issues ranging from funding, research status and ‘over-intellectualisation’ to room provision and life drawing facilities. I agree that we suffer from a lack of intellectual discourse both in terms of our academic standing and (more crucially from my point of view) in the depth of understanding of our field which it would give to students and practitioners. Put simply my experience of life drawing is that it is perceived in a shallow way. It’s complexities and potentials lie ‘hidden’ below the surface; while this is the case students lack the inspiration to pursue it to a deeper level; it loses it’s drive and the form itself is in danger. Even the vocabulary associated with drawing is being eclipsed. I can take a group of students who have supposedly been studying life drawing for two years and confidently predict that most will not be familiar with terms like negative space, gesture, contour, centre of gravity, contrapposto or have a good grasp of tonal values. These terms though practical are not opposed to intellectual rigour but in my view welded to it in the process of picture-making.17

19


20

5/8/08

16:19

Page 20


The last contributor highlights the influence of universities and clearly context plays a key role in a perceived desirability or otherwise of a critical discourse. Many drawing researchers operate within the context of a university with all its pressures and priorities. Some research is focused and formed in the light of research assessment exercises, collaborative opportunities, teaching commitments and funding. It’s understandable then, that for many drawing researchers in universities any critical discourse will mould itself to the shapes and directions suggested by higher education institutions and the policies that guide them. Tom McGuirk made the following observation recently in the same email thread referred to above: Having written a PhD thesis myself on the broader more general topic of the decline in the teaching of descriptive drawing in fine art education, I have been following the discussion with much interest and a little amusement as so often happens witnessing an argument among friends. I completely agree with Margaret that “If there is no critical intellectual discourse about life drawing then it makes it a very difficult practice to defend in terms of research and higher education funding”. I think it is great that she uses her evident skills to champion the practice. She describes the de facto situation and from a polemical point of view Margaret is right. Historically it is however precisely because fine art education has abandoned many of its core traditions and traditional independence in order to come under the university umbrella that it finds itself having to ‘defend itself’ and its traditions in such terms, terms which are not always of its own choosing and finds itself having to squeeze into the often ill-fitting garment of ‘Research’. Such it seems is the price of academic respectability and of course funding (who pays the piper calls the tune). This can turn out to be a very high price indeed when those outside the discipline impose their own sometimes inappropriate paradigms. In historical terms we find in this an echo of the same polemics and power struggle which accompanied the founding of the first Florentine academy so well described in an equally recommendable book Carl Goldstein’s18 Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers.19 It doesn’t really matter whether a domain demonstrates a liberal and inclusive plurality or whether it operates under a more generally agreed paradigm. It’s more than likely that the forces of both will be felt at some time in any given discipline and those who work in mature disciplines seem to adopt an approach that acknowledges the shifts and tensions. An immature discipline tends towards defence. It is inward-looking and protective rather than outwardlooking and willing to take risks. So the diverse roots of drawing research, particularly those entwined within universities offering art and design education, but also those in museums, galleries and other organisations concerned with public awareness or the promotion of professional practice are influential in the creation of a critical discourse in drawing research today. There is a close, even perhaps symbiotic relationship between the creation of a critical discourse and the creation of an agenda for drawing research. The discourse would benefit from an agenda and an agenda needs discourse if it is to be shaped and formed to suit the purposes of the community. Towards an agenda for drawing research At a basic level an agenda is a list or programme of things to be done or considered. Since the first use of the Latin term Agendum it has come to mean a device for controlling and limiting


5/8/08

16:19

Page 21


group activity, typically discussion in a meeting, and I think this may not sit comfortably with the present-day drawing research community’s understandable pursuit of independence and innovative thought. However, agenda in the context of a modern-day research grouping is less about controlling and limiting and more about externalising shared understandings from group reflexive thinking. Although there is a considerable body of published drawing research we, as a drawing research community, are not very good at critically evaluating this work, defining the merits and value of the various contributions, sharing our opinions and building innovative new work on that which has withstood interrogation. Without this sort of activity our research agendas remain personal and inward looking – relevant to our own particular sub-groups of drawing research but not helping to build bridges to other drawing researchers. This is not to say that creating a group agenda is easy. Drawing research is informed by many disciplines, for example, art, design, psychology, and education and there might be natural tensions arising from the diversity of these sources of research cues; we feed on the stimulus provided by a wide range of drawing makers who may have very different agendas to any we might collectively define; our work is often exploratory, personal and tentative and this can act to suppress our confidence in disseminating outputs towards building a group agenda. But we are not alone. All research fields, to a greater or lesser extent, exhibit these characteristics and have their research agendas influenced by disparate external and internal forces. A research agenda is what we consider to be valuable future actions in the context of what we perceive to have been valuable past actions. This doesn’t preclude new and innovative work – in fact, reference to previous work is an important way of revealing newness and innovation in research outputs and proposals. So why should we seek to have a drawing research agenda? Well, partly, as I say above, a research agenda encapsulates a community’s individual and group reflexive thinking at any given point in time. It is a measure of a community’s capability for analytical thinking and an indicator of maturity. For those who seek to raise funding for drawing research – either their own work or the work of research students – knowledge of the current research agenda is surely vital if new work is to be placed in context. Without knowledge of a shared research agenda evaluation of the value and merits of any given proposal for future research must rely on subjective interpretation by the reviewer. And so we come to what might constitute the elements in an agenda for drawing research today. This is by far the most difficult part of this piece to write. A research agenda evolves. It is never fixed. Issues emerge, flower and wither. Even issues that might seem to be bedrock issues such as research methodology either fall by the wayside or get subsumed by broader concerns. Towards the end of the twentieth-century the issues seemed to focus on: …notions of representation and sources of imagery, questions of whether expressions are internal (personal) or external (cultural); associations between child and adult art; the role of drawing in cognition; the process of learning in drawing; optimal ways to facilitate or nurture growth in and through drawing; relationships between drawing and intelligence, and the significance, for normative theories, of the anomalous drawings of a precocious genius or an extraordinary savant.20

21


22

5/8/08

16:19

Page 22


Today’s agenda is informed by new drawing research operating in new cultural, technological and philosophical realms but clearly some issues remain, notably the purpose and value of observational drawing. In 2002 Laura Hoptman, then of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated the exhibition Drawing Now: Eight Propositions. In the publication arising from this exhibition21 Hoptman not only illustrates the diversity in recent drawing but characterises this as a revival of ‘product’ over ‘process’. While defending the independence of drawing (‘drawing is all you need’) she structures the presentation so that it offers some provocative propositions that work as bridges between disparate fields including cognitive science, cultural studies, engineering and metaphysics. The propositions aren’t directly translatable into an agenda but they do inform one. A more recent publication still is the book Drawing, A Contemporary Approach by Teel Sale and Claudia Betti22 which partly functions didactically – it provides instruction about the making of drawings – while prompting the reader to confront issues concerning why they are making the images that they are. In addition to carefully placing the reader in situations of confrontation with aesthetic criticism the book stimulates a pre-verbal uneasiness within drawing-making which has a role in an agenda-setting process for drawing research. Of course perennial questions such as ‘what is drawing?’ continue to pester us but it’s another indicator of maturity that our discussions and writings don’t get bogged down by these. There have been some useful forays into definitions and taxonomies23 but some deft side-stepping of these thorny issues has allowed the drawing research community to make considerable forward movement through journals such as the International Journal of Art and Design Education (iJADE) and numerous conferences. Also there is growing public interest in, and knowledge of, drawing spearheaded by the Campaign for Drawing.24 A research agenda might encourage instances of greater public participation in enquiry and reflection through drawing. There are today many opportunities to document the applicability of research methods and data collection tools for drawing research. In a recent book by Graeme Sullivan 25 the unique capability of certain art-based research methods for establishing new knowledge is discussed (the book also offers a comprehensive bibliography of resources on research methodology relevant to drawing research). The drawing research community could make a significant contribution to the movement by reflecting on and disseminating their various information gathering, interpreting, creation and criticism. There is already a sufficiently large body of information on drawing research (albeit widely distributed) for someone to make a systematic review of what has been published, cited and developed and thus inform the community about our own history. And speaking of history, we are overdue a comprehensive history of drawing education. There is a lot of good postgraduate training and education taking place in institutions around the world and we need to share best practice. For those responsible for leading research students there is much scope in the debate regarding practice based research and the challenge to current systems and awards (such as the PhD). Perhaps we might make a case for examining drawing research in new and innovative ways? A few years ago Terence Love26 argued that the traditional five chapter model of postgraduate dissertations was flawed. He proposed that the traditional grounding of the model in ‘research methodology’ should be replaced by a model where candidates have to account for their ontological and


5/8/08

16:19

Page 23


epistemological perspectives before they offer a methodological perspective on which their research methodology (and then the particular research methods) is based. In drawing research we should be applying and developing this type of analysis. We need to ask questions about the purpose and manner of drawing education today, from the earliest years to postgraduate. We need to examine our notions of teaching and learning. Partly this concerns an historical awareness – what Deanna Petherbridge recently called ‘knowledge of the contemporary in a continuum’.27 If drawing has something special to offer educational processes, particularly education outside art and design, then we need to articulate this. Is there such a thing as bad or lazy drawing? What is good drawing, successful drawing, mature drawing? How do we present students with ‘authenticity’ in drawings in the age of internet digital databases? Is drawing subversive and, if so, how do we teach this? Do we, or should we, value ‘technique’. In recent decades the issue of drawing ‘skills’ in art courses has proved contentious, heated and divisive. To what extent is drawing concerned with markmaking and to what extent can drawing extend beyond this? For teachers there are responsibilities for developing new curricula and cross-curricula working. Do we need to reinvent the university if successful undergraduate drawing education is to be achieved? Students often have difficulty distinguishing evidence from content and context. There is a need for research training that deals with reading, interpreting and valuing images; reading narrative in drawing; interpreting conundrums. In fact, we still need to know what it is that we need to know! The relationship between drawing and thinking offers a potentially important topic for a drawing research agenda. Just how drawing supports cognitive processes, particularly creativity and the emergence of ideas, has been much discussed but little evidence has been used to construct a foundation of knowledge on which we might all build. In 1996 Michael Fish28 submitted a great PhD titled ‘How Sketches Work’ but this is rarely cited. There are opportunities to examine drawing as metaphor, analogy and mental liberation. We might examine drawing as a means of embracing challenge or confronting the unknown; the deliberate and controlled rejection of the comfortable. One might assume that developments in computer and communications technologies have acted to suppress awareness and development of drawing skills and knowledge but the converse is true. We see increased participation in traditional and digital drawing and increased public inquisitiveness about that most fundamental human capacity of the hand and brain to devise and construct meaningful marks and images with various media. Drawing offers the potential for a deliberate vagueness or incompleteness and this has been shown to support creative thinking. Knowledge of how this works can inform new generative computer tools with the extended potential of offering sketched 3D rapid prototypes. As well as design, an understanding of drawing might have applications in information building, knowledge building and systems building. There was an interesting thread of discussion on the Drawing Research Network in 2007 regarding the idea of ‘groundlessness’ – digital drawing that exists between the tool and the ground (and is thus groundless). Also, there is clearly a growing population of people who use

23


24

5/8/08

16:19

Page 24


internet resources to make, edit, store and share images such as photographs (e.g. Flickr) and video and audio (e.g. MySpace). The integration of drawing with the creative selecting, capturing, and manipulating of other types of data might offer a rich current topic for investigation. Drawing has mostly been considered as an activity undertaken by individuals. Where groups have been involved, for example, in some fields of design, their drawing activities have usually taken place serially rather than in parallel. Research into group practices and team working in design since the 1980s, reveals the value of ‘shared’ drawings in synchronous and asynchronous communication. Fine Art can also point to drawings conceived and made by more than one person. What are the issues and opportunities in collaborative public and professional drawing? Especially considering the opportunities presented by on-line multi-user environments such as those of the computer gaming industry. Coming of age Even allowing for its relative youth the discipline of drawing research today is more vibrant than ever before. Increasing numbers of postgraduate students, with diverse backgrounds, bring new research questions and construct new research opportunities. Books, conferences and seminars that touch on, or in some cases focus on, drawing research emerge regularly. Drawing research is now truly international. It appears to exhibit a healthy schizophrenia by which I mean we generate erudite publications conveying exemplary investigations that sit easily alongside more traditional models of research and we generate provocative outputs that challenge accepted conceptual frameworks of enquiry, knowledge and dissemination. We are a community that displays both conservative and radical leanings. Drawing research is a discourse but today that discourse is informed by an increasingly broad range of influences. Today you are as likely to find drawing researchers referring to Jean Baudrillard as John Berger, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty as Philip Rawson. Drawing research exists within the wider contexts of art theory, drawing practice, history, philosophy, and aesthetics but, ironically, it defies attempts at simplification and representation – as one more Venn diagram – because to locate it is to impoverish it. The distance between research and practice can seem, in some domains, a wide gulf. Clearly people’s interests and expertise differ and some prefer to work nearer one end of the spectrum or the other. But a mature domain doesn’t demonstrate a polarisation; it reveals, to a greater or lesser extent, people working between the theoretical extremes, people who seek to construct a relationship between research and practice, people who seek to synthesise the generation of knowledge and the application of knowledge. It might appear that the drawing community exhibits a clear imbalance with practice dominating over research but that would underestimate the importance of practice as research, that is, the ability for drawing practice to produce drawing knowledge. For a large number of drawing researchers their enquiry is both into and through drawing – a seamless and symbiotic process. Any drawing research agenda needs to not only consolidate our current understandings and relationships in drawing research but it needs to chart a stimulating range of options for future activities. There’s a need for an agenda aimed at drawing makers, drawing users and drawing readers today. A drawing


5/8/08

16:19

Page 25


research agenda should offer a framework of reasoned possibilities rather than a definitive and inflexible list or programme of things to be done. It should aim to be authoritative and enlightening, one which maps out uncharted or scantly-populated territory as well as achievements. It must be provocative and challenging. It is important that such an agenda is optimistic and creative. It should convert observers into participants – to get people to want to engage in drawing research (e.g. drawing practice, investigation, reflection, theorising, and experimentation). It should stimulate the reader to explore their own agenda and to become engaged in enquiry, which we might currently define as drawing, research or both. I began this chapter questioning what characterised drawing research. It seems the distinction between research and practice is healthily blurred. In developing the knowledge base of drawing research we need to draw on writings; there’s a lot of valuable reflection out there in books and journals that form a very suitable foundation. We also need to write on drawings; we need to make a contribution to this knowledge base through articulating our work, studies and opinions. This might be in traditional media such as conference papers but it might also exploit new media such as electronic journals, wikis, and blogs (Tracey29 is a good example of this new breed of internet journal of drawing scholarship). The Drawing Research Network presents a living agenda – ideas emerge and get modified, contributors inform the community about what they are working on, problems are articulated, suggestions for investigation are offered. The internet options, perhaps, offer the best opportunities for simultaneously sharing images and writing. Facilities such as Flickr [Flickr.com] enable a rapid dissemination of both the visual and the written plus there are new opportunities for sharing in the creation of drawings through groupware. If, as John Berger said ‘drawing is discovery’30 then perhaps drawing research is ‘making knowledge’. All of us will develop our own preferred strategy for this, through drawing, talking, reading, writing or any combination of these. Given our uniquely visual domain and our predominantly visual culture the various methods and procedures we devise for drawing research can make an important contribution to the arts and the sciences. Drawing research hasn’t come of age yet, but it is maturing. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Lockard, W. (1974). Design Drawing (edn 1982), Tucson, USA: Pepper Publishing. Rawson, P. (1969). Drawing, the appreciation of the arts, London: Oxford University Press. Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual Thinking (edn 1970), London: Faber & Faber. Ruskin, J. (1856). The Elements of Drawing (edn 1971). London: Dover Publications. Thistlewood, D. (1992). Drawing Research and Development (ed), Art and Design Education Series, Essex: Longman/NSEAD. Brizio, A. M. (1981). The Words of Leonardo, in Leonardo the Scientist, London: Hutchinson/ McGraw-Hill, pp. 124–153. Information on the Drawing Research Network can be found at www.drawing.org.uk Wallis, K. (2003). Painting & drawing the nude: a search for a realism for the body through phenomenology & fine art practice. PhD thesis, Bristol: University of the West of England at Bristol. Mayhew, M. (2007). ‘Re: life drawing.’ DRN Jiscmail archive. Date: 6.9.07. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drawing-research.html (Accessed 17.11.07). Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing (edn 1990), London: Penguin Books.

25


26

5/8/08

16:19

Page 26


11. Pink, S., Kurti, L. & Afonso, A. (eds) (2004). Working Images. Visual research and representation in ethnography, Abingdon: Routledge. 12. Afonso, A. (2004). New graphics for old stories. Representations of local memories through drawings, in, Pink, S., Kurti, L. & Afonso, A. (eds), ibid. p75. 13. Ibid, p. 75 14. Macmillan, S. (2005). Design research comes of age. Review of Rising stars - improving quality in design research, DRS symposium,15.7.05. Date: 9.9.05. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ lists/design-research.html (Accessed 17.9.07). 15. Stell, J. (2007). ‘Re: life drawing etc.’ DRN Jiscmail archive. Date: 6.9.07. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drawing-research.html (Accessed 17.11.07). 16. Joyce, S. (2007). ‘Re: life drawing.’ DRN Jiscmail archive. Date: 6.9.07. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drawing-research.html (Accessed 17.11.07). 17. McGowan, A. (2007). ‘Re: life drawing etc; Artists and Intellectuals.’ DRN Jiscmail archive. Date: 7.9.07. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drawing-research.html (Accessed 17.11.07). 18. Goldstein, C. (1996). Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19. McGuirk, T. (2007). ‘Re: life drawing etc.’ DRN Jiscmail archive. Date: 6.9.07. Available from URL www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/drawing-research.html (Accessed 17.11.07). 20. Thistlewood, D. op cit., p. viii. 21. Hoptman, L. (2002). Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 22. Sale, T. & Betti, C. (2003). Drawing, A Contemporary Approach, Belmont, USA: Thomson/ Wadsworth. 23. Schenk, P. (2005). Before and after the computer: The role of drawing in graphic design, Visual:Design:Scholarship, Vol. 1, No.2, pp. 11–20. www.agda.com.au/vds/vds010202.pdf 24. Information on the Campaign for Drawing can be found at: www.campaignfordrawing.org 25. Sullivan, G. (2005). Art Practice as Research, an Inquiry in the Visual Arts, London: Sage. 26. Love, T. (2002). Multiple Theoretical Perspectives in the Long Thesis PhD: A Foundation Problem in PhD Education. Available at URL: www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2002/ 2002%20Herdsa%20theo-persp%20longPhD.htm 27. Petherbridge, D. (2006). Quotation from a presentation titled ‘Drawing as Subversive Practice’, given at Drawing Board, a research workshop held at Lincoln University, 7–8 July. 28. Fish, M. (1996). How Sketches Work, PhD thesis, Loughborough University. 29. Tracey, an internet journal of drawing research and practice. Available at URL: www.lboro.ac.uk/ departments/ac/tracey/ 30. Berger, J. (2005). Berger on Drawing, Aghabullogue, Co Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press, p. 3.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 27

2 NAILING THE LIMINAL: THE DIFFICULTIES OF DEFINING DRAWING Deanna Petherbridge Drawing as a subject of study is a topic waiting to be formulated. And a major reason for its irresolute state is the problematic issue of defining what is drawing. To be sure, there is not a book or article about the history or practice of drawing which does not attempt some sort of definition, but the urgency with which historians and commentators develop, polish, question and critique such formulations is symptomatic of the problem. By contrast, no one has to define what is paint or painting – although authors might go to considerable lengths to consider and quantify colour. However diverse the statements about painting or architecture throughout the history of Western culture – as heterogeneous as the period and milieu in which they were formulated and the practitioners and historians who proposed them – they have always rested on a solid core of agreement. As regards sculpture, even in the Modernist periods when sculpture went two-dimensional, coloured or wiry, and cheekily escaped its historic definition of solidity, space-deplacement and volumetricity, a few well-argued texts soon established a comfortable orthodoxy about sculpture ‘in the expanded field’.1 And contemporary manifestations such as time-based media, performance art or installation have been named and niched with much clarity. Drawing, however, seldom attracts consensus views. Instead it invites frustration or obsession in attempting to clarify something which is slippery and irresolute in its fluid status as performative act and idea; as sign, and symbol and signifier; as conceptual diagram as well as medium and process and technique. With many many uses, manifestations and applications. The need to pin down the run-away outline, gestural sketch, diagrammatic notation, study drawing and fully worked cartoon, shake them into submission, connect them with their fellows and sternly convert them to a useful typology, has been addressed over the centuries by artists concerned with the academic status of art. Such theorists have tended to position themselves


28

5/8/08

16:19

Page 28


between the extremes of complex theories about what Italians name disegno (in French dessein) which encompass the conceptual and inventive aspects of both design and drawing, or bold statements which strangulate drawing into a formula. In recent times, artists, architects and designers have tended to favour the brisk sound-bite about the importance of drawing in their practice, following the current valorisation of individual choice and the politics of self over academic systems. This means that many contemporary exhibition catalogues and publications offer a brief introduction by some critic, museum curator or art or design historian, and then hand over to the practitioners…all of whom have something succinct and self-regarding (if sometimes gnomic) to say in support of their own practice, illustrated with a proud sketch or a CAD drawing of technological verve. Such indulgent compilations of self-introduced works – common to architecture as well as ‘fine art’ – are generally topical, light-weight and readily disposable in that they offer little understanding of what drawing could be about. Instead they serve to underscore the problematic soft-centre of post-modern pluralism without getting closer to laying out the complexity of drawing, which Edward Robbins has defined for architecture as ‘at once an idea and an act, an autonomous concept and a mode of social production…a form of social discourse.’ As mute object it is even capable of being ‘an object of power and worship’.2 In this brief chapter I will seek to locate some contemporary definitions of drawing within a longer history, and to unravel some of the distinctions between the uses of drawing by artists and by architects, engineers and designers, inflected by philosophical discussions and cultural theories as well as differences of practice. There will be a strong reliance on anthropological and sociological interpretations, as these seem to me to shed particularly interesting light on the status and usages of drawing. First amongst equals In the magisterial opening to his long-pondered book Drawing Acts, which undertakes a phenomenological study of drawing, David Rosand acknowledges it as ‘the fundamental pictorial act. To make a mark or trace a single line upon a surface immediately transforms that surface, energizes its neutrality; the graphic imposition turns the actual flatness of the ground into virtual space, translates its material reality into the fiction of the imagination’.3 But he ‘draws’ away from the outcomes of this generative act to insist that ‘drawing is not painting.’ Rosand therefore acknowledges the autonomy of drawing as a study, but acknowledges that it resists completion as a ‘graphic act’. Drawing, although a primary aspect of art-making, maintains its special dualistic status as a negative/positive condition: both what it is and what it is not. Historically, in the West since the Renaissance, drawing has always been considered a thing in its own right as well as one of the ‘parts’ of painting, along with light and shade, colour, invention, composition, perspective, foreshortening, expression and judgement (a fluid and changeable list.) Like the parts of the body, drawing is both a constituent and describable item but also participates inexorably in a holistic ensemble, if usually the primary condition to be described and evaluated. Its composite and ambivalent status has obsessed artists and commentators throughout the centuries. Leon Battista Alberti’s seminal text On Painting (De Pictura 1435) divides painting into three parts, which he describes as ‘circumscription,


5/8/08

16:19

Page 29

NAILING THE LIMINAL: THE DIFFICULTIES OF DEFINING DRAWING |

composition and reception of light’. ‘Circumscription is simply the recording of the outlines… But circumscription by itself is very often most pleasing’.4 Giorgio Vasari, who went to some pains to define different kinds of drawing (he differentiated the sketch from the finished study) institutionalised the Renaissance orthodoxy that ‘design’ (disegno) is the ‘parent of [the] three arts, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, having its origin in the intellect’ in the 1550 introduction to Lives of the Artists: Design is the imitation of the most beautiful things in nature, used for the creation of all figures whether in sculpture or painting; and this quality depends on the ability of the artist’s hand and mind to reproduce what he sees with his eyes accurately and correctly on to paper or a panel of whatever flat surface he may be using. The same applies to works of relief in sculpture.5 All the early theorists distinguish first thought sketches and preliminary under-drawings from other kinds of drawing, which are assigned specific functions in relation to a general schema of making, but such attributions change as easily as nomenclature over time and between authors. Roger de Piles (the defender of Rubens and the primacy of colour in the great debates that racked the French Royal Academy in the seventeenth century) came up with a complex definition of dessein in his Principles of Painting 1668, which accounts for the practice of drawing as descriptive outline as well as the organising and planning aspects of design: The word design as it relates to painting is taken in three different senses: First it signifies the entire thought of a work, lighted, shaded and sometimes even coloured; and, in this sense, it is not considered as one of the parts of painting, but only as the idea of the picture which the painter has in this thoughts. Secondly, it signifies the representation of some part of a human figure, or of an animal, or of a piece of drapery; all taken from the life, in order to be put into some part of a picture, and to stand for an evidence of truth; and in this sense it is called study. Lastly, it is taken for the boundary or outline of objects, for the measures and proportions of exterior forms: and then ‘tis reputed all of the parts of painting.6 In the age of Enlightenment, theoreticians became interested in the relationship between drawing and systems of signs, suggesting that drawing constitutes the grammar of art. Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Second Discourse on Art (delivered to the students of the Royal Academy on December 11, 1769) confirmed simply that ‘The power of drawing, modelling, and using colours, is very properly called the Language of the art’.7 Reynolds was to change his views many times during the course of his addresses to the Royal Academy with regard to the importance and danger of sketching, issues of imitation and copying, and which exemplars to follow; but his citing of artworks in the lectures were usually distinguished by an assessment of the quality of the drawing, the harmony or not of colour, composition and ‘the management and disposition of light and shadow’ and so on. In the final Discourse XV, Reynolds returned yet again to Michael Angelo (sic) as the prime exemplar for students, although acknowledging: ‘We are constrained, in these later days, to have recourse to a sort of Grammar and Dictionary,

29


30

5/8/08

16:19

Page 30


as the only means of recovering a dead language’.8 Drawing for academicians, from the earliest Italian proto-academies to the fully-fledged Royal and State institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is therefore recognised as something universal: a lingua franca (learned, not God-given) which crosses cultural and geographical barriers and links the present with the past. In his brief Notes on Painting (an appendix to the Salon of 1765) Denis Diderot, one of the editors of the Encyclopèdie, deals successively, more or less in the manner of all eighteenth century manuals on art, with drawing, colour, chiaroscuro, expression, composition, and finally some remarks on architecture, followed by a small excursus on taste and judgement. Showing himself as an heir to a long tradition (in spite of his plea for naturalism in drawing, and insistence that copying leads to mannerism), Diderot declares: ‘But if architecture gave birth to painting and sculpture, conversely it’s to these two arts that architecture owes its great perfection, and I advise you to be suspicious of any architect who’s not also a fine draftsman’.9 Drawing is no longer the progenitor of all the arts, but still the crucial signifying system of all art and design practice. Drawing is first among equals in its relationship to the other significant ‘parts’ of painting, architecture or sculpture, and is also the common element which links these art forms with each other as well as systems of learning. Whether tied in to copying classical models, or based on what was termed Nature up to the nineteenth century (and there is a strong distinction between symbolic (female) Nature and what we would today term naturalism), drawing is part of the tout ensemble of the work of art and the core of artistic practice. Charles Blanc, one-time director of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, known for his Grammar of the arts of drawing, architecture, sculpture and painting with its strong reliance on drawing from the body, provides a traditional and conservative definition of drawing as late as 1867: …drawing is not a simple imitation, a copy corresponding mathematically to the original, an art reproduction, a pleonasm. Drawing is a work of the mind, as is indicated by the orthography of our fathers, who wrote it dessein – design. Every drawing is the expression of a thought or a sentiment, and is charged to show us something superior to the apparent truth, when that reveals no sentiment, no thought. But what is this superior truth? It is sometimes the character of the object drawn, sometimes the character of the designer, and in high art, is what we call style.10 Nevertheless Blanc introduces new thinking when he advocates that ‘to copy Nature [it] is not enough to have eyes, [the artist] must know how to look, he must learn to see…’ (my italics). As Blanc had established a museum of copies for students to access the best classical exemplars, we can assume that what he meant by ‘learning to see’ was actually to ‘know’: that is, looking which is informed by the study of exemplars of style and beauty, especially as he assigns to Raphael the paradigm that ‘We must paint Nature not as she is but as she should be’.11 In 1879, the architect and mediaevalist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who was deeply opposed to the Beaux-Arts programme, confirmed the connection between drawing and looking in a more convincing manner: ‘Drawing, properly taught, is the best way of


5/8/08

16:19

Page 31


developing intelligence and forming judgement, for one learns to see, and seeing is knowledge’.12 Drawing and looking The correlation between the act of drawing and training the eye is a significant aspect of drawing which has dominated much subsequent art school teaching, in the West and globally, and which remains one of the few notions about drawing generally regarded today as ‘irrefutable’. This popular truism is undermined by the fact that few students in the twenty-first century develop sophisticated hand-eye skills, and most drawing tends to be slight, spontaneous, expressive, gestural and often deliberately de-skilled. John Ruskin, a contemporary of Blanc and Viollet-le-Duc, constructed the importance of training the eye in relation to Nature (whereas for Blanc, ‘truth’ turned on issues of the Ideal) stating: ‘I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw’.13 His privileging of observation occurs in his manual The Elements of Drawing, first published 1857, in which the first two ‘letters’ addressed to students are devoted to drawing (‘first practice’ and sketching from nature) while the following section deals with colour and composition according to the rules, or ‘laws’ of ‘principality’: repetition, contrast, harmony, and so on. Many of those structural rules were, of course, entirely ignored by Turner to whom Ruskin devoted such passionate loyalty in Modern Painters, in whose late sketches and paintings the very shimmering of light, colour and reflections becomes the laid-down truth of acts of looking.14 The conflation of looking, nature and truth was confirmed by Paul Cézanne in his letters to Emile Bernard (even if, in Turner-esque mode, he preferred not to divorce line from colour, and paint from drawing). He stressed the importance ‘whatever our temperament or powers in the presence of nature, to re-create the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has gone before…I owe you the truth in painting and I shall give it to you’.15 The confluence within Cézanne’s oeuvre of the underpinnings of cubism (the sphere, cube and cylinder) as abstract linear elements alongside a commitment to the overwhelming truth of the scopic, is a curious contradiction that is not often examined. Similarly many early twentieth century modernists such as Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Gleizes, Paul Klee and Mondrian, all of whom wrote about the structural importance of drawing in relation to abstraction, never deny the significance of drawing as an act of looking. Abstraction was understood by all of them to be a liberation from the figurative which allowed the parts of painting to reassume an independent if collaborative existence, and to escape from the boundaries of medium-specificity – ‘citizens of equal rights in the realm of the abstract’ to borrow a quote from Wassily Kandinsky. He wrote in The Problem of Form: …the moment [the observer] appreciates that…line can have a purely artistic function, at that moment the observer’s soul is prepared to hear the pure inner sound of that line…The line… is a thing which is as much of a practical entity as a chair, a well, a knife, a book, etc…Thus, in a picture when a line no longer describes a thing but functions as a thing itself, its inner sound is not muffled by other considerations. Its inner power is fully released.16

31


32

5/8/08

16:19

Page 32


Alexander Rodchenko explained more prosaically in his 1921 essay The Line: ‘Once artists began to look at the problem of colour separately from that of representation, the significance of the pictorial surface emerged in all its clarity…Work in the composition of forms and on their structural systems gradually brought the line to surface as an element of construction’.17 It is significant that Modernist practices based on this act of liberation, as expressed through Suprematism, Constructivism, de Stijl, were able, through accessing the geometrical aspects of line, to break down the separation between architecture, design and art and aim for a new ‘synthesis of all the plastic arts.’ The Bauhaus, which established Modernism as a transformative style and ideology in opposition to traditional academies, also endorsed the pedagogic importance of recording the natural world and drawing the body (life drawing, under various rubrics, was always taught) reinforcing drawing’s significance as an observational tool and a function of learning to look. In modernist times, therefore, drawing continues to have a vibrant composite life: still playing an important rôle as one of the parts of painting, as well as the constructive and abstract functions of design, it discards its copying and mimetic functions in favour of a commitment to the veracity of its very practice. If drawing teaches artists how to look, then its everyday practice is an affirmation of the importance of outer as well as inner vision: the perceptual and the conceptual. This constitutes a new formulation of a very traditional duality. Drawing as autonomous practice Philip Rawson, author of the influential book Drawing in 1969, follows Kandinsky when he defines drawing as the most ‘fundamentally spiritual of all visual artistic activities’ because of its difference from the colour and pigment of paint, or the ‘inflected surfaces’ of sculpture. ‘For a drawing’s basic ingredients are strokes or marks which have a symbolic relationship with experience, not a direct, overall similarity with anything real.’ His formalist text, typical of the neo-modernist revivals of the mid twentieth century, begins with a much-quoted definition: ‘Drawing I take to mean: that element in a work of art which is independent of colour or actual three-dimensional space, the underlying conceptual structure which may be indicated by tone alone’.18 In spite of its brevity, this is a dualistic definition. Rawson, whose knowledge of Indian, Chinese and Japanese art emboldened him to proclaim unabashedly universalist ‘truths’ about drawing in this seminal text, is truly revolutionary however, when he removes his discussion of drawing from its direct embedding in painting or other art forms. For the first time drawing is no longer regarded as an inseparable part of painting, but is investigated as an autonomous practice – although he does position it in relation to wider manifestations such as calligraphy, pottery designs, cave paintings or early glyphs. Rawson in fact only deals cursorily with ‘drawings in their own right’ in the last chapter of the book, devoted to kinds of drawings and their functions, where he limits them to ‘drawings which are made purely for the sake of capturing and preserving likenesses of people and places’, that is the traditional mimetic and recording function of drawing. Rawson’s opening definition of drawing is undoubtedly meagre although expanded and refined (as well as occasionally refuted) in the development of the book. Most present day definitions of drawing, however, tend to be even more boldly categorical. In a much published article by John Berger, Drawing on Paper, the author and artist proposes the ‘…three distinct


7/8/08

12:15

Page 33


ways in which drawings can function. There are those which study and question the visible, those which put down and communicate ideas, and those done from memory’.19 Berger relates this succinct triad to present indicative, conditional and historic past tense, and even goes on to propose a further category where ‘reality and project become inseparable’, and through an act of ‘inspiration’ the drawing uses the ‘Future Tense, foresee, forever’. The miracle of drawing is that it is monochromatic – well, most of the time – and cannot seduce because it is diagrammatic. ‘Drawings are only notes on paper…The secret is the paper’. In the equally sketchy essay Drawn to that Moment, Berger re-examines the ancient topos of the relationship of mimesis to death (recording that which will pass) when contemplating his own rough sketch of his father on his death-bed – although, regrettably, the illustrated sketch singularly fails to live up to his claims that ‘to draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances’.20 He makes a distinction between the simultaneity of sight of an object and the multiple ‘evidence of many glances’, ‘the assembled moments that…constitute a totality,’ that is, the act of drawing. His own drawing, he notes is unremarkable but ‘from being a site of departure, it has become a site of arrival’. In Drawing on Paper Berger narrates how he communicated through sketches with a woman in Istanbul, ‘The more we drew, the quicker we understood’, investigating the traditional notion that drawing is a lingua franca beyond the confines of spoken language. He returns to this theme in Sheets of Paper laid on the Grass. ‘Maybe it’s important that Marisa and I don’t share a common spoken or written language. When we are together a large part of our communication is by gestures, action or drawn diagrams.’ ‘Sometimes we draw together in the same place, the paper on the floor. More often we send the paper back and forth by post’.21 In these statements Berger recoups an account of the dialogic (albeit, in his case, quasi-erotic!) imperative that is immensely important for architects and designers – as well as being part of a popular mythology about the immediate communicability of drawing, which is not often discussed in relation to contemporary fine art practice. Drawing as dialogue For architects, engineers, town and country planners and designers of all conditions, the importance of conveying and sharing information through drawing is paramount. According to a contemporary overview, ‘In the literature of architecture, drawing is presented as being used in three distinct ways: as a medium for communication (with clients, builders, etc), as a medium for design (‘private play’) and as a medium for analysis (the acquisition of knowledge and understanding).22 Interestingly author Simon Unwin does not specify problem-solving as a separate imperative. 23 In her article in the same special issue of Building Research & Information, sociologist Kathryn Henderson claims the importance of sketches for sharing information, in an age of CAD. ‘Sketches are at the heart of design work. They serve as thinking tools to capture fleeting ideas on paper where they can be better understood, further analysed and refined and negotiated…Once on paper, sketches serve as talking sketches, collaborative tools for working out ideas with others designers as well as with those in production’.24 In her much cited field study into current engineering practice, On Line and On Paper in 1999 Henderson had related how hand-sketching (messy practice) operates as significant moments of exchange, negotiation and power-brokering in a ‘mixed practice’ of computer graphics and

33


34

5/8/08

16:19

Page 34


hand drawing.25 In this study she expanded the sociological notion of drawings as flexible ‘boundary objects’: ‘Objects that allow members of different groups, stratified or nonstratified, to come together for some common endeavour, though their understandings of the objects of their mutual attention may be quite different’.26 Drawings are powerful because of their metaindexical qualities, ‘their ability to be a holding ground and negotiation space for both explicit and yet-to-be-made-explicit knowledge that allows them to be more than the sum of their parts’. 27 To contemporary artists, although the potential of a work communicating to audience(s), or indeed engaging in the market place might or might not be of importance, drawing’s ability to be a shared and participatory tool of non-verbal exchange is considerably suppressed. This occlusion of a long-standing historical truth depends on many matters, amongst them the demise of academic systems and undervaluing, or indeed, suspicion of technical skill; the relativity of post-modernist philosophies and the shift away from authorial ownership and control to the constructions of meaning which have adhered to visual art from its embrace of discourse theory. If meanings are constructed by the ‘reader’ of drawings in an art context, then, by contrast, it could be proposed that the discursive function of architectural or engineering drawings is held in place (restricted) by their participation in domain-specific systems of codification. The specific interpretation of technical drawings might be collaborative, as Henderson points out – but they belong to a closely defined project or design brief and a very particular set of external circumstances. Unlike artist’s drawings, they are not free-floating in a discursive potentiality-without-boundaries. One of the list of meta-indexical properties cited by Henderson in her study of engineers’ use of drawing, was the ability to ‘elicit tacit knowledge from participants so that it can be represented in a format readable to others.’ The term tacit knowledge was introduced by scientist and sociologist Michael Polanyi to explain experiential knowledge, and Henderson uses the term as ‘a residual category, a holding place for many unverbalized forms of knowing, including but not limited to knowledge gained through visual elements and touch’.28 Tacit knowledge is something very familiar to artists, and a lot of untheorised teaching in art and design schools resides in the passing on of tacit knowledge between tutor and pupils. This concept has had a particularly strong impact on the issue of contemporary drawing practice – and perhaps has always inflected issues of drawing. We can therefore genuinely posit a generic past when students learned to draw from copying paper and three-dimensional models, as well as watching teachers or studio masters at work, or observing their corrective sketches made on the side of the student’s drawing paper. Such learning would be the optical spur for osmotically absorbing gestures, intervals of lines, rhythms of working, technical short-cuts and so on. In the post-Coldstream Report decades in twentieth century Britain, when drawing was not taught in British art schools – and perhaps even today – drawing was/can be happily disregarded as an academic subject under the delusory rubric that in itself it is an aspect of tacit knowledge.29 The reluctance, or inability of many present art teachers to enforce skills or pass on even simple methodologies to pupils has much to do with political ideologies but is also shored up with comforting misconceptions about authenticity, innate ability, or untested notions that ‘what comes naturally’ is best.30 Tacit knowledge not only depends on non-textual information, but also serves to naturalise the practices that escape verbalisation or codification. The same factors, I believe have not affected architecture and design, where drawing has continued to be central to practice since the days of Alberti: ‘It is the role and function of the


5/8/08

16:19

Page 35


drawing to give buildings and parts of buildings a suitable layout; an exact proportion; a proper organisation; a harmonious plan, such that the entire form of the construction is borne fully within the drawing itself’.31 The bricoleur and the engineer Tacit knowledge might be of relevance to hands-on artists, craftsmen and engineers, but is usually missing from present-day architecture and many design practices. (Arguably, CAM production systems where designs are translated directly into production systems, by-passing ‘hands-on’ and experiential processes, have entirely cut through this form of pre-systematic and intuitive knowledge.) This bears a curious relationship to the very useful distinction between the bricoleur and the engineer-as-scientist, formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1960s, which, at its most basic, proposes that the engineer works by means of concepts and the bricoleur by means of process. The notion was elaborated in The Savage Mind,32 a key document of Structuralism, which served to illuminate the differences between mythic or poetic behaviour (metaphor) and scientifically ordered concepts, and has served ever since as a distinction between problem-solving and materially-directed acts of graphic or plastic invention. LéviStrauss distinguished the scientist from the bricoleur ‘by the inverse functions which they assign to events and structures as ends and means, the scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the bricoleur creating structures by means of events’. In bricolage, ‘the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa’ while the bricoleur ‘speaks’ not only with things…but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities’. By contrast science ‘creates its means and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and theories’.33 Although Lévi-Strauss based his analysis of universal and particularised structures on ethnographical field studies, it is not coincidental that these theories were formulated at a period when contemporary art-making was under the influence of Jean Dubuffet and his commitment to Art Brut, initially derived from a fascination with wartime graffiti. Artists associated with the post-war international Cobra group were equally inflected with notions of the ‘raw’, the primitive, and the authenticity of spontaneous and natural materials and processes, taking notions of bricolage into the galleries, and having a profound, if not often acknowledged, influence on present notions of drawing practice. For example, Figure 1 shows the drawing Floating farmer by Dutch poet, artist and occasional tramp Lucebert (Lubertus van Swaanswijk 1924–94). It appears to have grown spontaneously in a series of layered gestures and marks. Some faint markings made by a casual finger dipped into the watery remnants of brown and purple watercolour have been overlaid with rough pencil shapes, impatiently claiming the paper. On top of these the artist has scribbled more recognisable figures in a scratchy, spluttering pen – a rotund floating figure looking straight ahead, a sun-face in the sky, and a pecking, struggling hen of some sorts. These have been partly filled in with stronger washes of colour, so that the drawing suggests a move from bodily gestures to abstract marks to child-like figuration, encompassing a cosmic history of drawing in one rough sketch. This is not about ideas or narrative – although it is tempting to reconstruct a transparent history of making, as I have suggested above. Instead one scribble has suggested another, one means of drawing has demanded to be eclipsed by another, and nothing is hidden, except perhaps the time in which

35


36

5/8/08

16:19

Page 36


Figure 1: Lucebert (Lubertus van Swaanswijk, 1924–94), Floating farmer (Zwevende boer), 1951–2, watercolour and pencil, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

the sequences and responses took place. Finally, Lucebert’s very neat signature asserts ownership and completion to an act of bricolage. Sketch and diagram The distinction between projects which exist in their own right, growing organically from chance relationships of materials and personal narratives (such as the Lucebert drawing cited above) and those architectural or design sketches which map out a future state of physical probability according to socially-inscribed rules and codes, makes for a tempting division. Of course issues of process and chance do play a part in architectural drawings, if probably at the beginnings and ends of what is, in effect, a much more structured serial process than the stop-and-start conditions of contemporary art making with its strong reliance on spontaneity and process. In architecture, early-stage sketches (for example Frank Gehry’s employment of trade-mark biro drawings and rough crushed paper models) are deliberately permeable to ‘chance’ effects, while presentation drawings at the end of the process in most architectural offices, are tweaked


5/8/08

16:19

Page 37


and stylistically manipulated to contain passages of graphic desirability, whether hand-orcomputer made, still or animated. Gehry’s sketches are particularly significant in relation to the problem-solving/ludic dichotomy of the engineer and the bricoleur. (And Lévi-Strauss was clear that the two aspects overlap and blur: they are not so much separate conditions, as separate poles of an extended argument containing difference.) However inflected with his own ‘handwriting’, and however incoherent and even interchangeable to the outsider, Gehry’s loose, swirling drawings represent early attempts to define the shape of a new building, on a particular site in response to a (partly) formulated brief. They point towards a future reality: drawing as a future conditional or subjunctive tense. The generative drawing at the beginning of the design or architectural process is nowadays generally designated a diagram, recalling the influence of Gilles Deleuze and his musings on chaos, generally in philosophical terms and specifically in relation to Francis Bacon. ‘The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm,’ he wrote in the latter context. ‘The diagram is…the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour-patches’. ‘The essential point about the diagram is that it is made in order for something to emerge from it, and if nothing emerges from it, it fails’.34 Deleuze deals with the self-reflexive aspect of a sketch, which, whether capable of development or not, is closely identified with the chance and chaotic aspects of its own making, but, although he acknowledges that the diagram guides the construction of the work while remaining a part of it, he disallows the lack of use-value, which art sketches traditionally embrace. Within design applications the diagram is that free early drawing which always generates information for something beyond itself, as defined by Robin Evans: ‘drawing in architecture…is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside drawing’.35 David Dunster, in his introduction to the ‘The Diagram’ and its seminal relationship to city planning and architecture also insists ‘diagrams in architectural thinking relate process to ideation’ while in townplanning ‘a diagram of a city is merely a further abstraction or simplification, which leaves out information so that a proposition can be more clearly understood’.36 Neither medium nor message Drawing as natural ‘truth’ (that is analytical tool of mimesis); as conceptualisation; as mapped structure or prefiguring of ideas, as symbolic relationship; as investigative act of looking; as a form of social discourse; as autonomous activity or study for work in other media – all of these aspects have been well argued and substantiated over the centuries, and writers on drawing continue to offer definitions and analyses of the process, the practice and objects of drawing. Rather than arguing for a reduction or proliferation of this rich theoretical humus, I believe that what can be most usefully extrapolated from such superfluity is that the urgencies and difficulties of defining drawing reflect its irresolute status – neither entirely medium nor message. The futility of attempting generalisations acts as an analogue of the very condition of drawing itself. Drawing is an immanence, always pointing to somewhere else – to a chain of serial development, another condition, another state, even when, as a gestural flourish it appears to have said everything in the most economical manner. A small, fluent drawing by Ansel Krut from a composite group of drawings entitled It could be Suicide…2004, illustrates some aspects of this notion. Simply entitled Nailing a Head, this

37


38

5/8/08

16:19

Page 38


drawing is both part of a series and at the same time a potent autonomous work in its own right.37 In spite of the spontaneity and resolution of his drawn images on prepared paper, Krut continues to draw and redraw them until they achieve an economic resolution or ‘rightness’ and he often develops them further in the form of much larger oil paintings. The drawing therefore exists in a ver y dif ferent space from the ‘raw’ Luceber t drawing and is definitely ‘cooked’ – to draw on another binary set proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss.38 This particular drawing therefore might well have a follow-up work in another medium, or itself be second in a chain, and within its small compass the artist has worked hard to reduce the figural action to an optimal, if pared-down statement. Every single thickened brown brush line (over lighter traces of ink) supplies Figure 2: Ansel Krut, Nailing a Head, from series ‘It maximum information and contributes to could be Suicide…’ 2004, Ink on prepared paper, the brutal but simultaneously ridiculous 15 x 11ins (38 x 27.5cm). Courtesy Ansel Krut and image. The demonic killer, rushing in at Domo Baal, www.domobaal.com speed (attested by the curve of a single leg) to the stage of the action, signals his cruelty through clenched teeth and mad, mean eyes, while stick-limbs serve semiotically as signsymbols of arms capable of deploying the murderous nail and hammer. The bird-like victim, laid out on a ridiculous rectangle like a beach towel has its eyes cancelled with crosses, so is either dead already or in a faint, even before the blow that will drive the nail into its temple. The resemblance to a comic-strip chicken or duck puts the creature beyond tragedy: such creatures are sacrificed regularly in Walt Disney animated shorts, only to get up again clucking in the next sequence, apparently unscathed. Krut’s drawing, like others in his carnivalesque oeuvre, alerts us to the stupidity and ridiculousness of rote violence in popular animation, or perhaps in culture as a whole. (Ansel Krut’s personal biography, growing up in South Africa under Apartheid, has simultaneously sharpened his eye for senseless cruelty while ridiculing malevolence through humour and caricature.) The victim’s (female?) body is outside the frame, so the artist has concentrated the telling action within the vertical sheet of paper, employing a cut-off frame focus in the manner of a photograph…or a Japanese print. The extension of the figures beyond the viewing frame implies a prolongation of action, narrative and setting. This suggestion of continuity beyond


5/8/08

16:19

Page 39


confines replicates the serial relationship (if lack of literal connection) of the drawing to its fellows in a vertical wall-installation, the order of which is never fixed, but changes in each exhibition. There are other sorts of continuities: the subject-matter is embedded in history of art, and immediately brings to mind (my mind at least) graphic representations of Jael & Sisera, particularly the two violent, sketchy and economical drawings by Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from the 1640s. The biblical tale from the Book of Judges tells how Sisera, Caananite general of the oppressive overlord of the Israelites King Jabin, on fleeing from a lost battle, was enticed into the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. When he fell asleep after a proffered bowl of milk, she nailed his head to the ground. This narrative has been visited every now and then in art history, particularly in prints and paintings in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although Ansel’s drawing appears to reverse the story, with a male instead of a female killer.39 I am not, of course, suggesting that Krut has directly borrowed such historical iconography, or even consciously made a reference to the biblical tale. Nevertheless the evocation of references within the independently conceived narrative, gives enormous resonance to a literary or art historical reading, and adds to the iconic quality of this drawing of a fleeting moment. Seemingly spontaneous in its simple graphic outlines, this drawing belongs to many discursive contexts, not least art history and contemporary comic strips. Although I’ve certainly done so, my intention in this lengthy exegesis has not been to overload a small, innocent drawing with historical and theoretical associations – after all, only the authorial artist knows what the work is about. Rather I’ve set out to suggest that, although the meaning of a casual sketch is generally unfixed and provisional, drawings-as-art, however slight, are never innocent of cultural context, and this particular work like most others is part of a unending chain of associations and serial possibilities. Moreover the wry subject matter of this drawing seems to be so ridiculously associated with the intentions of this essay, that I can’t resist the notion of striking (yet another) hole in the head. Trying to nail down the subject of drawing leads us into liminal territory, the ambiguous if vibrant threshold between states of definition and indefinition, identity and transition. Perhaps drawing, in all its multifarious manifestations in art and design can never be defined: but as the object and subject of study it is just waiting to be nailed. Notes 1. The term was first used by Rosalind Krauss in her seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October 8, Spring, 1979. Picasso and others at the beginning of the 19th century had already produced collage or wall-mounted works which challenged traditional materials and notions of solidity. 2. Robbins, E. (1994). Why Architects Draw, Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, p. 7. In the introductory text, Edward Robbins, an anthropologist and town planner, specifies some of these social modes, including being ‘involved with the control of the social division of labor within the production of architecture’, p. 48. 3. Rosand, D. (2002). Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1. 4. Alberti, L-B. (1972). On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, London: Penguin Books, (ed.1991), p. 65. 5. Vasari, G. (1987). Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, London: Penguin Books, Volume I, p. 249.

39


40

5/8/08

16:19

Page 40


6. Roger de Piles’ Principles of Painting is in fact a translation from the Latin of l’Art de la peinture de C A Dufresnoy, Paris 1668 &1684. The quoted passage is taken from the 18th century edition The Art of Painting of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, translated by William Mason, with annotations by Sir Joshua Reynolds, (1783) York and London (T. Cadell in the Strand; R. Faulder, New Bond Street, London and J. Todd, York), (Reprinted New York 1969). 7. Reynolds, Sir J. (1975). Discourses on Art, Robert R. Wark (Ed.), New Haven & London: Yale University Press (ed.1988), p. 26. 8. Ibid., p. 278. 9. Diderot, D. (1995). Diderot on Art translated John Goodman, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, Vol 1, p. 233. 10. Blanc, M. (1873). The grammar of painting and engraving with original illustrations: translated from the French of Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin by Kate Newell Doggett, Chicago: S.C. Griggs, (ed. 1879), p. 98. 11. Ibid., p. 99. 12. Viollet-le-Duc, E. Histoire d’un Dessinateur: comment on aprend à dessiner, Paris, J. Hetzel, [6th edition] 1883 (my translation) 13. Ruskin, J. (1857). The Elements of Drawing, New York: Dover Publications, (1971), p. 13. 14. Jonathan Crary, controversially from my point of view, argues for a new scopic regime in the work of Turner, in which ‘the juridical model of the camera loses its pre-eminent authority. Vision is no longer subordinated to an exterior image of the true or the right. The eye is no longer what predicates a ‘real world’. See Crary, J. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass & London: an October Book, MIT Press, 2001 (1990) p. 138. 15. Conversations with Cézanne, (2001). Michael Dora (Ed.), translated Julie Lawrence Cochran, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p. 48 (Letter of 23 October 1905). 16. Wassily Kandinsky (1912). The Problem of Form (Uber die Formfrage) in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, Munich: R. Piper & Co Verlag. Reproduced in Miesel, V. (1965) Voices of German Expressionism, London: Tate Publishing, p. 456–7 17. Rodchenko, A. (1921). The Line, reprinted in Selim Khan-Magomedov and Vieri Quilici (eds), (1986) Rodchenko: The Complete Work, London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 292–94. 18. Rawson, P. (1969). Drawing (The Appreciation of the Arts, 3) London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, p. 1. 19. Berger, J. (2005). ‘Drawing on Paper’ in Berger on Drawing, Jim Savage (Ed.), Cork: Ireland Occasional Press, 2005, p. 46 This article first appeared as ‘To Take Paper, To draw’ in Harper’s Magazine, 1987. 20. Berger, J. Drawn to that Moment, in Berger on Drawing. Ibid., pp. 64–72. 21. Berger, J. Sheets of Paper laid on the Grass. Ibid., pp. 57–63. 22. Unwin, S. (2007, Jan/Feb). Analysing Architecture through Drawing, in Building Research & Information, Special issue on Visual Practices: images of knowledge work, Vol. 35, No.1, p. 102. 23. Unwin, S. (1997). Analysing Architecture, London and New York: Routledge, (2003). 24. Henderson, K. (2007, Jan/Feb). Achieving legitimacy: visual discourses in engineering design and green building code development, in Building Research & Information, Special issue on Visual Practices: images of knowledge work, Vol. 35, No.1, (6–17) p. 8. 25. Henderson, K (1999). On Line and On Paper. Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering, Cambridge Mass. & London: MIT Press.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 41


26. Ibid., p. 51. In dealing with ‘boundary objects’ Kathryn Henderson borrows inter alia from Bruno Latour, (1986) ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. No.6, pp. 1–40. 27. op. cit, Henderson, K. (1999). p. 199. 28. op. cit, Henderson, K. (1999). p. 6. See Polanyi, M, (1967) The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 29. Sir William Coldstream (1908–1987), Slade professor and Chairman of art panel of the Arts Council, undertook a review of art education in 1968 with Sir John Summerson. The Second Coldstream Report, 1970 (published by the National Advisory Council on Art Education) led to the abandoning of life classes in most United Kingdom art colleges for nearly three decades. 30. There is a strong distinction along the stress lines of ‘skill’ between amateur art and its teaching, and what is offered in professional art colleges. 31. Alberti, L. B. (1988). De re aedificatoria. On the art of building in ten books., translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 32. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1966), p. 22. 33. Ibid., p. 21 and p. 22. 34. Deleuze, G. (1981) Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum, (2003), pp. 102, 101 and 159. See also Bogue, R. (2003) Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York and London: Routledge. 35. Evans, R. (1986). Translations from Drawing to Building, AA Files No.12: 3–18, London: Architectural Association. 36. Dunster, D. (2006, Jan) Charting the role of the diagram in architects’ work, The Architectural Review, (Special Issue, The Diagram), Vol. CCXIX, No. 1307, p. 31. 37. Each drawing in the complex is 15 x 11 ins (38 x 28cms) in ink on prepared paper. 38. See Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, London: Penguin Books. 39. One of the best-known painted versions is that by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1652/3) the Jael and Sisera (1620) in the Szepmuvedszeti Museum, Budapest but there is also a very muscular Yael killing Sisera by Palma Giovane (Jacopo Palma c. 1548–1628).

41


5/8/08

16:19

Page 42


5/8/08

16:19

Page 43

3 DRAWING CONNECTIONS Richard Talbot This chapter documents the journey I have made from making drawings to making sculpture and back again. It discusses the problems and issues relating to the understanding and representation of three-dimensionality that lies at the root of my practice. It describes the role that linear perspective has played in the journey and in determining the what, why and how of the work I now make. The chapter is a reflection on my drawing practice. It seeks to convey a process of enquiry that is constantly looking to other areas of knowledge, drawing connections, to inform both the content of the drawings and my understanding of my practice. My drawings could be described as autonomous, speculative, and investigative. They are, in some ways, the result of giving problems to myself to solve. The white space of the paper, which could be equated with infinite space, becomes the place in which I can make and draw connections between things and grapple directly with things that are, in more than one sense, out of reach. In retrospect, I can see that I am setting up some kind of dialogue between two and three dimensions on the paper – a dialogue between what I see and what I know. In terms of what I see, it is what is actually being generated on the paper; in terms of what I know, it is forms that I am depicting and which I can define geometrically, or that can be generated through geometry using plans and elevations. The starting points for the drawings therefore relate to the real world, but they are not reliant on sight, and the forms that I use do not actually need to exist. On encountering my drawings for the first time, viewers often remark that I must be very good at thinking three-dimensionally. On the face of it, this would appear to be the case; I am generating and manipulating three dimensional forms and building elaborate spatial structures that entail working out how things join together – and how and where they sit in space. I appear to be dealing with things that are usually associated with building in three dimensions – geometry, plans, elevations, cross-sections and intersections and using the trappings of linear perspective in order to depict them. Figure 1 illustrates this.


44

5/8/08

16:19

Page 44


Figure 1: Richard Talbot, Glass 2 (detail), 2003, pencil on paper. 1.8m x 1.4m.

In reality though, as far as being good at thinking three-dimensionally is concerned, I think that the reverse may be closer to the truth. Despite appearances, it does not come naturally – I actually struggle with these things. However I believe that it is this frustration with three dimensions that lies at the root of much of my drawing practice. As a sculptor the relationship between two and three dimensions has been an overriding concern. Of course it also begs the question – what is meant by three-dimensional thinking? I remember two specific experiences from my childhood which, in retrospect, appear directly connected to my practice and research – things that puzzled and fascinated me then and continue to do so. One was travelling in the car and following the map and no matter which direction we were actually travelling, being able to read it always the right way up – a process of orientation and mental gymnastics. The other was looking at the passing landscape, at the trees and telegraph posts moving in relation to each other across my field of vision – a phenomenon known as parallax. I was aware of being able to make myself see this simply as a two-dimensional visual effect and then being able to make it flip and ‘see’ it in threedimensional terms – in effect, rationalising what was happening in space. I realised then that I was not seeing three-dimensionally, but was simply fitting what I was seeing into a spatial model – a model based on experience. Together with seeing images in clouds,


5/8/08

16:19

Page 45

DRAWING CONNECTIONS |

these experiences seem to say something very fundamental about our vision, our understanding of three dimensions and the importance of the two-dimensional image; something perhaps acknowledged by Leonardo in his recommendation to use accidental images to stimulate the imagination. It also says a lot about how much we project from ourselves; how things ‘catch’ our eye and that seeing is not passive. I would not say that these issues directly inform the content of the drawings that I now make, but they have subtly driven many of the directions that my practice and my research have taken. Having said that, the prevailing direction has been around in a circle, or perhaps it is simply around a point, and although at various times I have thought that I have made a radical shift in my practice, I find myself repeatedly returning to the same thoughts, concerns and questions. It means that I have gained insights into the decisions and thinking along the way, but in coming to write about my practice, it also means that it is not a linear story. There is also a certain degree of after-the-event rationalisation going on, but that may be inevitable in an account of a practice that I sometimes think is ultimately about removing – or perhaps overcoming, any reference to time. It is not my intention to produce work that is contemplative, but maybe it is a by-product of the processes and approaches that I adopt. Perhaps some of these are similar to what is going on in Piero della Francesca’s work and that is why I find it particularly potent. This is something that I will return to later. Whatever forms my practice has taken, whether within sculpture or drawing, and whatever I may think my work may be about, one issue I have never been able to escape from is that of the ‘point of view’, with all its meanings and with all its repercussions. Perhaps more accurately, I should say that I have always been very conscious of the issue, sometimes to the point where it could actually stop me making any work at all. Perhaps it is the self-awareness that stems from the simple act of looking at the night sky out into space and experiencing the sense of wonder and total incomprehensibility of it all – highlighting that fundamental paradox of being at the centre but knowing that you are not at the centre. In this respect perhaps the work that I produce could be seen as a way of orientating myself within the world and perhaps placing a piece of white paper on the wall is the first part of this process of orientation. I am creating a place in which to operate, a thing to work with that acts as a go-between – a medium in the correct sense of the word. Therefore for me, the act of drawing could be considered to be the medium, rather than the stuff I draw with. The mechanics of perspective drawing also entail thinking quite explicitly about orientation, not only one’s physical relationship to the objects that one might be about to draw or depict, but also to the surface of the paper – the picture plane. I am using methods traditionally associated with depiction within painting, but they are, in fact, essentially the same as those used within architecture, both for its depiction and as an element used in design and more recently computer graphics and virtual reality. Aspects of all of these have therefore impinged on my work. However, I have arrived at my interest and involvement with linear perspective through a very different route, initially through problems to be overcome within my sculpture practice. In addition, my involvement has led to me questioning many of the

45


46

5/8/08

16:19

Page 46


common assumptions about its nature and purpose, and consequently, the history of perspective. This in itself was not a conscious decision as such – I did not set out to be quite as involved with linear perspective as I have become. It did not come about through wanting to make pictures or to be a painter, the area which, in terms of art at least, perspective is normally associated with. It came about through thinking about sculpture and trying to make sculpture and my puzzlement about the nature of sculpture. More precisely, it was the feeling that much sculpture, be it ancient or contemporary, although obviously three-dimensional, was essentially pictorial or there was a strongly pictorial element to it. Even more disturbing was the fact that so much sculpture looked better in photographs than in real life. Maybe this says something more about the power of photographic images than anything else, or perhaps that although something may be an object its image also plays a very large role in its reception. My early experience of sculpture was seeing it as part of cathedral architecture. As a teenager, I particularly remember seeing work by Beuys and Philip King’s Genghis Khan – work that appears to be poles apart, but which I found equally fascinating. Then, while I was a student at Goldsmiths College, the constructed steel sculpture coming out of Saint Martins School of Art was, according to articles in Artscribe, what real sculpture was about, so I was naturally curious. I attended a talk by Anthony Caro at Saint Martins where he showed the lineage of true sculpture – from the Greeks to Michelangelo, Bernini, to David Smith, with him and his own students now ‘holding the torch’. I was aware of David Smith’s own writings about sculpture and drawing so what was being presented felt very alien and blinkered. However, to conclude his talk, he showed a very architectural work by Alice Aycock, saying that he did not care what it was about but that formally he found it exciting. This work made a big impression on me and clearly influenced Caro greatly in the following years. With all these sculptors and many others I was very conscious of the fact that drawing, in one way or another played an important role, sometimes to the extent that the drawings became more important than the sculpture. I did not feel any particular allegiance to either carving or to modelling or to construction although I could see that there were elements of drawing in all of these. I felt that there should be some way of working that included or encompassed all of these elements. This was all set against a backdrop of Minimalism, Arte Povera, installation, performance, conceptual and early video work, all of which I absorbed and tried to take on board. Richard Hamilton, John Berger, John Cage and Matta were visitors to Goldsmiths. A Jasper Johns show at the Hayward Gallery made a particular impact on me and Duchamp was an ever present figure. Of course, as a student you are in a constant state of flux and I think I worked through, or took on the attitudes and attributes of every artist and art movement at one time or another, but it was through doing this that I understood it and could then reject it. In retrospect it was necessary so that I could start from scratch – a clean slate. I was immediately confronted by all the associated problems including how to draw and what to draw, what to make and how to make. As a student at Goldsmiths, drawing was very much encouraged and talked about. I was particularly interested in diagrams and this probably reflects my school background and


5/8/08

16:19

Page 47


studying science subjects. I remember in physics being intrigued with optics – lenses, mirrors, virtual and real images. This curiosity about vision and the world around me, alongside ability in mathematics and geometry, in fact, led me to going to university to study astronomy and physics before deciding to go to art school. When it came to making drawings, I eventually realised that these images and ideas were still very important to me and potent. I was curious about the role and place of geometry in art. I was curious about shadows. I was interested in the spatial ambiguity of diagrams – at the very simple level of a triangle that can be read as both a flat shape or as converging lines in a tilted plane. I was also interested in maps and the way they can contain different kinds of information. I was making ‘poetic’ associations and connections between shapes and ideas, for example, lenses and boats, water and light. However, I consciously avoided using perspective. The drawings were overtly diagrammatic in nature, but always hinted at something spatial. In my own attempts to make sculpture, I constantly struggled with what I felt to be paradoxes about three-dimensional objects, in particular how objects are seen. As a way of overcoming the ‘point of view’ and acknowledging its pervasive presence, neutralising it rather than celebrating it in any way, I started to incorporate overtly pictorial elements into the objects that I was making. These objects which were initially made in plaster, contained references to landscape, optics and water and had elements that were constructed, cast, carved, modelled and drawn. I was pulling in ideas from the drawings as well as imagery from film, literature, sciences, alchemy and architecture. The traditions of landscape architecture, ‘the picturesque’, became particularly relevant and I started to think about depicting landscape in terms of a cross-section, so that as well as making something three-dimensional, it clearly contained two-dimensional aspects that were not pictorial. Spatial depth was generated or implied through occlusion, rather than using diminishing proportions associated with linear perspective. Other sculptures that I made again played on this and were constructed so that they looked simple from one point of view but appeared complex from another. Others played on their position in relation to the viewer’s eye level and the horizon. I found that all of this inevitably brought out all those well known issues and questions – the positioning of an object in relation to its surroundings; the floor, the wall, the pedestal, the frame, the context, scale, processes, materials, meaning and function, all those things that artists have, at one time or another, tried to grapple with in one way or another – or to overtly escape from or comment on, for example particularly in Duchamp’s work. Given my interest in landscape, Man Ray’s ‘Dust Breeding’ photograph (Figure 2) showing the dust-covered surface of Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ seemed extraordinary, but Duchamp’s work in general appeared to touch on so many ideas that I was thinking about and dealing with. Reading his notebooks confirmed this; at the core seemed to be a concern about conventions of seeing and representation – in particular linear perspective.1 Duchamp seemed to be recognising the nature and limitations of our perceptions and was aware of the ideas from

47


48

5/8/08

16:19

Page 48


Figure 2: Man Ray (1890–1976), Dust Breeding (Elevage de poussiere) (1920–64) (gelatin silver print) (b/w photo). ©The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel/ Vera & Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art/ The Bridgeman Art Library. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2007.

nineteenth century mathematics that dealt with speculations about other dimensions, an area that I too became very curious about, eventually writing my BA dissertation around it. Duchamp took on ideas that link representation, projection, geometry and number through the well known notion of how dimensions can be generated: a point moving through space produces a line; a line moving through space gives a plane; a plane moving through space gives a solid; so what is produced when a solid is moved through space? Of course this is something that those of us that live in a three-dimensional world cannot ‘envisage’, although writers such as C H Hinton2 did try. However, although we cannot ‘imagine’ what this transformation produces, this concept is at the root of the mathematical procedures of ‘squaring’ and ‘cubing’ a number; it can therefore be achieved through mathematics. Duchamp used shadows and anamorphic projections as a way of highlighting the role of the observer and questioning the distinction between the real and its image, perhaps setting the


5/8/08

16:19

Page 49


‘objective’ in opposition to the subjective. As his notebooks show, he was interested in the ideas of one dimension being a projection of another, and the Large Glass is full of references to movement in different directions – the machinery locking all the directions together. The relationship between two and three dimensions has always been a problem. Since Plato’s cave shadow allegory, the problems of knowledge, perception and of representation have been fundamental issues, and not just for artists. This allegory relates to prisoners in a cave and the questions that arise relating to their perceptions and knowledge when the only things they experience are shadows on the walls. Oblivious to the reality and the hidden world around them, would they, or could they, have any notion that the shadows are the result of other phenomena? It is an issue that has attracted the attention of major thinkers and artists. Perhaps Duchamp’s concerns have become the inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s investigations. He questions and challenges the orthodox view, the Cartesian view, of our understanding of space and suggests that depth is the primary dimension and that everything else is a fabrication, a necessary device to simply help us operate in the world. The only visual experience we have that actually tells us anything is occlusion. However, we need to make assumptions about what we are looking at. We need to perform shortcuts; we can’t afford to re-assess fully every new situation we are in or we’d never be able to cross the road. As part of this, we need to separate everything into distinct entities – stuff in opposition to space. As Merleau-Ponty states: The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy. Once depth is understood in this way, we can no longer call it a third dimension. In the first place, if it were a dimension, it would be the first one; there are forms and definite planes only if it is stipulated how far from me their different parts are. But a first dimension that contains all the others is no longer a dimension, at least in the ordinary sense of a certain relationship according to which we make measurements.3 At this stage I was clearly curious and interested in perspective but apart from very early renaissance paintings, I had no interest in the wide range of paintings that seemed to be using it. However, I was quite fascinated by medieval art but at the time I did not quite know why. I did not see any point in learning to make drawings using perspective. This was mainly because the ‘how to’ books that were generally available all treated the subject in the same way; they were aimed at artists who wanted to paint ‘realistic’ pictures, or at architects needing to construct perspectives of their buildings for presentation purposes. Such books invariably presented the subject as a means or process for getting your pictures to look right. They may have included a cursory opening chapter about the renaissance, but invariably presented it as if this period merely resolved a problem about drawing properly. However, once I looked a bit further, I found myself more interested in those drawings demonstrating the mechanics of perspective than in those demonstrating its application, in particular in the books of Thomas Malton and Brook Taylor. Figure 3 provides an example of

49


50

5/8/08

16:19

Page 50


Figure 3: Perspective study from Thomas Malton’s A Compleat Treatise on Perspective in Theory and in Practice, London, 1776.

Malton’s work. These authors present the reader with a three-dimensional system – the viewer, the picture plane and the objects, often using three-dimensional pop-up models connected with threads that represent the visual rays. They demonstrate how to construct shadows as this also involves projection onto a plane. Being able to stand back and see the whole system seemed extraordinary, and to cap it all, there would be drawings of all of this in perspective – perspective in perspective. They would show all the underlying construction work, which added another dimension. The examples then given in these books of its use, drawing architectural details and so on, seemed very dull in comparison. At the same time I had seen Piero della Francesca’s book De Prospectiva Pingendi,4 written, it is believed, to teach painters the mechanics of perspective and from which most subsequent writers on perspective have drawn extensively. It showed diagrams demonstrating the geometry of perspective even more pared down, in fact pared down to first principles, but it was the first book from which I felt I could learn something about the mechanics. The diagrams were virtually self-explanatory, although there is also an extremely detailed written description of every diagram and every procedure. Paradoxically perhaps, but probably very significantly, it was presenting problems about drawing individual objects, not presenting perspective as something to do with making pictures. I think what I found particularly interesting about Piero della Francesca’s book, and why it enabled me to get to grips with perspective, is that I could actually see the way transformations take place. For instance, it was very clear the way a square changes shape or is ‘degraded’ when it is in another plane. It is geometry, but it remains very visual, whereas in recent books written for painters, the procedures are presented as a set of rules, and the methods shown can appear to be quite abstract, in the sense that it is not always immediately clear how they work. This is something that James Elkins has commented on with reference to the nature of renaissance perspective; whereas contemporary ‘how to’ books on perspective present the


5/8/08

16:19

Page 51


Figure 4: De Prospectiva Pingendi, Book 1, Fig Xlll. Re-drawn by the author.

phenomenon in terms of vanishing points and how to get things in pictures to look right, the earlier methods lent themselves to drawing individual, spatially unrelated, objects.5 Elkins also points out the similarity between the layout of Fig XIII in Book 1 of Piero della Francesca’s De Prospectiva Pingendi and his painting ‘The Flagellation of Christ’.6 This contrast is attempted in Figure 4 and Figure 5.

Figure 5: Piero della Francesca (c.1415–92), The Flagellation of Christ, c.1463–4 (tempera on panel). © Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library.

51


52

5/8/08

16:19

Page 52


What I also found particularly curious was the inherently ambiguous nature of these drawings, and the way he apparently overlaid drawings creating a drawing where two things were shown at once. There isn’t anything odd in what he was doing, but this visual aspect of the drawings is something that rarely generates comment, presumably because these drawings are seen to represent certainty – a rational scientific approach to thinking, and therefore cannot contain anything ambiguous. Notwithstanding Lacan’s thoughts about the ‘gaze’, subject and object7 and illustrated in Figure 6, I think there has always been an element of ambiguity in diagrams demonstrating perspective.8

Figure 6: Representations of the Renaissance and the Lacanian views of the relationship between the viewer, the image and the world.

In an age when the observer and the observed are considered inseparable, linear perspective and all its trappings and its supposed objective view of the external world could be thought to be redundant. To me, it is the ambiguous nature of two converging lines on a piece of paper that opens up possibilities. As Merleau-Ponty points out: ‘When we look at a road which sweeps before us toward the horizon, we must not say either that the sides of the road are given to us as convergent or that they are given to us as parallel; they are parallel in depth. The perspective appearance is not posited, but neither is the parallelism’.9 Linear perspective continues to inspire vast amounts of literature and is also the cause of extreme reactions. Its perceived rules and methods are something that artists have consciously and unconsciously kicked against. To some, linear perspective constrains and depresses the imagination. To some, it solves problems; to others it is the problem. For example, Norman Bryson has suggested that the naturalism and rationalism associated with perspective illusion is a western myth, allowing such pictures to be used as tools of political power.10 For Martin Kemp it is a ‘system for recording the configuration of light rays on a plane as they proceed from an object to the eye in a pyramidal pattern’.11 Whatever the rights and wrongs of these extreme points of view, they need to be set against research in the neurosciences, for example, that of Susan Greenfield or Oliver Sacks that demonstrate the knife edge on which our apparently stable vision and perception is balanced, and which also suggests that probably a large part of what we think we perceive, is, in fact, internally generated. Perspective’s cultural significance may be variously interpreted, but its mechanics are generally accepted to be a means to an end, that end being the convincing or ‘accurate’ depiction of three dimensions. This perception is perhaps also encouraged when, for example, Martin Kemp describes one of Piero della Francesca’s drawing methods negatively, calling it ‘long-winded’ and ‘laborious’.12 As an artist using the geometry of linear perspective today, its use for depiction in fact seems to be its least important quality. One of the reasons for my own fascination with


5/8/08

16:19

Page 53


perspective is that it is an apparently rational system, but within it, I am able to work intuitively, enabling me to think, structure and to speculate. It is partly because of this that I find it hard to reconcile my own use and experiences of perspective with the models presented or implied by Kemp and others, who assume that it is a tool – a tool associated with creating illusion. I was more and more trying to get to grips with perspective’s history, both in painting and in architecture, through reading, but despite having acquired some basic knowledge of its mechanics I still had no compulsion to actually use it. It was a couple of years later, when I didn’t have a studio suitable for making sculpture that I decided to completely throw myself into using it. Just prior to this point, my drawings were playing with line, geometry and pattern and the diminishing proportions reminiscent of perspective that one can generate from these. I was making drawings that were clearly flat, but which also hinted at something spatial. Much later still, having learnt a great deal about its history and its mechanics, I returned to some of these earlier drawings and the simple methods that I was using to create depth. I began to realise that much of the so-called geometry of perspective was, in fact, also to be found in some very basic two-dimensional geometric constructions – the same ‘root 2’ constructions that I had been playing with (see Figure 7). This eventually led me to question the whole premise on which the orthodox history of perspective is largely built. While Alberti’s notion that an image of an object is formed by the intersection of a cone of vision with the picture plane is perfectly correct, the reverse of this procedure is equally valid. This would mean that spaces could be generated to fit a predetermined two-dimensional image. Of course this was put to use in Baroque architecture – Borromini in Palazzo Spada, or Guarini, for example, but I would suggest that this may also be what is happening in paintings such as Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, where it has been noted by Martin Kemp that elements in the painting, no matter at what depth they are in space, coincide with simple ratios on the surface of the painting. Thus a surface can be considered a starting point for projecting back from, rather than an intersection, and this has directed some recent work, for example, Figure 7. As soon as I started using perspective to make drawings, I immediately felt ‘at home’. Having been involved in making sculpture, I initially thought about it in terms of drawing solid objects

Figure 7: Richard Talbot, perspective developed from √2 pattern, Hunt (detail), 2003, pencil on paper. 1m x 8cm.

53


54

5/8/08

16:19

Page 54


sitting on a floor. I realised very quickly that I was able to conjure with these things. Things could float – I could place them anywhere and in any orientation. They still relied on being real in the sense that I had to define them in terms of plans and elevations, but they could now defy gravity. They did not have chipped corners and edges; they were idealised forms that I could balance on top of one another, all the things that were impossible in reality. Even though I had stopped consciously making objects to show and drawing had become my main activity, I still thought of myself as a sculptor. I was doing most of the things that I was doing when I was making sculpture, that is, making references to landscape, architecture and water, cutting, constructing, carving and playing with illusion. I played with stereotomy, working out how forms interlock. I started to play with the idea of the ‘point of view’ again, playing with orientation and making pairs of drawings where the same things were drawn from the opposite side, and turned upside down. I played with mirror images. I played with sets of forms that were themselves diminishing in proportions. In ‘Missing the Target’, (Figure 8) I made a direct reference to Jasper Johns by producing a structure that would, if seen end-on, be a series of concentric circles – a target. I initially used the same methods that an architect would use to construct a building in perspective, but left all the construction work there on the paper. It created a kind of scaffolding – a matrix, which held the three-dimensional forms. The drawings could be read at any scale – they were contained in their own space. They could be quite intimate but also could refer to infinitely large structures.

Figure 8: Richard Talbot, Missing the Target, 1996, pencil on paper.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 55


I was not attempting to depict deep space – the space is shallow, more like that found in medieval paintings. I began to try to retain a diagrammatic quality alongside a representation of three dimensions, possibly similar to the qualities of some early Renaissance paintings. I tried to leave everything that was involved in making the drawing on the paper – all the construction marks, the plans and elevations, as well as the forms that I have constructed. Even though I am using geometry in the drawings, the process is still, in fact, very intuitive. I do not start with an idea of what the end drawing may look like. The drawings evolve organically. I am making the same intuitive decisions about, say, how something fits into something else, or the thickness of something, whether it is within a drawing or in a wood construction. I am also very aware of the surface of the paper – that direct contact between the pencil and paper is important. I make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes produce other ideas which are then incorporated. I make some marks and lines that are purely diagrammatic and some which describe forms. I have become very aware of the interplay between them and the spatial effects that they produce. These lines and other marks, which do not initially have any visual purpose, become just as much part of the drawing as anything else. In addition, I am not defining objects absolutely and they remain transparent. The overall sense of transparency it creates is an essential part of the process, allowing forms and ideas to emerge, not unlike Leonardo’s suggestion about using accidental images. What I see on the paper is a combination of many things; plans, elevations, working out, construction marks, and perspective renderings of various forms. A combination of different kinds of information, things that can be read either twodimensionally or three-dimensionally, and sometimes read as both. The drawings take quite a long time to make so there is a constant reassessing. Because of the process, I have to have some hunch about something I want to get on the paper first, but then I might leave it for several weeks and then come back to it. This constant coming back to the drawing is quite an important aspect; I get to the point where I can forget my original intentions and no matter what kind of notion I had about exploring a particular idea, all that eventually goes out of the window and I deal with the drawing as it is on the paper. It feels as if I am creating a world within this paper, but not as it were a world involving the horizon and deep space but actually dealing with something here and now, almost something that I could grasp with my hands. It is akin to a block of space with endless possibilities. I think that is how it relates back to the sculpture, that I am able to work with the space, the shallow space, where I am actually able to make the same decisions, cutting, slicing and revealing things. However, the advantage of a drawing is that it can remain open-ended. In my paper ‘Design and perspective construction: Why is the Chalice the shape it is?’13 I demonstrate that unlike many methods of perspective projection, the method used in the Chalice positively lends itself to drawing individual, regular geometric forms. The design process can take place on the paper, and the design is partly a result of the drawing methods. It is, in fact, a process akin to that of carving – thinking and locating points and forms within the confines of a rectangular block. The transparent block with its visible internal three-dimensional logic,

55


56

5/8/08

16:19

Page 56


facilitates thinking in three dimensions. I believe this would have been a major factor in Piero’s and, later, Leonardo’s understanding and manipulation of the geometry of solid figures. This is a crucial issue for me – how the physical layout of a drawing on the paper, the method and approach of the perspective construction, relate to the nature of the space generated, the forms that are generated, and how they influence each other. The images within the drawings are drawn as if they are directly in front of me. I am not composing images within a space, for example within a frame with reference to an issue within painting such as composition. They are drawn and dealt with as objects, things that you could almost handle, rather than as pictures. I have never felt that I have wanted to create illusion through drawing. Nor have I wanted to communicate anything through my work. My approach to making a drawing could be compared to that of building a medieval cathedral, where a relatively rigid two-dimensional ground-plan was put in place, and the ensuing structure then developed organically, its form being the result of varying amounts of intention, pragmatism, accident and ambition.14 The drawing’s meaning, if such a thing exists, is not in my control. The drawings are the result of all the decisions made, conscious or otherwise. I of course accept responsibility for everything in the drawings, but what is brought to mind here is Perez-Gomez’s idea of ‘geometrical operations as a source of meaning’.15 He was specifically talking about architects from the Baroque period such as Guarini who used geometry and projection as part of the design process, but there are clear similarities in developing three-dimensional spaces from twodimensional images. In the period leading up to the invention/discovery of linear perspective there was no clear separation between optics, geometry, cosmology, and metaphysics. As Dalibor Vesely points out ‘For a modern mind, deeply influenced by instrumental, scientific thinking, it is obviously difficult to comprehend how a relatively simple sequence of lines can represent the content and meaning of a luminous world. The key to such an understanding is the mediating role and the symbolic meaning of geometry in medieval optics’.16 Perspective clearly isn’t just to do with accurate representation but it has mistakenly become that in our post-experimental scientific age. A drawing ‘in perspective’ is able to contain more information than the purely spatial. It can contain two and three-dimensional information, deep space and shallow space, and the processes involved are certainly more than prosaic tools for creating illusion or representing what is seen. Notes 1. Sanouillet, M. & Peterson, E (eds) (1975). The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson. 2. Hinton, C. (1886). Scientific Romances; What is the Fourth Dimension? London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 3. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and Mind, in J. M. Edie, ed. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. p. 180. 4. Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, ed. N. Fasola (1942), Florence: Sansoni. 5. Elkins, J. (1994). The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 57


6. Elkins, J. (1987). Piero della Francesca and the Renaissance Proof of Linear Perspective. The Art Bulletin Vol. 69, No.2 (June) pp. 220–230. 7. Lacan, J. (1994). What is a Picture, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. pp. 105–119. 8. There is also a remarkable similarity between Lacan’s diagram and those in Nicholas De Cusa’s ‘On Conjectures’, demonstrating the relationship between us and the world. 9. Merleau-Ponty M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 261. 10. Bryson, N. (1983). Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press. 11. Kemp, M. (1992). The Science of Art: Optical themes in western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (First ed. 1990), p. 342. 12. Kemp, M. (1997). Behind the Picture: Art and evidence in the Italian Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 99–100. 13. Talbot, R. (2006). Design and perspective construction: Why is the Chalice the shape it is?, in Nexus VI: Architecture and Mathematics, eds. Sylvie Duvernoy and Orietta Pedemonte, Turin: Kim Williams Books, pp. 121–134. www.nexusjournal.com/conferences/N2006-Talbot.html 14. Von Simpson, O. (1962). The Gothic Cathedral. New York: Pantheon Books. 15. Perez-Gomez, A. (1983). Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 16. Vesely, D. (2004). Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 116.

57


5/8/08

16:19

Page 58


5/8/08

16:19

Page 59

4 LOOKING AT DRAWING: THEORETICAL DISTINCTIONS AND THEIR USEFULNESS Ernst van Alphen It should be said nonetheless that an intelligent and experienced artist can pour more of his great abilities and art into modest productions that are sketchy and unfinished than many do in their large works. Only really great artists will see that I am speaking the truth with this strange remark. Albrecht Dürer.1 Artists, critics, and philosophers have proposed a variety of concepts and distinctions to differentiate kinds of drawing and to differentiate drawing from other media. This chapter presents notions of drawing as developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, German artist Albrecht Dürer, French critic Roland Barthes, American critic Rosalind Krauss, and German philosopher Walter Benjamin. The productiveness of their notions of drawing will be demonstrated through an analysis of drawings by the Dutch artist Armando and the Swiss artist Britta Huttenlocher with reference to the drawing practices of the German artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Elder, and American artist Cy Twombly. Jacques Derrida: Drawing as intransitive act In the drawings of the Dutch artist Armando broken lines move cautiously across the white paper. These lines, especially those in drawings from the 1950s (see Figure 1), have something forced about them, as if putting them on paper had required great effort. It is the power that is needed to draw the lines that speaks from these drawings. Only in the drawings from the 1970s and 1980s do his lines become suppler, but this difference is merely relative, not absolute. The forced quality of Armando’s drawings, in combination with their slow movement, suggests that they are the result of a particular activity: an exploration of the paper. The pencil explores the paper, searchingly or hesitantly, with a concentration that is directed at both the point of the pencil and the contact with the paper. The pressure that is exerted on the


60

5/8/08

16:19

Page 60


Figure 1: Armando, Untitled, 1958, ink on paper, 32.5 x 25 cm; private collection.

paper with the point of the pencil varies constantly, leaving lines that are not flowing but broken and always varying in width and intensity of black. As in Figure 2 the lines change from deep black to wispy grey. Because of the emphasis given to this exploration of the paper, the viewer’s attention is concentrated on the movement in the drawing. Any representation that may come about as a result is totally secondary. Armando’s drawings are then only figurative by exception; we recognize a flag, a tree or a fence. For French philosopher Jacques Derrida, writing in the catalogue he put together for the Louvre in 1990 to accompany the drawing exhibition Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines, it is just this exploratory movement that is to be regarded as the definition of drawing.2 He asserts that the act of drawing has something to do with blindness. On the one hand the artist behaves like a blind man; he searches and gropes and may never reach his goal. But Derrida suggests that the drawing itself is also blind. He presents drawing as an intransitive activity; our attention does not focus on the image we perceive, a represented world, but on the representation of that world – as activity. We see nothing in the drawing (transitive); we see only the drawing as intransitive act. Derrida’s general characterization of drawing is less surprising than it seems at first glance. Throughout the twentieth century there has been a regular emergence of artists reacting against


5/8/08

16:19

Page 61

LOOKING AT DRAWING: THEORETICAL DISTINCTIONS AND THEIR USEFULNESS |

the conventional assumption that the basis of drawing is visual perception. Drawing after a model,3 for example, was rejected by the Surrealist artists who followed the principle of automatism and gave free rein to the hand – no longer tied to the direction of the eye. Similarly, in the conceptualism of the 1960s, drawing was used as a weapon against the dominance of the retina in the visual arts. Robert Morris, for instance, produced a series of drawings in 1973 entitled Blind Time in which he completed self-imposed assignments with his eyes shut and within limited periods of time.4 Derrida explores his proposition that drawing is blind by turning to the way blindness itself is portrayed in drawing. He claims that this apparently random motif is self-reflexive. Whenever an artist chooses a blind person as the theme for drawings he or she is projecting onto that person ideas about the artist. Thus the blind person is no more than Figure 2: Armando, Untitled, 1982, pencil on paper, an allegor y for the ar tist or, to put it 18 x 13 cm; Courtesy Rob de Vries Gallery, Haarlem. differently, every blind person drawn is a self-por trait. By drawing the motif of blindness, the artist depicts the potency of drawing. Derrida uses the word ‘puissance’ here, which first of all has to do with potency in the sexual sense. By this he suggests that the ‘power’ of the drawings is not to be found in its persuasiveness, its effect or its goal (an image, for instance) but in a kind of underlying libido, or, by continuing with Derrida’s sexual metaphor, a libido from which the drawing issues. Albrecht Dürer: Drawing and Gwalt, or ars versus ingenium According to the sixteenth-century artist Albrecht Dürer there is a quasi-magical power of the artist that manifests itself most particularly in drawing. He called this power Gwalt. Gwalt cannot be learned or imitated, and in this sense it can be compared with what has been called ingenium in classical rhetoric since the time of Quintilian. This ability is usually seen in opposition to ars, a skill or area of competence that can be learned or imitated. Thus ingenium, Dürer’s Gwalt, refers to a kind of divine power given to the artist by God. This power is in evidence in everything the artist makes, but according to Dürer it is particularly apparent in the calligraphic line. This is why an artist’s Gwalt is best encountered in his drawings. In his impressive study of the work of Hans Holbein the Elder and Albrecht Dürer, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Joseph Koerner5 argues that the divine ingenium or Gwalt is invariably to be found in the artist’s drawings. According to a theory that has become a classic topos, the ability of an artist to draw a straight line or a perfect circle freehand is regarded as proof of this divine power. The hand of the artist is thereby completely

61


62

5/8/08

16:19

Page 62


subservient to an idea in the artist’s mind – an idea of a circle or a straight line, for instance. The faster the drawing or sketch is made, the more subservient the hand. What is ‘modern’ about Dürer is the way in which the hand is no longer directed by the idea but by perception in time. In Holbein’s drawn portraits, each line contributes directly to the likeness being portrayed. Each line is true in the sense of being analogous to the person being portrayed. Dürer, on the other hand, makes the most of the effects of mistakes; he allows all his lines, both the successful and the unsuccessful, to breathe life into his self-portrait. The large number of lines that go into portraying his thumb in such a variety of ways, or the intense mass of lines that describe his chin and wrist, make Dürer’s likeness active and lively. All these lines, seen as a whole, document the work of representation.6 In other words, in his self-portrait Dürer depicted not only his appearance but also the acts that called the depicted image to life. The act of drawing is no longer present in the form of the product alone – a likeness – but it is also present as activity. This recognition of drawing-as-act is more than the introduction of a new subject. It implies a paradigm shift. If the ingenium of classical rhetoric consisted of a divine power present in the artist, then Dürer transformed Gwalt into a human ability. For Dürer, it is the role of the maker, the artist, that occupies a position of prominence. Armando’s drawings radicalize those of Dürer. Working from the distinction between ars and Gwalt we can conclude that in Armando only Gwalt remains. The drawing as the result of acquired technique does not appear in his oeuvre. The emphatic absence of composition, combined with the ‘primitive’ broken lines, creates the impression that everything having to do with ars has been intentionally neglected. The activity of drawing and the power that drives it (for which Dürer has reserved space beside ars) has become an exclusive point of interest in Armando. Yet, the question remains whether the power given shape in Armando’s drawings is the same as Dürer’s Gwalt. Dürer’s ‘power,’ after all, is no longer of divine origin. For him the artist had become a special person possessing a special drive. In accordance with the humanism of the Renaissance, this uniqueness of the artist is a manifestation of the individualism that was on the rise during that period. So the most individual aspect of the artist, let us say his unique style, can be seen in Dürer’s Gwalt. An early form of expressionism thereby makes its entrance. But it is precisely here where the comparison between Armando and Dürer no longer holds. The contorted and sometimes aggressive power revealed in Armando’s drawings does not originate in a ‘condition’ or ‘characteristic’ of the artist. Throughout his entire life, and within all the media in which he works, Armando has resisted expressionistic poetics. His goal has never been ‘authenticity’ of the maker but of the material. The power or energy manifested in Armando’s drawings should instead be ascribed to the tension that develops whenever pencil is put to paper. Roland Barthes: Drawing and ductus In order to better understand the specific aspects of Armando’s drawings and the kind of power they express, a comparison with another artist is helpful – this time a contemporary one. In the


5/8/08

16:19

Page 63


work of the American artist Cy Twombly, both the paintings and the drawings appear ‘drawn’. But his drawing style is very specific, closely related to writing or graffiti. If Twombly’s work consists of a form of writing, this does not mean, as Roland Barthes has argued about this artist, that his work is calligraphic. Calligraphy is the art of a ‘formed’ – one might say a ‘drawn’ – writing. The essence of writing, according to Barthes, does not reside in its form, nor in the message or meaning that it might convey, but in the gesture involved. Twombly does not concern himself with the form – the product – of writing, but only with the act that produces the handwriting. When his work embodies ‘the gesture of writing’ that does not mean that it glories in what we might call a fluid hand. Just the opposite. It has been remarked that it looks as though Twombly produced his work with his left hand. The lines are often awkward, clumsy. In Barthes’ words, ‘by producing a handwriting that seems left-handed and awkward (gauche), he undermines the morality of the body’.7 The effect of left-handedness eliminates any association with technique (ars). Barthes’ claim that Twombly has undermined the morality of the body also holds for Armando. Barthes suggests that Twombly’s hand is no longer guided by the rest of the body, mind or will, or by a God-given power. What we see working here is the hand alone, under its own steam. A fitting expression for the movement of the hand severed from the artist can be found in the more formalistic vocabulary of paleography: the ductus. In paleography, handwriting is assessed not on the basis of the form of the visual product but on the basis of the path that the hand travels. It is the activity of the hand that forms the basis for the classification and definition of various letters. Indeed, it is the hand that conducts the line: from top to bottom, from left to right, by stopping, breaking off and continuing somewhere else on the paper. According to Barthes, it is the ductus that is dominant in Twombly’s work, or rather, that is indulged in his work. For Twombly does not obey the rules that govern the movement of the hand; he plays with them. He explores the possibilities inherent in hand motion and breaks the rules imposed on the hand. When we study the ductus in Armando’s drawings, the ‘left-handedness’ is even more striking than in Twombly. Even in the drawings that evoke an image, such as a flag or a tree, the attention is drawn to the way the analogy is executed. The resulting image remains subordinate. The drawings that make up the series of flags from 1981 (example shown in Figure 3) consist of short, broken gestures. On the image level we might say that this makes the flags look frayed. But what really catches the eye is the agitation of the gestures that have called these frayed flags to life. But whether Armando’s lines appear agitated and insecure or (what we also often see) aggressive and vicious, they are always the embodiment of a power, an energy. This power rarely evokes an analogous image within another dimension, but when it does it is an image of subordinate importance. He moves in only one direction across the paper. In this sense the lines that constitute Armando’s drawings are the traces of an activity. This is different to a product or result of an activity. What we see is the activity itself, not the activity’s object or goal. It is important that we deal here with the difference between Albrecht Dürer on the one hand and Cy Twombly and Armando on the other. Earlier it was proposed that Dürer’s modernity can

63


64

5/8/08

16:19

Page 64


Figure 3: Armando, Fahne (Flag), 1982, pencil on paper, 18 x 13 cm, (1 from a series of 13); Courtesy Rob de Vries Gallery, Haarlem.

be found in the fact that he reveals the activity of drawing in the drawing itself. It is just this activity that is so prominent in Twombly. One important difference, however, is that the activity Dürer reveals is purposeful, and that he as artist is the seat of this activity. In this sense Dürer’s activity is illustrative of a transitive act. What we as viewers see, then, is not only the drawing that Dürer has made but also the Dürer who is doing the drawing. Twombly’s drawings, on the other hand, are illustrative of drawings as an intransitive act. His drawing is no longer purposeful; he produces no images. Nor is he, as artist, the seat of his activity. He has ‘surrendered’ himself to his own hand and to the pencil it wields. It is the tension that arises when the pencil touches the paper that directs the activity of the drawing. In this sense the artist is no longer the subject who performs the action but the medium through whom the drawing is able to manifest itself.

Roland Barthes: Drawing as marks versus drawing as markings If we accept Derrida’s statement that the artist who produces drawings is blind, and that the activity of drawing consists of intransitive groping, we are forced to conclude that the medium of drawing has reached full bloom in Twombly and Armando. Roland Barthes makes a distinction between drawings that consist of trace (or marks) and those that consist of tracing (or markings).8 Twombly’s drawings are then extreme forms of tracing. The ‘-ing’ suffix of the present participle, when added to the French word trace, suggests that the drawn lines are traces of an activity instead of an object or concept that was to be represented. But by focusing on the act of drawing, more is blocked than the representation of an object or concept alone. It is also the work of art itself, which forces itself, as object, upon the viewer. Dürer seems to be referring to the status of paintings and sculpture as objects in the motto with which this chapter began. In their autonomy, these media impose themselves as fetishes on the viewers, which makes them objects that derive a magical seductiveness from their static character. Drawings, however, have traditionally been regarded as ‘temporary’ things, that are not autonomous, but function as designs for a definitive work. It is because of this impossible and marginal position of the drawing as object that the activity of design is able to play such a central role. And it is precisely for this reason that Dürer attaches such special value to the drawings of artists and even considers them more important than their paintings or sculptures. Paradoxically, it was because people in Dürer’s time developed an eye for these qualities of drawing that drawings first began to be regarded as autonomous expressions. Having


5/8/08

16:19

Page 65


acquired this appreciation as an activity – as non-fetish – drawings began to be collected as fetishes. Rosalind Krauss: Drawing as graffiti Thus far I have mainly emphasized the similarities between Armando and Twombly. The differences between their drawings, however, are at least as significant. Earlier I remarked that Twombly’s work can be understood as handwriting on the one hand and graffiti on the other. If his lines remind one of writing, they mainly characterize Twombly’s way of playing with ductus. I say ‘playing’ because his gestures evoke both light-hearted pleasure and a busyness caused partly by boredom. When his lines remind one of graffiti, it is because they look as though they were intended to appropriate the canvas by soiling or marking it. In this sense his work sometimes resembles a blackboard, or more strongly, public toilet walls. Even the drawings of genitalia that we sometimes encounter in these kinds of places, especially men’s rooms, can be found in his work. Rosalind Krauss has concisely expressed the meaning of graffiti for Twombly’s work: Twombly took up graffiti as a way of interpreting the meaning of Action Painting’s mark, and most particularly that of Pollock’s radically innovative dripped line. For graffiti is a medium of marking that has precise, and unmistakable, characteristics. First, it is performative, suspending representation in favor of action: I mark you, I cancel you, I dirty you. Second it is violent: always an invasion of a space that is not the marker’s own, it takes illegitimate advantage of the surface of inscription, violating it, mauling it, scarring it. Third, it converts the present tense of the performative into the past tense of the index: it is the trace of an event, torn away from the presence of the marker. “Kilroy was here,” it reads.9 According to Krauss, Twombly’s acts of drawing produce no images; they are violent acts that occupy the surface of the canvas or paper, in the sense of appropriating it or seizing it. His work mainly has to do with the confiscation of space. Armando’s drawings, by contrast never resemble a men’s room wall. The mood that his drawings evoke is very different to that of Twombly. And although here, too, the image is overshadowed by drawing as activity, the carrying out of this activity is not an appropriation of space by means of befoulment or inscription. His drawing consists of marking. The aggression in Armando’s drawings is not aimed at seizing the surface. Rather it has to do with the tension between two opponents: the point of the pencil and the surface of the paper. In the drawings from the 1950s, the confrontation is plainly violent. Armando’s act of drawing was a matter of life or death. It expressed intense tension. He himself said, ‘For me, a line has to be what I also find in children’s drawings. It has to have tension. If I were to begin a line and it lacked tension for just one centimeter, the drawing would be a failure and I would tear up the paper’.10 In his later drawings there is no evidence of this unexpected, aggressive violence. It is as if the contact between the pencil and paper was a matter of continual mutual exploration. Walter Benjamin: Sign versus mark A rather different notion of drawing is proposed by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. He develops it by differentiating drawing from painting. In his article ‘On Painting, or Sign and Marks,’ (Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal),11 he distinguishes different kinds of lines,

65


66

5/8/08

16:19

Page 66


among which are the ‘graphic line’ and the inherently magical ‘line of the absolute sign’. It is striking that in his discussion of the graphic line, Benjamin constantly evokes the realm of landscape: The graphic line is defined by its contrast with area…The graphic line marks out the area and so defines it by attaching itself to its background. Conversely, the graphic line can exist only against this background, so that a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing.12 Notions of ‘area’, ‘background’, but of course also ‘line,’ are used ambiguously. Such terms allow an analysis of the nature of the graphic line literally, that is formalistically, but at the same time they metaphorically support the construction of the realm of landscape. This metaphorical dimension of Benjamin’s discussion of the graphic line becomes apparent when he dwells on the background of a drawing: The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface on which it is inscribed. We might even deny it that identity by thinking of it as a surge of white waves (though these might not even be distinguishable to the naked eye).13 His comparison of the background with ‘a surge of white waves’ introduces a dynamic movement in his description of the graphic line, a dynamism that also characterises the composition of landscape. Benjamin’s discussion of the line of the absolute sign radiates back on what he had to say about the graphic line, because every representational line also has an impact unrelated to its representational function. But in order to explain the absolute sign he makes another distinction, this time the one between absolute sign and absolute mark. He claims that the sign seems to have more reference to persons, whereas the mark tends to exclude the personal. This intriguing but rather obscure remark becomes clear only later when he articulates a more basic difference: …the sign is printed on something, whereas the mark emerges from it. This makes it clear that the realm of the mark is a medium. Whereas the absolute sign does not for the most part appear on living beings but can be impressed or appear on lifeless buildings, trees, and so on, the mark appears principally on living beings (Christ’s stigmata, blushes, perhaps leprosy and birthmarks).14 The distinction between signs and marks as personal versus non-personal is made clearer; signs are intentionally made by a subject whereas marks just emerge or appear. Subjects are confronted with marks, but these are not intentionally made by them. At first sight Benjamin’s next step in his argument about the graphic line is rather puzzling. He declares that the medium of painting is that of the mark in the narrower sense, for it has neither background nor graphic line. He is very much aware of the strange implication of this logic because painting poses a ‘problem’:


5/8/08

16:19

Page 67


The problem of painting becomes clear only when we understand the nature of the mark in the narrower sense, while feeling astonished that a picture can have a composition even though this cannot be reduced to a graphic design.15 Composition in painting is not the result of the difference between graphic line and background but between the reciprocal demarcations of the coloured surfaces. Whereas in drawing the drawn line creates background, in painting there is not such a clear agency responsible for the emergence of the composition. Differences between colours reciprocally lead to composition. This different nature of painting’s composition explains its status as mark. Composition emerges; it is the result of the qualities of the colours used, which come about differentially, that is reciprocally. These qualities are not intentionally made by an agent as is the case in the drawing of a graphic line. The difference between drawing and painting can now be understood as the difference between sign and mark. Whereas composition in drawing is the result of an intentionally creative agency (the person who draws), in painting composition is only indirectly created by the painter. It is primarily brought about by the differential qualities of colours. The painter, of course, applies the colours, but she does not create their differential values; she only utilizes them. They have to be accepted as they emerge or appear. Benjamin’s understanding of the sign and the mark illuminates the work of the Swiss artist Britta Huttenlocher. One could now say that in her works she seems to explore the graphic line. The ordering of the compositions is at first sight the exclusive result of lines directed by the artist. However, there are also elements which emerge and are in that sense painterly. The drawn panels which she made from 1992 until 1999 convey a tension between the ordering, directing hand of the draughtsman and elements which have to be accepted when they emerge (Figures 4 and 5). These works are emphatically drawn. They consist exclusively of graphic lines. But their compositions contain striking repetitions. Many lines are doubled, sometimes even ten or eleven times because they were drawn by a kind of comb-like row of pencils. Lines follow in the track of other lines. These lines fundamentally challenge Benjamin’s understanding of the graphic line. They don’t seem to be drawn by a directing subject. They exclude the personal, to use his words. They seem to have emerged in the wake of other lines. Their appearance seems to find their origin in other lines, not in human agency. In 1998 Huttenlocher started to make watercolours. It is striking that Benjamin mentions watercolour as an exception within his schematic distinction of sign and mark, of drawing and painting. ‘The only instance in which colour and line coincide is in the watercolour, in which the pencil outlines are visible and the paint is put on transparently. In that case the background is retained, even though it is coloured’.16 Benjamin highlights the fact that in watercolour one can ‘draw’ with colour. But with respect to the opposition between signs that are intentionally made versus marks that just emerge, watercolours seem to be sign and mark at the same time. Although one can draw lines in colour, these lines are hard to direct. They flow and the artist has only limited control over them. A major part of the watercolour line just emerges. Watercolours are in this respect a medium in which painting and drawing meet.

67


68

5/8/08

16:19

Page 68


Figure 4: Britta Huttenlocher, Untitled, 1992, pencil on canvas on wood, 76.6 x 70.6 cm; Courtesy Gallery Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam; Peter Cox photographer.)

Benjamin’s notion of drawing as sign is the result of how he differentiates it from painting. This explains why his notion of his drawing differs substantially from those developed by Derrida, Dürer, or Barthes. The latter all focus on the kind of activity that is performed when an artist draws and that is symptomatically present in its resulting image: the drawing. For them it is the gesture of the hand that defines drawing. Benjamin, however, does not focus on the activity or gesture of the hand, but on formal features of drawings versus paintings and how certain formal features produce composition. Benjamin’s perspective differs, which leads to another notion of drawing. Different as the discussed theoretical distinctions of drawing are, they all highlight crucial aspects of drawing. They allow us to see into and make sense of drawings.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 69


Figure 5: Britta Huttenlocher, Untitled, 1993, pencil on canvas on wood, 76.6 x 70.6 cm; Courtesy Gallery Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam; Peter Cox photographer.

Notes 1. Dürer, A. Schriftlicher Nachlaß, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin, 1956–69). 2. Derrida, J. (1990). Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux. 3. This is figurative by definition, but not all figurative drawing is the result of drawing ‘after a model’. 4. Lee, P. and Mehring, C. (1997). Drawing is Another Kind of Language, Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Art Museum. 5. Koerner, J. (1993). The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 6. Ibid., p. 6.

69


70

5/8/08

16:19

Page 70


7. Barthes, R. (1982). Cy Twombly ou non multa sed multum, in L’obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, p. 151. 8. Ibid., p. 159. 9. Krauss, R. (1994). Cy’s Up, Artforum, September, p. 159. 10. Sanders, M. (1985). De galm van het verleden: Martijn Sanders in gesprek met Armando, in Armando: 100 tekeningen, 1952–1984 . Rotterdam: Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, p. 9. 11. Benjamin, W. (1996). Painting, or Signs and Marks, (Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal), in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 83–86. 12. Ibid., p. 83. 13. Ibid., p. 83. 14. Ibid., p. 84. 15. Ibid., p. 85. 16. Ibid., p. 85.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 71

5 PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND THE PENCIL James Faure Walker Is your pencil British? The most practical sketching appliance we have seen. I have run after animals with it, and walked miles with it slung over my shoulders without in any way feeling it too heavy.1 By a stroke of luck I came to possess a collection of The Studio magazines from the 1900s to its demise in the 1980s.2 The advertisements for pencils, pens, drawing appliances, and correspondence courses began to invade my waking hours. The Autolycus, an early form of laptop computer, went on being advertised throughout the ‘twenties. Here too was Percy Bradshaw’s ‘Press Art School’ of Forest Hill, with eager testimonials from satisfied pupils who, as promised, earned a living from drawing. Assuming that Drawing as a Career appeals to you, in a more than passing way…I am quite sincere when I say that, for the trained artist who can do the work, there are plenty of jobs waiting today. If you post me an original drawing I will criticize it helpfully and send you my Prospectus without charge.3 This was a correspondence college based initially in Forest Hill, London. Percy Bradshaw himself, who wrote three drawing books published by The Studio, often appears in the advertisements from 1905, ageing gracefully, ever imploring ‘Don’t you wish you could draw?’ Sometimes the Press Art School itself is pictured; sometimes there are sketchers at work, perhaps drawing the school itself; and sometimes caricatures. In 1928 he would have to contend with forty other local art schools on neighbouring pages, not including rival correspondence courses. Aspiring draughtsmen had a choice of animal drawing schools. One was run by Beatrice Flower, and one by Miss Grant Gordon (NDD): the Animal Studio in Albert Place, Kensington, London W.8. The 1949 advertisement announces dog models 10.30 to 12.30 on Mondays, horse models 10.30 to 12.30 on Fridays.4 Here is a lost world of drawing, with amateurs, professionals, specialised skills, and strict timetables – art schools had ‘headmasters’.


72

5/8/08

16:19

Page 72


Figure 1: The Autolycus in a Reeves advert of 1928 and an advert for Turquoise pencils, 1963.

1928

1963

The pencil and pen market was competitive. In 1928 Koh-I-Noor claimed that: Famous Artists have gone hungry rather than use any but the best materials. For the Artist the ‘best materials’, as far as the pencil is concerned, mean the Koh-I-Noor, ‘the perfect pencil’. These pencils may have been magnificent, but they were made in Czechoslovakia. Whether because of patriotism, anti-German feeling after the First World War, or because of a lack of any other selling point, Wolff’s Royal Sovereign pencil’s slogan in 1925 was ‘Is your Pencil British?’ (Figure 3). Symbols of Britishness – the lion, Trafalgar Square, Romney – accompany


5/8/08

16:19

Page 73

PRIDE, PREJUDICE AND THE PENCIL |

1906

1948

1930

1950

Figure 2: Four adverts for Percy V. Bradshaw’s Press Art School, from The Studio (1906, 1930, 1948 and 1950).

73


74

5/8/08

16:19

Page 74


1925

1928

1931

1949

Figure 3: Four adverts for pencils (1925, 1928, 1931 and 1949).


5/8/08

16:19

Page 75


1930

1940 Figure 4: Adverts for Venus pencils (1930, 1940 and 1944).

1944

75


76

5/8/08

16:19

Page 76


the image of the pencil. The Royal Sovereign’s other competitors were American (Venus, Turquoise), and Faber-Castell (German). In wartime, pencils could be recruited for the nation. The American Eagle Company (makers of the Turquoise) produced the ‘Stars and Stripes’, ‘Patrol’, and the ‘Ensign’ models. Sovereign’s theme came to be ‘Construction starts with a pencil’. The pencil is in the foreground, hovering over the drawn plans, with the shipyard in the background. Venus commissioned the most inventive drawings (Figure 4), first in 1940 with ‘Pencilebrities’, like A. Games, depicting a row of the different helmet styles of the allies to show what could be done with a 2B; and then in 1944 with pencils shouldered like rifles in ‘Weapons of War’: More and more pencils are needed every day to design the weapons that are still the key to victory – tanks, ships, aeroplanes. That is why pencils made by the Venus Pencil Company are in such heavy demand for vital war industry. Branded lines, extra grades, fine finish and luxury workmanship – these must give way temporarily to the needs of war – but the traditional standard of Venus quality still remains. The public can still obtain, and depend upon the standardised ‘War Drawing’ (in 7 grades) and Utility (Blacklead, Copying and Coloured) Pencils now produced by the Venus Pencil Co.5 It was not until 1952 that the full range was restored, and Venus, Turquoise, Reeves and others made much of the extra tones again available. After the war everything changed. In 1930 the Venus had been ‘The Pencil round which the World of Art Revolves’, but now art and the world were different. The Press Art School maintained its impressive record in training cartoonists, including Ralph Steadman, but by the 1960s the Forest Hill college had ceased advertising. Percy Bradshaw died in 1965. The postman no longer delivered the rolled up drawings. Instead they were being sent to Paris (see Figure 5): Learn to draw direct from Paris under famous French artists…Don’t you wish you could draw and paint? Haven’t you envied the pleasure of your friends who can – and the money some make? Now you can learn to be a real artist in a few months, in your own home, through the world famous Paris ABC School of Art. The secret is you reap all the benefit of studying under famous French artists by post. Your lessons come (in English, of course) direct from Paris; your drawings go to Paris and your particular teacher in Paris sends his criticisms and suggestions direct to you.6 A line drawing shows a couple of naked pubescent children, kneeling and drinking from a flask. In today’s watchful climate this image might not be accepted as an innocent demonstration of penmanship. Even pencil advertisements, unwittingly, reveal the ethos of their time – or the inhibitions of our time. An advertisement for the Turquoise pencil of the same period is a textbook case of ‘the male gaze’ (Figure 5). A firm hand holds the Turquoise pencil up to the viewer’s eye to measure the soft-focus nude. There is no pencil to equal Turquoise. Turquoise leads are made from 100% electronic graphite for extra smoothness, and super-bonded in the wood for extra strength. They hold


5/8/08

16:19

Page 77


1955

1960

1960 Figure 5: Post-War adverts from The Studio.

1960

77


78

5/8/08

16:19

Page 78


a point under great pressure and need less sharpening than ordinary pencils. Give smooth, clean, lines.7 A better job in half the time Each ‘drawing’ generation likes to think it is more enlightened, more tolerant, more advanced in every respect than its predecessors. For one generation the argument may be line versus tone, precision versus atmosphere.8 The issue that divides one art world – the Whistler versus Ruskin libel case of 1878 – may be of little interest to the succeeding one. Why should the time taken to make a work affect its merit as art? But the idea that drawing should be about showing good hard work did linger for a long time; right up to the 1950s, you can sense some suspicion of the Impressionists; after all, they painted directly without drawing first. But there were other complexes at work. Being ‘modern’ in the 1930s and 1940s might well involve a vitriolic hatred for anything studiobound, anything mock medieval, heavy with Victorian ‘fancy dress’. In 1944 the new President of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings – now remembered as much for suggesting that Picasso needed a good kicking as for his sporting pictures – was praised as a modernist because he was a ‘plein air’ landscapist.9 His only rival, in the painting of horses, was considered to be Velazquez. In a 1953 review of late nineteenth century painting, William Powell Frith’s Derby Day is described as ‘exasperating’, a complete waste of time. The same article reflects on the recent death of Raoul Dufy, regarded by Alexander Watt as among the leading six painters of the twentieth century (the others being Bonnard, Braque, Matisse, Picasso and Rouault).10 We live in post-modern times. We are supposed to be above such squabbles, or at least we are supposed to tolerate the whole spectrum of styles, accepting the one-second drawing in the same spirit as the drawing that took ten years. The divisive issue of our time might be the use of the computer – what in 1900 would have been called ‘the drawing appliance’, or indeed ‘the perfect pencil’.11 Digital lines, whether 3D or 2D, are seen as lacking the character of the line pressed across paper by the pencil. We value the raw and the gritty: crude charcoal, the leaky pen, anything low tech. Should a pen, brush or pencil, have a character of its own? Or should it be designed to be anonymous, flawless, transmitting uninflected the artist’s ‘idea’? In my own case, I confess, I do keep special pens and brushes, which I treasure for their idiosyncrasies. My fondness for eccentric brushes has increased because of simultaneously drawing with paint software, where creating irregular and unpredictable brushes is part of the art. Of course, temperamental pens are only tolerable if you know you have the perfect pen – a gel pen no doubt – as a standby. I doubt whether many of us regret the passing of the constantly clogging Rapidograph – first advertised in 1955. But Illustrator lay well in the future when Gillott’s pens (Figure 6) tackled that question of obedience. In 1925 a finely detailed Pre-Raphaelite illustration, ‘The Arming of Joan of Arc’, demonstrates ‘The Magic Touch of Linley Sambourne’: It reveals all Linley Sambourne’s command of line and tone, and that wizardry of light and shade that always lends distinction to any one of his compositions.12


5/8/08

16:19

Page 79


1925

1950

1960

1962

1955 Figure 6: Five adverts for Gillotts pens.

79


80

5/8/08

16:19

Page 80


Sambourne had started out as a draughtsman in a marine engineering works, and is best known for his illustrations for Punch. He died in 1910 and over his lifetime he had amassed a collection of 10,000 catalogued photographs. The medievalism of the image was hardly of its time, but presumably it was still, for many readers, a fine case of contemporary drawing. In 1950 we are in the modern world, with a drawing that must have taken less than five seconds: a woman’s face in one continuous line (Figure 6): The pen must grow out of the artist’s hand, taking his direction with the obedience of a guardsman and the grace of a premiere danseuse: Once a pen expresses its own personality it is doomed! It should grow old and tired imperceptibly and be discarded reluctantly. It has to be a Gillott pen – every time and all the time.13 The nib becomes less the slave for dutiful hard work, more the enabler of spontaneity – both claims made repeatedly in today’s ‘frictionless’ graphics software. The skill of the artist flows freely through the Gillott pen and that which emerges in black and white is a true interpretation of what he has in mind.14 The more ‘transparent’ and ‘intuitive’ the better. The artist does not work against a resistant material. There is simply the mental concept and the physical execution. But was the world speeding up? Certainly labour-saving devices were becoming attractive. The Aerograph airbrush was one such device and four advertisements appear in Figure 7. As a product the Aerograph, like the Gillot pen, remained little modified over some seventy years of advertising. The real changes occur in the settings: the backdrops showing it at work. Invented in Iowa in 1879, the airbrush came to be produced in Clerkenwell, London, as the Aerograph, and began life as essentially an ‘artistic’ way of saving time. ‘He who saves time lengthens life’15 and ‘Not a machine, not a process. An artist’s tool and a new and beautiful art’.16 An 1884 advertisement in Chicago celebrates a ‘special medal’ award for ‘the air brush and portraits’, and depicts artists at desks, like clerks, producing portraits but apparently without models. A clue to the process comes in the Air Brush Journal that announces classes at the Illinois Art School in ‘Photo Copying of the highest and most artistic grades’. As with the printers who were to be replaced by the Epson a century later, there was presumably a trade, the photocopier, put out of business by the Xerox. A 1906 advertisement in The Studio for the Aerograph lists its uses: The improved Air Brush is of great assistance to the Artist for Black-and-White and WaterColour Drawings, Finishing Photographic Work for Process Engraving, and the like.17 From the turn of the century through to the 1920s the Aerograph is drawn in profile like a piece of plumbing, isolated from any context (Figure 7). In 1925 the Aerograph appears with its compressor – ‘Equip your studio with the Aerograph electric motor driven compressor’. This advertisement is next to the ‘Diana Series Exhibition


5/8/08

16:19

Page 81


1925

1940 Figure 7: Four adverts for the Aerograph (1925, 1929, 1940 and 1949).

1929

1949

81


82

5/8/08

16:19

Page 82


Camera Studies’ – ‘Comprising a New and Exclusive Series of Charming Photographic OutDoor Figure Studies, taken by an artist amid the rugged sea-shore and shady woodland scenery of Britain.’ Several albums of nude figure studies were advertised, most notably by the Paine family of Walthamstow, with five gold medals to their credit, and great testimonials: ‘the finest models I have seen’ (A Doctor); ‘Models are physical perfection’ (Captain Hawkey).18 Outdoor settings, silhouetted on the skyline, poses reminiscent of ‘Health and Efficiency’, and of course hairstyles, tie them to the period. They may have been used exclusively for ‘artistic’ purposes, but some albums do list female nude ‘lingerie and boudoir’ poses, as well as ‘child studies’. The juxtaposition of female form with cold machinery was not uncommon. Soft tonal gradation, the smoothness of satin, was the ideal, to be achieved through finely graded pencils, pastels, airbrushes, or photographs. Use the Aerograph for rapid and beautiful work. It produces exquisite gradations of tone and delicacy of shading that cannot be equalled in any other way and in a fraction of the time taken by older methods. Over 26,000 in use.19 The ‘AE’ model of 1930 claims to have new and improved features but is still for ‘spray painting’. By 1940 the advertisements have more of a streamlined look. The sans serif typeface looks functional, and the subtle gradations show what the Aerograph can do (Figure 7). More Speed, Less Haste, Thanks to Aerograph Air-Brush Equipment. For retouching and recolouring photographs, producing exquisite gradations of tone with a minimum of trouble, the Aerograph Air-Brush is invaluable.20 In 1949 the Aerograph is spraying an image of the earth. It is being used all over the globe: ‘A Better Job in Half the Time. Aerograph Air Brushes are used all over the World’.21 The far less messy tools of drawing software, especially Illustrator, have long superseded precision spraying for technical drawing, and for graphic art generally. Airbrush ‘art’ now has cult status, especially for customised cars and bikes. Spray cans are handy for graffiti. As a drawing tool it has become neglected. In recent times drawing has caught the attention of philosophers, and been defined as the ‘inscribed’ mark, the trace of the hand as the pencil moves across the surface. This variety of drawing has no lines and no contact. Spray painting imposes a discipline. As with watercolour you cannot revise: you have to work fast and keep moving. Every shade and every grade The Studio is presenting us with snapshots of an era but who is doing the drawing, what do the artists look like, what do they talk about? Generally, with their British perspective, they were more confident of their place in the world. Today pencils, pens, brushes, graphics software etc., are advertised in magazines specializing in illustration, and in leisure painting, such as Artists and Illustrators. The practical side of art – visits to artists’ studios, the how-I-painted-this-picture articles – disappeared from the ‘serious’ art magazines in the ‘seventies. Their advertising


5/8/08

16:19

Page 83


pages, their main revenue source, were given over to galleries. The last place you would now expect to find an article on how-to-draw would be Frieze. If drawings feature at all they are there as ‘art’, not illustration. What makes the copies of The Studio such a rich archive is simply the fact that most of the advertisements were drawn. They were drawn for a purpose, even if it was just to promote a brand of pencil. In those pre-war days drawing was a broad church. Engineers, architects, commercial artists, all had to draw, and draw with the skills of the professional. Drawing was a career. For the amateur, sketching equipment was advertised in the same slot as field sports accessories. The Studio advertised all-weather wear, but the season proper did not start till May. Dozens of specialized manuals appeared; Jasper Salwey’s ‘The Art of Drawing in Lead Pencil’ (‘with a foreword by Leonard Squirrell’) in 1921; Borough Johnson’s ‘The Technique of Pencil Drawing’ (‘with a foreword by Frank Brangwyn RA and a Note on Pencil Drawing by Selwyn Image’) of 1928. Though emphatically practical, these books could embody a philosophical outlook on life, with the occasional hobbyhorse. Lewis Day’s seminal 1901 ‘Nature and Ornament: Nature the Raw Material of Design’ bemoans the neglect of tendrils, because of their sinuous variety. Alfred Rich’s 1918 ‘Water Colour Painting’ – up to the 1950s ‘watercolour drawing’ was considered drawing – tours the counties in search of real watercolour country. F J Glass (Headmaster of Londonderry Art School) demonstrates how to translate nature studies into decorative motifs in ‘Drawing Design and Craftwork’ of 1920. All these followed Ruskin’s dictum that learning to draw was really learning to see. Some manuals, wonderfully illustrated, are indistinguishable from botany books. Drawing in that period was not primarily a selfconscious ‘art’ form but a means to an end. It was about investigating and communicating, about serious study, be it in science, medicine, design, manufacture, leisure, portraits or landscapes. Carpenter and Westley, of Regent Street, the suppliers in 1906 of the ‘Pocket Diminishing Glass’ were opticians: ‘Spectacles for Artists a Speciality’.22 It would have seemed odd at that time for someone to ask ‘what is drawing?’ – to lump it all together and try out some definitions. But this is where we are today at the typical drawing conference. Here and there a purist will suggest only hand-made marks on paper count; that anything photographic, printed, sprayed or digital should be excluded. But for the most part we try to be liberal and inclusive. We look at maps as drawings – just at the time, incidentally, when drawing in the ordinary sense is no longer used to make maps.23 Typically the conference viewpoint is that of the ‘fine artist’ rather than that of the designer, animator, or specialist in information visualisation – fields where you would be mad not to use graphics software. In his comprehensive study of the 1950s, Having it So Good,24 Peter Hennessy points out that religion becomes an intellectual debating point just at the time the Church of England’s congregation dwindles. Perhaps ‘drawing’ has become an attractive conference proposition for similar reasons. Theorists, analysts, scholars, splinter groups, as much as artists themselves, are making the running. The message is that drawing is in a healthy state. The alternative view would be that most of what used to be described as drawing has been absorbed into electronic formats, and the remainder we are intent on preserving, the fine art part, has become the preserve of conservative soul-searchers. It is easy ground for the art theorist. Why, one wonders, is there such a fixation on the low tech, on ‘the mark on the paper’? Surely the sheer

83


84

5/8/08

16:19

Page 84


ingenuity of the Bezier curve, the Photoshop filter, the complexity of Maya, or even the Aerograph, are worthy of at least the same attention from a ‘drawing community’? This disdain for skill, for the technical side of drawing, for ‘commercial’ or ‘trade’ drawing, can be traced back to the 1950s. There was this residual imperial arrogance, deference to an ‘educated’ class, traditions carried on for their own sake, culminating in the Suez humiliation of 1956. Reading The Studio editorials of the time, the insularity of the British establishment is striking. One debate was prompted by the President of the Royal Academy proposing a two-stream model, where ‘moderns’ and ‘traditionalists’ could enjoy separate parallel lives. Some resented the way the British Council was promoting the likes of Henry Moore overseas. The Academicians felt that they themselves – the worthy heirs of Michelangelo – should be given the Venice Biennale Pavilion. But their view that they really were the great draughtsmen of their time may have been wishful thinking – they supplied their own criteria, of course, the Royal Academy as ever being a closed shop. At this time there seem to be no images of ‘art intellectuals’, perhaps offering advice in advertisements, just the occasional connoisseur, critic, or even scientist – all of whom preferred the bow tie. The term ‘research’ does crop up here and there. There was a company called ‘studio research’ which produced ‘sculptex’ modelling material. There were plastic and viscose alternative types of canvas, and a canvas adapted for watercolour. The scientist leans forward to explain to the artist – who wears a trilby – that Reeves’ ‘Goya’ oil paints are four-star permanent (Figure 8). The 1955 Turquoise Pencil promotion features the ‘reflectometer’, proving that ‘If it says it is 4H it is 4H’, with ‘100% electronic graphite’ (Figure 5): a ‘wired’ pencil decades before the Wacom ‘stylus’. Researchers sought ways of making materials more efficient, looking for a smooth flowing pen. Their equivalents today would be the programmers at Adobe, enhancing ‘functionality’ for the ‘workflow pipeline’. Anxiety about making any association between the pencil and the machine has its own history – though without developments in technology pencils would never have been perfected and manufactured in bulk.26 Even in the 1990s professors at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam insisted that the pencil should be sharpened by hand with a knife, not with a mechanical sharpener.27 But it is easy to make the wrong assumption about the drawing habits of the past, where copying old master drawings, even photographs – recommended by Ruskin – would be more part of the routine than it is now. Before leafing though these drawings of artists and pencils I lazily supposed that the distrust of ‘modern’ technology went right back to a ‘pretechnology’ era; as if today’s drawing fundamentalists were defending roughly the same ground as the practitioners of a hundred years ago: both would feel that drawings could only be made by hand, that ‘technology’ should be rejected. ‘Avoid machine-made jewellery,’ shouts a 1906 advertisement, ‘it lacks originality.’ Three products share a page of the November 1906 The Studio: a Kodak camera recommended as the ideal Christmas present for the art student; the Waterman’s ‘Patent Spoonfeed’ Ideal Fountain Pen – ‘And now no inky fingers’; while Lefranc & Co’s ‘Celebrated Colours’ are being used by a damsel in flowing dress, perhaps painting in ancient Athens (Figure 8).


5/8/08

16:19

Page 85


1906

1955 Figure 8: Three adverts from The Studio, 1906, and a Goya advert, 1955.

85


86

5/8/08

16:19

Page 86


According to this, the artists of the 1900s are dreamy aesthetes with floppy hair, producing illuminated manuscripts. But meanwhile, across the channel, a more turbulent attack on the canvas was coming about: through Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picasso, Kirchner, Nolde and others. They discarded the distinction between drawing and painting; they would have looked ‘primitive’. The insularity of The Studio is even more pronounced during the interwar years. In the 1930s and 1940s the artists wear tweed suits and smoke pipes. They are prepared to sketch in all weathers and have a no-nonsense air about them; by the end of the 1950s they have grown beards, wear fishermen’s jerseys, listen to modern jazz, and live in Paris. By the 1960s The Studio was in love with Paris, with reports of studio visits to Braque, and many now forgotten Parisians, and also to bistros with their art collections. The bohemian lifestyle calls for jokey illustrations that allude to that two-stream model of traditional and modern: For sketches and portraits, Or Avant garde art, VENUS assures you Success from the start.28 Primitive, traditional, modern, human, technology, are all loose categories permeated with the prejudices of their time. Not so long ago, primitive meant primitive, and multiculturalism was for oddballs like Dubuffet. Western artists, Western civilisation set the standard. Draughtsmanship was draughtsmanship. Western factories produced the best-engineered drawing materials – though after the war India did extensive research in setting up its own pencil industry. Based in Birmingham, those Gillott’s ‘Drawing and Professional Pens’ were advertised over many decades. A 1962 advertisement (Figure 6) features a hairy crouching caveman with fur pants scratching an angry bison on the wall: ‘Times have changed…Artists in those days had to make do. Artists today have Gillott’s pens’.29 Right through to the 1960s ‘draughtsmanship’ was tied to a gold standard, only attainable after years of study and constant practice, copying Renaissance masters, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo. Their drawings would be studied, not in terms of ‘visual culture’, but in order to learn the mechanics of drawing. To take your bearings from cave drawings, or from a theory about ‘the body’ and ‘how it is to be in the world’, would have been laughable – unless you had studied with Klee, or perhaps Anthony Caro. Equally, Gillott’s 1950s advertisements use stereotypes that jar with our idea of universal human values. To illustrate ‘the finest pens in the world’, peoples of the world are assembled: a tribesman, a coolie, an African carrying a water jar on her head, a Cossack dancer (Figure 6). These are the background subjects while the couple in dress and suit are the sophisticated travelling Westerners. Teaching drawing at that time, whether your loyalties were with the Renaissance or the ‘Moderns’ of the School of Paris, you would not have encountered the mix of students from China, Korea, Africa, of today’s MA drawing courses, where as a tutor you soon learn that drawing embraces variables – such as flesh tones – as much as universals. In China ‘drawing’ can simply mean painting without colour. Skin colour was not a sensitive issue in 1931, not according to the promotion of the ‘Castell’ and ‘Polychromos’ pencil: ‘The A.W. Faber’s made


5/8/08

16:19

Page 87


in every shade and every grade.’ This is illustrated by two smiling ‘natives’ carrying outsize pencils. An article on ‘Negro Art’ is also an embarrassing read. This might seem an inappropriate response, imposing today’s values on the past, as if connoisseurship and shading had no connection with racial supremacy. Perhaps. But an advertisement on the previous page announces Sir Charles Petrie’s ‘Mussolini’, a new biography of ‘the great Italian Statesman’, published, incidentally, by The Studio itself.30 This word ‘drawing’ Pleas for ‘traditional values’ permeate the post-War years: This word ‘drawing’ seems in these days to have lost so much of its meaning; surely, above all, it stands for sound construction and a thorough searching for form, based upon a profound knowledge of things seen with a sensitive eye. It is this very knowledge of the structure of things, both animate and inanimate, which appears to be lacking in so much modern work…One sees so many drawings executed in a loose, scribbling technique that certainly do not portray any, or at least very little, knowledge of the bones of the matter.31 The experiments of Picasso and others have, so far as I can see, failed to find a direction for real development yet. The schools of painting working in the way suggested by the original experiments are producing nothing of consequence… I think that good abstract painting must be a natural development through a sound academic knowledge if it is to have any real value. It is useless for students with only a few years painting behind them to just ‘go abstract’ one week-end. They may fool themselves and others for a time, standards of assessment for this kind of painting are very difficult, but there can be no future in it.32 When you look in detail at what was actually taught in the small local art schools – where there really were ‘lessons’ – you come across distinctions and polarised views that are now forgotten. At Kingston the preferred method was ‘Florentine’ drawing, which meant that in outlining any turning point of a form, such as the clothed shoulder, your line had to suggest the underlying flow of muscle. This was quite different from the Coldstream approach, based on Cézanne, on the precise positioning of, say, the end of the shoulder in relation to the electric fire.33 You did not use a continuous line, but a series of points. You measured. There were also methods that were entirely tonal, using charcoal, or fine gradations of pencil; or pen drawing for illustration. In the 1960s I was taught by followers of Vivian Pitchforth, the guru of figure drawing often featured in The Studio, who once they had erased your drawing would draw a little geometric anatomical sketch showing how the thorax fitted to the pelvis to help you out.34 The next tutor might say you should use cross-hatching, the next would say don’t use cross-hatching but do include eyelids, and so on. At Saint Martins School of Art there was also a dissident class run on Bomberg’s principles by Leon Kossoff, where I was ticked off for bringing an H pencil into the class rather than charcoal – there are no lines there, Kossoff would say, looking at the model. He directed you towards the emotional whole: you were to empathise with the model, ‘be her’, feel what she felt; the opposite of the optical, or surgical approach developed from Henry Tonks at the Slade in the 1900s.

87


88

5/8/08

16:19

Page 88


But would this prepare you for the pranks of ‘avant garde art’? Even in 1963, the editor, G S Whittet, declared that: Picasso, far from being a boon to modern art, has been its curse. Taken up by intellectuals with whom, let us face it, he had little in common, he became a status symbol of culture for the wealthy boor…Young painters, labouring day after day to draw just right that complex play of curves in the neck, shoulder and thorax of a model on the throne, looked at later Picasso distortions and despaired.35 Are we any the wiser? Don’t believers in ‘traditional’ drawing feel a similar despair looking at a 3D animation – or even at a splashy brushmark masquerading as a finished drawing? Today pencil lovers agonize over the loss of territory to ‘new’ media or to installation art. Scholars and artists want to have the ‘whole’ of drawing in their sights, parcelling it into categories. Deanna Petherbridge’s brilliant National Gallery lectures in 2006 gave a magisterial overview, illustrated at every point, from obsessive drawing to Manga. Anthologies such as Emma Dexter’s ‘Vitamin D’ and Tania Kovats’ ‘The Drawing Book’ set out to demonstrate the plurality and vigour of contemporary drawing. But there is practice, and there is theory, and sometimes it isn’t clear which is leading the way. Also in 2006, at the ‘With a Single Mark’ conference at Tate Britain, the eminent French philosopher, Alain Badiou, went for the big picture, but did not mention a single actual drawing; he referred only to a poem of Wallace Stevens, ‘Description Without Place’; the offered definition was that drawing was ‘the trace of a trace’ – to which one wit responded that this was good news for draughtsmen on CSI. A drawing, we were told, was political – it was ‘the medium of resistance’, but not the kind of resistance, presumably, detectable by the reflectometer. To spend an hour or so at a drawing lecture without anything to look at apart from the speaker’s hand gestures must have been a little trying for some. It was like admitting that drawing hadn’t got any intellectual substance of its own. You have to import a philosopher. Some postgraduate courses have resident philosophers at hand. Renaissance courts had astrologers. As drawings become fainter, more minimal, more self-effacing, more Neolithic, so rhetoric and fantasy fill the void. Some observers speak of this as the cultural vacuum, a disregard for the visual and for art history bordering on the insane. It makes success or failure in drawing meaningless. Students, they say, are left to decide for themselves ‘what drawing is’. It could be a walk to their village each day, or crosses in a notebook. You take photos, keep an archive, ‘reflect’ on the practice, wrap a theory around it, and if the methodology fits, the job is done. This may be an exaggeration, but I have come across students who think of their work in autistic isolation. They are unaware of an ‘out there’ discipline called drawing. They may visit two exhibitions of contemporary drawing; one of life drawings; the other, featuring videos, maps drawn on the wall, photographed shadows presented as drawings. They see no contradiction. They just like or dislike each show. Passivity, you might say, is a bonus. It might be apathy, or it could be healthy post-modernism. Drawing can be whatever you want it to be. Better that than discipline for discipline’s sake. Today we like to think we work in ‘an expanded field’ of drawing, applying phenomenology, pushing at the limits, colonising activities like map-making and diary writing. The finer points of technique, whether pencil, pen, brush, drawing software, or even perspective, are less important. The students are left to learn ‘skills’ in their own time. At GCSE level art teachers are


5/8/08

16:19

Page 89


pressed to impart ‘drawing skills’. At the next stage they can take a GCE A Level in ‘Digital Arts’, though if they progress through to university they won’t at present find an equivalent fine art course. They will need to branch off into ‘Visual Communication’. For ‘drawing skills’ they would specialize in ‘Illustration’. Drawing, we are told, should now be recognized as an art form in its own right. One argument put forward for its neglect in the past is that drawing hasn’t had an independent history. There is no unbroken chain of movements and masterworks – such as sustains painting, and makes painters feel someone is looking over their shoulder. The ‘drawing artist’ is uninhibited. This is a half-truth. A casual scan through fifty years of pencil advertisements, a dip into the editorials, shows that drawing certainly does have a history, an unfortunate history of well-intentioned bigotry. The attitudes we hold today came from somewhere; they have plenty of echoes in the past. However much we universalize drawing as an expression of being ‘human’ – ‘being in the world’ – we are tied to our time, to our history. A future generation will pinpoint our trademark prejudices, smirk at our pretentious phrases, smirk at a portable gadget called a ‘Powerbook’. We implicitly exclude whole swathes of drawing by what we emphasise. Take the term ‘the body’. It has become the default term; we draw the body, look at its anatomy, draw with the body, draw with feet, elbows, or pressing against the wall. It is a diffuse concept, as idealized as the body of ‘The Body Shop’, and symptomatic of a culture given over to health clubs and skin care. There would be no room for the calligraphy of Islamic cultures, nor for the outdoor sketch clubs of the 1920s, nor for their figure drawing methods. In those drawing classes the ‘figure’ was specifically male or female, clothed or nude, inside or outside, and sometimes classes were for ‘Ladies’ or ‘Gentlemen’ only. R B Kitaj put on ‘The Human Clay’ drawing exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1974; for several years he and David Hockney campaigned against what they saw as the neglect of life drawing in art schools. That polemic is now history, but still influences our thinking, one way or the other. Kitaj took the view that for art to be properly human it had to depict human beings.36 It was existential. Figure drawing was the core, the social bond, linking human to human. So presumably a distant view of Portsmouth Harbour would be less human. He recommended a remarkable book, ‘The Humanism of Art’, by Vladislav Zimenko. This was the soviet view of minimal art, and it was a well-informed view. It still packs a punch, now that the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, or the drawings of Eva Hesse or Cy Twombly provide the orthodox canon – any doubts about the quality of that work would be heresy. The book celebrates the heroic socialist realism of painters such as Deyneka, still little appreciated in the West, but ingeniously recycled in Neo Rauch’s dreamy parodies.37 Looking back, that exhibition and the idea of reviving drawing, were part of a broadside against ‘modernism’, against what was perceived to be its lack of human soul. Art, we were told, was in crisis. Exhibitions like ‘Art for Society’ sided with the Mexican Muralists, and implied that if you weren’t painting figures you were probably ‘against’ your fellow creatures. Damning Modernism became respectable. Self-styled progressive critics sided with the tabloid press in 1976, when the Tate was ridiculed for purchasing the Carl Andre ‘Bricks’. Being a ‘modernist’ meant a period in the wilderness, especially for architects. If you were abstract you were just painting about nothing, playing with paint, a ‘formalist’. Whether such opinions were well-

89


90

5/8/08

16:19

Page 90


founded, or just prejudices, was not the point. The argument moved sideways. Previously marginalised groups felt vindicated, scores were settled; the ‘modernisers’ were blamed for alienating the public, blamed for neglecting the ‘sound principles’, blamed for depriving students of drawing lessons. Support was whipped up for bringing back life drawing, or at least going through the motions, something that had a figurative look to it. Without this noise, the Prince’s Drawing School, founded in 2000, would probably never have happened. The paradox is that what is being revived does not correspond to the way drawing was taught in the classes that petered out in the ‘sixties; it is a diluted version: without the angst, the tensions, the contrasts and disputes necessary for a thriving culture. It is unlikely that creating institutions, competitions, or courses, will of themselves reverse changes that are visible over decades, and that are symptoms of social and technological forces. It is fine to say, as many do, that drawing is good for you, but so is singing, and so is the Eurovision Song Contest. The high octane drawing of the twentieth century greats – Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Tàpies, Polke, would be on my list, and certainly Daniel Clowes – is more than this. It breaks through the ‘sound drawing’ decorum preached in the pages of The Studio. But what of drawing in general? If fundamentalists say the answer is to ‘stop using computers’ to design, draw, work out patterns, visualize buildings, they will have a tough campaign ahead of them. It is telling that the life room at the Royal Academy Schools, once regarded as the epicentre of drawing culture, is hardly used at all by its students, through lack of demand. These postgraduate students represent an elite: 560 apply for 17 places. The suite of Epson printers is used non-stop. Perhaps modernists, vilified thirty years ago, have become re-engaged with a sweet vengeance. If we carry on thinking about drawing in the anachronistic terms of those well-meaning headmasters, as making a mark with a pencil, patching together a smudged representation of a bored life-model, then we are missing the important story. ‘Construction’ no longer begins with a pencil, and no worlds – art worlds or advertising worlds – revolve around the Venus. Cars, planes, wars, adverts, posters, portraits, maps, all begin with something called digital. For the way we communicate, write, design, compose music, keep photos, fly aeroplanes, fight wars, and move money around, the world now depends on the computer. So it would be surprising if drawing with pencils, or painting with paints, remained quite unaffected, even within the most introverted academies. Yet, it seems, human nature being what it is, we always want to universalize our idea of ‘what drawing is’. We fix on the word drawing as if we can identify some pure constant, as if drawing stays the same whatever the available tools, whatever the purpose, whatever the view from the window, and whatever the dissenting sects are saying. Drawing ideologies have been built up around something as simple as pencil and paper. If you take a really long view, this is just one technology, one that worked well for a few centuries. As with the supposed decline of morals among the young, the decline of drawing has been talked about for at least the last hundred years. For all I know it was the favourite topic of the cave painters when they met up to talk shop. Dismay at falling standards, regret that drawing is going ‘modern’, this goes with the territory. The expertise of one generation means little to the next. Gadgets that are great for drawing while running after animals are put away in the attic. Your favourite ‘watercolour country’ becomes Milton Keynes. The life room becomes a Mac room.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 91


A hundred years ago, T Martin Wood wrote of the pleasures of English Drawing – specifically the landscapes of Gainsborough, Constable and Cox. He identified this trait: ‘The true landscape art of England is homely, emotional; loving the village and the way open to it by the open plain’.38 He preferred the innocent to the systematic: The pleasure derived from the study of drawings lies in the appreciation of the draughtsman’s sensitive vision as displayed in them and the responsiveness of his pencil. The touch of the artist in a fine drawing is a thing of nerves. This nervous quality was essentially the feature of drawing until these present times, for the reason that the art of line was insisted upon to such an extent that an easy skill in it was then looked upon as the first equipment in every artist. The modern tendency of training has meant the loss of those finely sympathetic qualities of drawing, which evolved from persistent training. This scholarship in drawing remains only with a remnant of artists today, a pure stream difficult to find uncontaminated by so-called systems invented in the schools.39 Who knows what he would make of the varieties of ‘pencil practice’ today? There is plenty of mark-making with that nervous touch, but would that be enough? Surely the drawing should record the loved local environment? We can be sympathetic to our surroundings, but in most cases we live in cities, cities full of electronic screens, rushing this way and that. If we are not to follow the ‘so-called systems’ – these days that would probably mean art theory – or sketch shoppers in Oxford Street, or Midsomer Murders on TV, I am not too sure what we should do. Perhaps the days of the pencil are numbered, or perhaps not. It would be like asking whether any of those advertisements created the market for pencils, or merely reflected it. Drawing as an activity, whether hobby or profession, goes its own way regardless. Yes, it may ‘go digital’. But whatever form it takes, it will still be buffeted here and there by world events, shortages, dogmas, fashions, and eccentric individuals. Notes 1. Oliver, H. (1897). on the Reeves ‘Autolycus’ colour box. The Studio, June 15, ad xix. 2. A South London art school was discarding the magazines. This information was circulated amongst members of the London Group (the artists’ group founded in 1913). As a member, I helped rescue them. All the illustrations are taken from these copies of The Studio. My thanks to David Redfern. 3. Bradshaw, P. (1926). The Press Art School, The Studio, March, ad xii. (Percy Bradshaw was the founder and had been principal since 1905). 4. This address has long been the studio and home of Anthony Whishaw RA, who recalls the rings in the wall of the studio for tethering the horses. 5. The Studio, August 1944, ad vi. 6. The Studio, August 1960, ad vii. 7. The Studio, April 1960, ad iv. 8. Differences between Ruskin and Walter Crane are touched on in Faure Walker, J. (2005), in Old manuals and New Pencils, Drawing: The Process, edited by Davies, J and Duff, L. Bristol: Intellect, pp. 15–25. 9. Kaines Smith, S. MBE, MA, FSA, (1944) The New PRA, Sir Alfred Munnings, The Studio, August, pp. 44–49. 10. Alexander Watt, (1953) Paris Commentary, The Studio, July, pp. 24–26.

91


92

5/8/08

16:19

Page 92


11. For an extended discussion of this question see Faure Walker J. (2006), Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer, Upper Saddle River N.J: Prentice Hall. 12. The Studio, July 1925, ad xvi. 13. The Studio, August 1950, ad ii. 14. The Studio, July 1948, ad iv. 15. The Air Brush Journal, Rockford, Illinois January 1891. I am indebted to Andy Penaluna’s exhaustive research on the history of the airbrush. For an intriguing illustration from the first airbrush handbook of 1885 see: www.andypenaluna.com/history/1885pages/1885book.html 16. The Studio, August 15, 1896, ad xii. 17. Aerograph advertisement, The Studio, November 1906, ad xix. 18. The Studio, October 1928, ad xi. 19. The Studio, March 1928, ad viii. 20. The Studio, June 1940, ad iii. 21. The Studio, July 1949, ad iv. 22. ‘The Pocket Diminishing Glass is for the use of artists, that they may be enabled to estimate the changes produced in a Drawing when reduced in size.’ The work of Erkki Huhtamo in ‘media archaeology’ is seminal in pointing out how optical devices before the computer age literally framed how people saw. For a discussion of how perceptions of ‘nature’ may be undergoing an equivalent change see also Faure Walker J, (2006), The Altered Filament: Painting and Nature (Linking frontiers: art, technology, science and society), Proceedings, Congresso Internacional, Artech, Universidade de Vigo, pp. 74–77. 23. Stephen Farthing’s ingenious plan de dessein positions many types of drawing ranging from skid marks to air traffic control screens as stations on a London tube map. Being itself a drawing (a map) and a map of drawing, it raises the question of whether there could be an infinite series of maps of maps of drawing. Also, if fine artist ventures into such a specialized discipline as cartography, they may find they are trespassing on hallowed ground. 24. Hennessy, P. (2006). Having it So Good, Britain in the Fifties, London: Allen Lane, Penguin. 25. Turquoise pencil advertisement, The Studio, April 1962, ad vi. 26. Petroski, H. (1993). The Pencil, a History of Design and Circumstance, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 27. I am indebted to Marja Van Putten and Wim Vonk for illuminating discussions on this subject. 28. The Studio, July 1960, ad v. 29. The Studio, March 1962, ad vi. 30. The Studio, August 1931, ad vii. 31. Atkins, A. (1944). A Plea for Tradition in English Water-Colour Drawing, The Studio, July, p. 13. (Alban F.T. Atkins was Art Master at Burford Grammar School, Oxon.) 32. Taylor, A. (1953). The Student Speaks, The Studio, July, p. 22. Arthur H Taylor was a mature student at the Royal Academy Schools. 33. My thanks to John Carter for pointing this out. 34. Tutors who erase any part of a student’s drawing today risk receiving an official complaint, which in some cases has actually happened. 35. The Studio, April 1963, p. 135. 36. Faure Walker, J. (1977). Interview with R.B. Kitaj, Artscribe 5 (February). 37. Zimenko, Z. (1976). The Humanism of Art, Moscow: Progress Publishers. 38. Martin Wood, T. (1906). English Drawing – The Landscape and Figure Sketches of the Older Masters, The Studio, November, p. 120. 39. Ibid, p. 119.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 93

6 REAPPRAISING YOUNG CHILDREN’S MARK-MAKING AND DRAWING Angela Anning In 1997 Brent Wilson1 wrote: ‘When we study children’s art we must look at what the child has represented and expressed, at the conditions under which the child art is made, and at ourselves and others in the act of studying it’. In this chapter I explore how the lenses through which researchers have investigated children’s ‘art’, or more widely their ‘meaning making’, have impacted on theoretical models of the young child as thinker, doer, artist, observer and meaning maker. I will outline new insights into the complexity of understanding young children’s mark-making and drawing, demonstrating their genesis from particular disciplines and domains of knowledge. My own research and scholarship is within the fields of early childhood and art education. So my lens will focus on the drawings of children under seven. Research into children’s mark-making and drawing Research into children’s drawings emerged in the late nineteenth century, alongside a preoccupation in the visual arts with ‘primitive’ arts from Africa and the ‘exotic’ conventions of Japanese and Chinese art. The construct of children’s art as ‘innocent’ emerged. Attempts to ‘teach’ children to draw were perceived as ‘corrupting’. Meanwhile in elementary schools in the United Kingdom art was taught as a vehicle for training the hand and eye, by copying shapes from the board or drawing objects from observation. Early in the twentieth century Lucquet2–3 published a seminal, longitudinal study of his own daughter, Simone’s, drawings done between the ages of three and nine-years-old at the corner of her father’s desk as he worked. He also studied the drawings of the mentally ill. Lucquet’s two fields of study represent important domains in the history of research into children’s drawing: developmental psychology and therapy. This chapter addresses both before turning to a third domain, art education.


94

5/8/08

16:19

Page 94


Developmental psychology Lucquet formulated a stage theory for the development of children’s drawing. At the ‘scribbling’ stage (for two- to four-year-olds) children made marks apparently at random, but through ‘fortuitous realism’ the child ascribed meanings to marks. A circle would suggest and be developed into a face. A square would become a house. He defined the second stage (for four- to seven-year-olds) as ‘pre-schematic’, when children produced drawings characterised by ‘failed realism’. At the third stage (for seven- to nine-year-olds), the ‘schematic’ stage, children were in transition from the ‘visually unrealistic’ features of the second stage to the ‘visual realism’ of the fourth stage (for nine-to ten-year-olds) when they were able to represent objects ‘realistically’. Lucquet referenced the influence of contextual features of a child’s visual experiences – the impact of comic strips and book illustrations – on their drawings. Piaget’s 4 seminal work on Stage Theories in children’s development underpinned developmental psychology from the 1930s to the 1980s. Strongly embedded in the Stage Theories of drawing was the over-arching construct that the aim of drawing was accurate representations. So by implication children’s drawings were seen as deficient until they had achieved ‘realism’. Stage Theories in drawing development even crept into the design of intelligence tests in the 1920s. Burt’s Intelligence Tests5 and Goodenough’s Draw a Man Test were premised on the notion of fixed sequences in children’s development. The Goodenough test criteria,6 from which she constructed age norms against levels of competence in drawing figures, were based on the belief that the more detailed and realistic the child’s drawing was, the greater their level of intellectual maturity. In 1969 Kellogg published her influential book on universal stages of development in children’s drawing. She collected large samples of children’s drawings in cross-sectional studies. She identified and classified 20 basic scribble types including dots, horizontal and vertical lines, open and closed lines, loops, spirals and circles. She explored the way children placed marks on the paper, including the sequence in which drawings were made. Kellogg7 argued that the scribbles formed the basis of all later graphical expressions, much as babbling forms the basis of speech. She regarded attempts to coach children into ‘more mature’ drawing behaviours as contaminating the ‘natural unfolding’ of their drawing abilities. Golomb8–9 simplified Kellogg’s model, focusing on two basic types of scribbles: loops and circles, generated by children’s circular arm and hand movements; and parallel lines, generated by their horizontal, vertical or diagonal arm and hand movements. In her later work she explored how children progress towards greater levels of understanding of the social nature of symbolic activities, including drawing.10 Kellogg’s lens was limited to studying cognitive aspects of children’s drawing development, with few concessions made to the affective and aesthetic. Moreover, her research involved the study and coding of large samples of the end products of children’s drawings, without studying the processes by which the products were achieved. In contrast Goodnow argued that we must look at both the processes and products of children’s drawings if we are to make sense of them. She made the distinction between children’s procedural (knowing how) and declarative (knowing that) knowledge about drawing. She investigated the pivotal decisions


5/8/08

16:19

Page 95

REAPPRAISING YOUNG CHILDREN’S MARK-MAKING AND DRAWING |

children made in the processes of drawing: for example, what should be included or excluded, the point of view to be taken and what models of previous drawings to deploy. She recognised that children develop individual formulae. Children who adopted ‘successful’ formulae/strategies, were resistant to changing them. They were reluctant to initiate novel decisions about the layout of a picture, how components of drawings were related to each other spatially and how to sequence features of drawing. In her book published in 1977 Goodnow stated ‘Graphic work is truly visible thinking. The features it displays – thrift, conservatism, principles of organisation and sequence – are features of all problem solving, whether by children or adults’.11 In the 1970s Athey12 studied children’s drawings in the United Kingdom from a different perspective. She identified schemas, ‘patterns of repeatable behaviour into which experiences are assimilated and that are gradually co-ordinated’, used by two- to five-year-olds at home and in a nursery. She identified three developmental stages related to schema explorations: motor, symbolic representation and thought levels. She categorised types of schemas: dynamic circular, enclosure, developing and enclosing space, dynamic vertical and rotation. Schemas permeated the play behaviours, talk and drawings of children. A child might be obsessed with drawing circles, running around in circles and responding to ring games. Another preoccupation was the notion of ‘intellectual realism’ (children draw what they know) rather than ‘visual realism’ (children draw what they see).13 This preoccupation generated laboratory based research into the development of topological similarity to referent objects in drawings (for example figures, houses or animals) or how children plan, sequence and make marks to produce equivalencies of three dimensional objects in two-dimensional lines. Cox’s 14–15 work focused on perceptual aspects of children’s drawing development. In laboratory based experiments she investigated how children of different ages represent ‘occlusion’ (that is objects placed behind or within other objects), spatial orientation and perspective. Cox is sensitive to the need to embed tasks for children in empirical research in everyday situations and narratives with which they are familiar. She applied her empirical findings to the ‘real world’ or classrooms. She investigated a collection of drawings of figures from a nursery school to explore how under-five-year-olds learn to draw figures in educational contexts.16 She worked with an art educator in Key Stage One classrooms, with five- to sevenyear-olds, to explore an approach to teaching called ‘negotiated drawing’ 17 which incorporated detailed observations and discussions of objects before the children drew them. The children demonstrated enhanced competencies in drawing after the intervention. Willats’s18–19 work focused on children’s conceptual understanding of, and ability to reproduce in drawing, spatial relationships and figures, including features such as touching and enclosure. He argued that children learn to draw by acquiring increasingly complex and effective rules as they process information about what drawing means. Their rules are different from those of adults involved in drawing, but in no way inferior. ‘In this respect learning to draw is like learning a language: children learn to speak not just by adding to their vocabulary, but by learning increasingly complex and powerful language rules. And like learning a language, learning to draw is one of the major achievements of the human mind.’20 Like Cox he critiques

95


96

5/8/08

16:19

Page 96


the lack of formal drawing instruction in schools, which for him must be underpinned by teaching the technical aspects of accurate representation. By about seven or eight years of age most children acquire a preoccupation with literal realism and adopt formulaic and conservative approaches to drawing. They seem to lose the exuberance and confidence of their early drawing styles. This leads to the ‘U-curve’, a concept explored by Gardner and colleagues in the USA. 21 Gardner, an American cognitive psychologist, is best known for his work on ‘multiple intelligences’.22 His work followed that of an American philosopher, Goodman23 who identified distinct symbolic systems in the domains of language, gesture and the visual arts. He founded Project Zero at Harvard University. Gardner argued that children’s early fluency in graphic representations withers for two reasons. First, children are socialised into perceiving the written word as the dominant mode of communication and since drawing is not important, they cease to engage with it. Second, within educational contexts there is little drawing instruction to help children overcome their feelings of inadequacy in predominantly representational drawing tasks. However, Davis,24 also associated with Project Zero, challenged the concept of a U-curve, arguing that different cultural values legislate different judgements about what constitutes more or less well-developed children’s drawings. She reported on an experiment carried out by Pariser25 when the same set of children’s drawings were rated by teams of North American and Montreal Chinese judges. North American judges identified U-shaped development in the drawings, whilst Montreal Chinese judges did not. Pariser’s explanation was that the differences in judgements about the drawings reflected a Western Art reverence for spontaneous expressivity, versus a Chinese appreciation of the skills of technical control. Therapy In the specialised field of art therapy, within the discipline of clinical psychology, children’s drawings have been used as windows into their emotional states. Malchiodi26 combined extensive clinical experience with an understanding of research into children’s drawing. She adopted a phenomenological approach to understanding children and their drawings, by which she meant that she studied them in their own right, rather than through the lens of preconceived theories. She argued that children draw for reasons that are uniquely related to their own developmental trajectories, or motivation, or personal experiences. The skill of the art therapist is to build up a relationship of trust with their clients. They must bring an open mind to interpreting what the drawings mean, tuning in to pre-occupations expressed directly in drawings and talk around drawing episodes. Other research focused on children with exceptional drawing abilities; sometimes those diagnosed as having autistic tendencies. For example, Selfe27 made a detailed study of the exceptional drawings of an autistic child. Nadia’s drawings flourished during the period of early childhood (from three- to six-years-old) when her speech and social development were severely delayed. Selfe hypothesises that the spate of drawings was precipitated by trauma related to her mother’s hospitalisation for cancer treatment and eventual death. Golomb28 made detailed longitudinal studies of children. She commented on the gendered nature of children’s drawings: ‘the spontaneous productions of boys reveal an intense concern


5/8/08

16:19

Page 97


with warfare, actions of violence and destruction, machinery and sports contests, whereas the girls depict more tranquil scenes of romance, family life, landscapes and children at play’.29 Dyson reported on her five-month study of children drawing freely in a kindergarten. She observed that boys chose to draw ‘explosions, battles, and displays of power and motion’, with an emphasis on narratives characterised by action. Girls drew ‘happy little girls and cheerful small animals’.30 Art education From the mid nineteenth century until the 1930s art education within United Kingdom elementary schools was dominated by two concepts. The first was to teach the basics of representation (based on the Western Fine Art traditions of drawing figures, landscapes and objects from direct observation). The second, often involving copying from the blackboard, was to teach technical drawing (based on the need to teach hand/eye co-ordination to prepare a skilled workforce). In Vienna in the 1920s Frank Cizek, inspired by teaching young children painting and drawing, formulated his seminal ideas that children’s spontaneous artwork be recognised as art in its own right. He worked closely with Viennese artists and architects, the best known being Gustav Klimt, who turned to children’s art as a source of inspiration for their own work. As Viola31 reported: ‘Some went so far as to say that these were the foundations of the new art education. Why go back to the Chinese, Japanese, ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Negroes (sic)? Here was what they sought.’ Cizek’s touring exhibitions of Austrian children’s art in the 1930s were as influential as Reggio Emilia’s The Hundred Languages of Children32 touring exhibitions of children’s artwork from Northern Italy in the 1990s. But the emphasis on children’s creativity and individual expression in Cizek’s pioneering work must be seen within the context of a general shift in constructs of early childhood education from preparing children for work to preparing them for life. Individualised, ‘child-centred’ education, preparing children for life, was exemplified in policies outlined in the Hadow Reports from the British government’s Board of Education33–34 to its ultimate expression in the Plowden Report35 in the 1960s. The child-centredness movement perpetuated the notion that children’s creativity was a natural unfolding process. Adult interference in young children’s drawing by ‘teaching’ was seen as inappropriate, like pulling the wings off a butterfly. Stage Theories of development underpinned child-centred ideologies. In the USA in the 1940s an Austrian-American art educator, Lowenfeld, identified six stages of artistic development: scribbling (ages 2 to 4); pre-schematic stages (4 to 7); schematic (7 to 9); dawning realism (9 to 11); pseudo-realism (11 to 13); and period of decision (adolescence). But he was also interested in children’s individual pathways through the development of drawing. He identified two styles in the way children used art to express themselves: visual (reflecting the appearance of objects) and haptic (reflecting the most characteristic features of objects) arguing that adults should not ‘interfere’ with the unfolding of children’s preferred styles. His work was updated and published in the 1980s in a book that remained influential for the next two decades.36 In the United Kingdom, Herbert Read,37 influenced by the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, developed stylistic criteria focused on the aesthetic for classifying children’s artwork,

97


98

5/8/08

16:19

Page 98


for which he drew on Jung’s categories of introversion and extroversion in personalities. Other influential British art educators were Alec Clegg38 based in the West Riding of Yorkshire and Robin Tanner39 working in Oxfordshire. Traces of their powerful ‘house styles’ can still be seen in some primary schools in these counties, just as the ‘house style’ of Reggio Emilia can be detected in some contemporary nursery classes. In the USA in the 1960s, Arnheim40 used gestalt theory to investigate the cognitive processes embedded in perception and representation. He demonstrated that in ‘learning to look’ the child must learn to actively select, abstract and generalise from what they perceive. He believed that visual images spoke directly to those who observed them. They did not need the mediation of words to ‘explain’ them. This holistic approach was at the heart of gestalt theory. It resonated with ‘modernism’ in adult art of the 1960s. The long tradition of the dominance of figurative imagery of landscapes, portraits and still lives were rejected in favour of explorations in colour, line, shape, texture and form. Photography could ‘do’ representation. In the 1970s in the USA Eisner41 challenged the ideology of ‘natural unfolding’ in the development of children’s art, arguing that children learn from experience of art, but benefit from instruction too. He defined the role of adults as significant. They should be active in providing a rich learning environment, stimulating activities, and guidance for children to progress towards their own personal, expressive style. He saw drawing as one of the important ways in which young children learn to communicate, alongside talk and dramatic play. Art educators in the United Kingdom, for example, Gentle,42 Clement43 and Morgan44 reflected this balanced approach to experience and instruction, neatly summarised in the Gulbenkian Report on arts education. ‘The task is not simply to let anything happen in the name of selfexpression and creativity. Neither is it to impose rigid structures or ideas and methods upon the children. The need is for a difficult balance of freedom and authority’.45 But in early years classrooms the legacy of the ‘innocent eye’ of the child, and teachers’ reluctance to ‘teach’ drawing, remained strong. Yet there is an argument that the very tools and media offered to young children in educational contexts – A3 pieces of sugar paper on easels and big brushes stuck into pots of strong primary coloured paint, and stumpy crayons and pencils with A4 pieces of kitchen paper – create conditions whereby young children are bound to conform to their teachers’ constructs of art. It was not until the introduction of the Statutory Curriculum for Art and Design in 1992 that teachers of young children were required to rethink the predominant culture of ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘free expression’ in art education. Matthews, an artist and an art educator, challenged the shibboleths of art education for young children. Much of his research is based on sensitive, detailed observations (using camera, notebook and video camera) of his children46 and latterly his grandchildren.47 He argues that from the moment children make marks, perhaps initially with food or in play with objects, their expressions are intentional. ‘Far from being meaningless, the early paintings and drawings are products of a complex family of representational and expressive modes’.48 He identified three basic types of marks, emerging from children’s physical movements: vertical and horizontal arcs and push-pull action. Later these develop into structures, for example, shapes, zigzags,


5/8/08

16:19

Page 99


rotations, spirals, core and radials and U shapes on baselines. He described the ‘action representations’ made by young children, initially based on their physical gestures, later made to represent moving objects or shifts in time. An example of his detailed observations is when Ben, at three years and one month, painted the wreckage of a smashed aeroplane: …for each new stroke he picks up a new brush, loaded with a new colour, overlaying these differently coloured strokes to make the representation of the tangled wreckage. It is as if the child colour codes each action…After showing the shape of the wreckage, he then paints a longitudinal line down the page that ends with a splodge at the paper’s edge nearest him. The line represents the descending flight of the aeroplane; the splodge its impact with the ground. That Ben is representing a vertical, downward movement is an interpretation supported by his accompaniment of this line with a ‘descending’ vocalisation, which ends with an explosive sound, as he makes the final mark at the edge of the paper – as the aircraft smashes into the ground.49 Socio-cultural theories In the 1990s there was a shift in educational research towards acknowledging the importance of the cultural context in which children learn. In socio-cultural research the concept of ‘communities of practice’, focusing on how knowledge is developed, distributed and used within communities50 emerged from the work of psychologists and anthropologists. In his later writing on art education Eisner anticipated this paradigm shift: We learn about [the mind’s] potentialities not only from psychologists who study the mind but also by looking at the culture – all cultures – because culture displays the forms humans have used to give expression to what they have imagined, understood and felt…I suggest we inspect culture to discover what might be called ‘cognitive artifacts’ (the products of thought), that we use these products of thought to understand what we can of the forms of thinking that led to each, and that we try in the process to grasp the kind of meaning that each provides.51 There was also a movement towards inter-disciplinary research. Combining research into visual and linguistic domains generated innovative research into ‘multiple literacies’.52–54 Literacies to which children are exposed in their everyday lives include a wide range of letter and image based stimuli: moving images on computer or television screens, graphics in advertisements and comics, logos and signs on retail outlets and street furniture etc. This inter-disciplinary version of what it means to be literate contrasts with the limited version of ‘literacy’ – characterised by a pre-occupation with the word and books – promoted within educational contexts. A third initiative was research into multi-modal representations. Kress studied his children’s journeys into making meanings. He observed them engaged in multi-modal representations using found materials to make models, household furniture and objects mixed with toys to make ‘worlds’ in which to act out complicated narratives in play episodes, and mark-making using felt tips, biros and paint to ‘draw’ elaborate and highly personal versions of their growing understanding of the world. He charted his children’s unselfconscious ability to flick from one mode of representation to another. He argued that ‘children act multi-modally, both in the things

99


100

5/8/08

16:19

Page 100


they use, the objects they make, and in the engagement of their bodies; there is no separation of body and mind’.55 Pahl56–57 observed young children making meaning in nursery and home contexts. Her observations of children’s socio-dramatic play showed them using objects, narratives and representations (including drawing) in a fluid way. Like Marsh and Millard she noted the influence of television and video/DVD images and sounds on children’s play behaviours at home. I want to illustrate a socio-cultural approach to investigating graphic development from a longitudinal study of the influences on young children’s drawing at home and school.58 We took the children’s drawings as what Eisner called ‘cognitive artifacts (the products of thought)’. The drawings of seven young children between the ages of three and six were collected during one

Young child making sense of continuities and discontinuities

Community of practice in preschool/school settings:

Community of practice at home: ■ rites/rituals modelled ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

by significant others roles/responsibilities (son/daughter, sibling) use of tools (language, drawing) use of artefacts (things) experience of activities (informal learning) access to places and spaces access to TV/videos/ CD/internet

Child’s experiences of meaning-making:

■ rites/rituals modelled

by significant others ■ roles/responsibilities

■ storying ■ mark-making ■ physical action ■ play ■ looking

(‘looked after’, pupil) ■ use of tools

(language, drawing) ■ use of artefacts

(things)

■ listening

■ experience of

■ feeling

activities (formal and informal learning) ■ access to places and spaces ■ limited access to TV/videos/CD/web

mark-making/ drawing/ writing Figure 1: Interconnectedness of the influences on children’s drawing.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 101


101

month each year by their parents at home, who annotated and pasted them into scrapbooks, and key workers/teachers in pre-school or school contexts. The drawings were used as the stimuli for dialogues with parents, professionals and the children about their meanings and the processes by which they were created. The conceptual framework is shown in Figure 1. Young children make sense of the continuities and discontinuities in distinct communities of practice at home and in early years settings. At home rites and rituals emerge from particular family cultural histories and traditions, the pre-occupations of significant adults and siblings, and the impact of popular culture. A child’s role is as a son or daughter, the baby of the family, the tomboy or the mummy’s girl. In a pre-school or school a child becomes ‘someone to be looked after’ and ‘a pupil’. Suddenly she is one of many peer group rivals vying for adult attention. Family histories determine activities seen as ‘the norm’ in the intimate, private space of home: watching television soap operas together, eating snack meals, going to Church or shopping on Sundays. While drawing at home a child is likely to be influenced by popular culture and what tools (felt-tips, colouring books, stickers), artefacts (comics, cards, play stations) and spaces (kitchen table, in front of the television) are available. A pencil at home is a tool to draw a picture for Grandma, but at school to trace a shape or draw from observation a stuffed animal. Their interactions with parents and siblings are likely to be informal. As suggested earlier, children’s preoccupations are likely to be strongly gendered. In the public spaces of early years institutional settings, activities at the Foundation Stage for three- to five-year-olds are determined by customs and practices derived from the professionals’ constructs of childhood.59 In pre-schools drawing may be a ‘free play’ activity, with tools (crayons, scissors, cut paper) set out on ‘mark-making’ tables. But even here the influence of the raising standards agenda to improve children’s literacy and numeracy impacts on adults’ interactions with children around drawing episodes. In schools a statutory art and design curriculum was introduced in 1992, supplemented by exemplary lessons from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.60 Yet many teachers at Key Stage One (for five- to seven-year-olds) perceive drawing as a one-off activity (‘draw an apple’, ‘draw a William Morris design’); or as a servicing activity for other subjects (‘draw a picture when you’ve finished writing your story’, ‘copy a Roman soldier for our history topic’). I want to use drawings from the Anning and Ring research to illustrate these cultural dissonances. Luke, aged three, was preoccupied with ‘scary’ things. His father, a long distance lorry driver, was absent during the week. His mother colluded with his interests. He was fascinated with crocodiles. His mother sang to him and his young brother songs she learned at Pontin’s holiday camp as a child, including Never Smile at a Crocodile. She described how Luke created a rich narrative in the living room, using cushions as rocks, and a baby bath as a boat, with coat hangers for oars. He ‘rowed’ frantically across the ‘river’ of the carpet to escape the crocodiles’ snapping jaws, with full sound effects.


102

5/8/08

16:19

Page 102


Figure 2: Luke’s action drawing.

Figure 2 is an example of an ‘action drawing’ recreating the energy and scariness of the multimodal play episode. Interactions around drawing on the kitchen table with his mother were reciprocal. Luke enlisted mum’s help in his meticulous attempts to represent television characters. She described how she drew teletubbies for him: ‘I did La La and he said, “La La’s head doesn’t go like that”. You’ve got to have the right colour, the right shade’. Luke felt himself to be an equal partner in these exchanges.61 Luke and his younger brother attended day care at a Family Centre three days a week. Staff felt pressurised to offer three-year-olds ‘educational’ activities. A Family Centre manager, keen to encourage staff to value drawing told us: When we hear the phrase mark-making, it doesn’t matter how many times you go through it with them, they think writing…that’s not to say if a child did a row of circles they wouldn’t be impressed by that, but only because it’s starting to look like letters. They feel that’s what they ought to be…they know the benefits, they know the therapy that children get from expressing, from experiencing. But their own vulnerability will always lead them to think in terms of writing…62 In Luke’s Family Centre, drawing was recorded in children’s profiles as a stage in mark-making: from horizontal and vertical marks, through drawing figures to emergent writing. Figure 3 was drawn by Luke after his key worker had modelled how to draw mummy. Luke was encouraged to draw a circle and shown where to add eyes and nose. His only decision was where to add hair. This didactic approach to drawing did little to encourage the exuberant action drawings he did at home. Perhaps because of this, he rarely chose to draw in the Family Centre.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 103


103

Holly was the oldest of four children. Her mother was at home full-time. Her father, a shift worker, often around too, was the children’s preferred play partner. A large extended family, mostly committed Christians, was available to Holly. The atmosphere at home was relaxed. Holly often helped out with her siblings or played alongside them with dolls. Television was not turned on until the children were in bed, though by the time she was five, the children were allowed to watch videos. Holly’s home drawings were reflections on everyday domestic and Church events. At the age of five she drew her family (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Luke’s drawing of his mum.

A much-loved nana is drawn with two babies in her tummy, recording Holly’s fascination with her twin uncles. At the bottom of the picture are the latest baby, Leigh, and assorted rabbits, hamsters and other pets.63 In her Key Stage One classroom, literacy and numeracy hours dominated, though her teacher would have preferred ‘a lot more opportunities to be involved in role play and to develop their own ideas and socialise’. Art was timetabled as a 50-minute lesson once a week. One teacher told us; ‘We do collective art, like collective worship. We do art on a Tuesday afternoon’.64 Holly’s rapid drawings and attempts to write were being shaped into ‘more tidy’ work. The only time Holly could draw freely was during ‘wet playtimes’, when the children gathered around tables in boy or girl groups to create gendered drawings. By the age of six Holly was being prepared for Key Stage One Standard Assessment Tasks.

Figure 4: Holly’s drawing of her family.

Figure 5 shows her response to a drug awareness project, for which she managed to draw interesting figures despite a mundane set task.


104

5/8/08

16:19

Page 104


Figure 5: Holly’s drug awareness task.

The prescribed lines in the school workbook illustrate the ‘school’ division between writing and drawing. 65 The teachers remained confused about the pedagogy of drawing. Typical comments were: ‘I think a lot of teachers are a bit frightened of saying to a child, “that could be improved” but now we tend to look at what the task was and how we might improve it…the size of it or the shape of it, how it has got texture, how you might shade it…use different media to make it any better’. And: ‘When we did self-portraits, I drew my face on the board first and we touched our eyebrows and our noses. But I don’t mind if they are less accurate in their drawings than in their writing…I’ve stopped myself saying, “Dogs don’t have five legs, do they?” Because if that child’s representation of a dog has six legs, that’s them expressing themselves. It’s artistic licence’.66 Meanwhile at home the seven children continued to use drawing to shape their sense of who they were. They were strongly influenced by drawing strategies and behaviours modelled by siblings, parents and peer group, by imagery from popular culture and by gendered interests. Simon’s parents drew for him or alongside him, and he often learned from watching his older sister draw. He was obsessed with football, acting out memorable passes and goals in the garden. Figure 6 is a picture of his hero, David Beckham, copied meticulously from his football book when he was five.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 105


Figure 6: Simon’s drawing of David Beckham.

105

Figure 7: Lianne’s multi-modal Kiss Me.

Lianne’s mother was a teaching assistant and understood the rites and rituals of schools. She encouraged Lianne’s extended dramatic play episodes at home with a cheerful tolerance of mess. Lianne’s first teacher encouraged her to experiment freely with drawing, but Lianne found the transition to the formalities of Key Stage One classrooms irksome. Her teacher reported: ‘I am having to squash her because she is so excitable’.67 But at home she felt cherished as a princess. Her mother said: ‘She does little books like six pages of A4 and she folds them in half, it’s mostly princess stories and things like that…she thinks she is a princess.’ Figure 7, done when she was seven, showing a preoccupation with love and friendship, and fluently multi-modal, is typical. Conclusion This chapter has followed the traces of history of research into young children’s mark-making and drawing, looking through the lenses of developmental psychologists, therapists, educators and socio-cultural theorists. Drawing development is now perceived as less a ladder of stages with orderly progression towards a goal of competence (associated with visual realism), but more a repertoire of personal styles and genres. We understand that the cultural contexts in which drawings are


106

5/8/08

16:19

Page 106


made dictate the constraints and affordances of drawing behaviours. As Wolf succinctly argued, the implications of new research into children’s drawing are important for parents and educators: If children grow up in a culture where calligraphy, manga, realistic drawing and design all flourish, their invented idioms have an audience and a purpose. If, on the other hand, children’s drawings meet only one question, ‘What is it?’ the result can be a thin and discouraged realism…Children’s repertoires are ours to nurture or to narrow.68 This work contains material first published in Anning, A. and Ring, K. (2004) Making Sense of Children’s Drawings, Buckingham: Open University Press. The material is reproduced with the kind permission of the Open University Press. Notes 1. Wilson, B. (1997). Types of Child Art and Alternative Developmental Accounts: Interpreting the Interpreters, Human Development, Vol. 40, No.3, p. 158. 2. Lucquet, G. (1913). Les Dessins d’un Enfant. Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan. 3. Lucquet, G. (1923). Le Dessin Enfantin. Paris: Delachaux et Niestle. 4. Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1969). The Psychology of the Child, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 5. Burt, C. (1921). Mental and Scholastic Tests. London: R. S. King & Son. 6. Goodenough, F. (1926). Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings. New York: World Books. 7. Kellogg, R. (1969). Analysing Children’s Art, Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield. 8. Golomb, C. (1981). Representation and reality: the origins and determinants of young children’s drawing, Review of Research in Visual Arts Education, 14, pp. 36–48. 9. Golomb, C. (1992). The Child’s Creation of the Pictorial World. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. 10. Golomb, C. (1993). Art and the young child: Another look at the developmental question, Visual Arts Research, 19, pp. 1–15. 11. Goodnow, J. (1977). Children’s Drawings, London: Fontana, p. 149. 12. Athey, C. (1990). Extending Thought in Young Children. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, p. 37. 13. Freeman, N. (1980). Strategies of Representation in Young Children, London: Academic Press. 14. Cox, M. (1991). The Child’s Point of View. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester and Wheatsheaf. 15. Cox, M. (1992). Children’s Drawings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 16. Cox, M. (1997). Drawings of People by the Under-Fives. London: The Falmer Press. 17. Cooke, G., Griffin, D. & Cox, M. (1998). Teaching Young Children to Draw, London: The Falmer Press. 18. Willats, J. (1995). An information processing approach to drawing development, in Lange-Kuettner, C. & Thomas, C.V. (Eds.) Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children. London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf. 19. Willats, J. (2005). Making Sense of Children’s Drawings, New Jersey: Erlbaum. 20. Ibid., p. 1 21. Gardner, H. & Perkins, D. (1989). Art, Mind and Education: Research from Project Zero, University of Illinois. 22. Gardner, H. (1993). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, London: Fontana Press. 23. Goodman, N. (1976). The Languages of Art , Indianapolis: Hackett. 24. Davis, J. (1997). The what and the whether of the U: Cultural implications of understanding


5/8/08

16:19

Page 107


107

development in graphic symbolization, Human Development, 40, pp. 145–154. 25. Pariser, D. (1995). A cross-cultural examination of the U-curve in aesthetic development, Spencer Foundation Small Grant Final Report. 26. Malchiodi, C. (1998). Understanding Children’s Drawings, New York: The Guilford Press. 27. Selfe, L. (1977). Nadia- a Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child. New York: Academic Press. 28. Golomb, C. (1992). op. cit. 29. Ibid., p. 158. 30. Dyson, A. (1986). Transitions and tensions: interrelationships between the drawing, talking and dictating of young children, Research into the Teaching of English, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 379–409. 31. Viola, W. (1936). Child Art and Frank Cizek. Vienna: Austrian Junior Red Cross. 32. Edwards, C., Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (Eds.) (1993). The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, Northwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. 33. Board of Education, (1931). Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School, Hadow Report, London: HMSO. 34. Board of Education, (1933). Report of the Consultative Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools, Hadow Report, London: HMSO. 35. Central Advisory Council for Education (CACE), (1966). Children and their Primary Schools, Plowden Report, London:HMSO. 36. Lowenfeld, V. & Brittain, W. (1982). Creative and Mental Growth, 7th Edition, New York: Macmillan. 37. Read, H. (1943). Education Through Art, London: Faber & Faber. 38. Clegg, A. (1980). About Our Schools, London: Blackwell. 39. Tanner, R. (1989). What I Believe: Lectures and Other Writings, Bath: Holborne Museum and Crafts Centre. 40. Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual Thinking, London: Faber & Faber. 41. Eisner, E. (1972). Educating Artistic Vision, New York: Macmillan. 42. Gentle, K. (1978). Learning Through Drawing, Bradford: Art Galleries and Museums for the North Eastern Region of the Association of Advisers for Art and Design. 43. Clement, R. (1986). The Art Teacher’s Handbook, London: Hutchinson. 44. Morgan, M. (1988). Art 4–11: Art in the Early Years of Schooling, Hemel Hempstead: Simon & Schuster. 45. Robinson, K. (1982). The Gulbenkian Report. The Arts in Schools: Principles, Practices and Provision, London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, p. 33. 46. Matthews, J. (1994). Helping Young Children to Paint and Draw: Children and Visual Representation, London: Hodder & Stoughton. 47. Matthews, J. (1999). The Art of Childhood and Adolescence: The Construction of Meaning. London: The Falmer Press. 48. Ibid., p. 21 49. Ibid., p. 37 50. Chaiklin, S. & Lave, J. (Eds.) (1993). Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 51. Eisner, E. (1997). Cognition and Representation, Phi Delta Kappan, 78, p. 350 52. Marsh, J. & Millard, E. (2000). Literacy and Popular Culture: Using Children’s Culture in the Classroom, London: Paul Chapman. 53. Street, B. (1993). The New Literacy Studies: Implications for Education and Pedagogy, Changing


108

5/8/08

16:19

Page 108


English, Vol.1, No. 1, pp. 113–126. 54. Brice-Heath, S. (2000). Seeing our way into learning, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 121–130. 55. Kress, G. (1997). Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy, London: Routledge, p. 97. 56. Pahl, K. (1999). Transformations: Meaning Making in Nursery Education, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. 57. Pahl, K. (2002). Ephemera, mess and miscellaneous piles: texts and practices in families, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 145–166. 58. Anning, A. & Ring, K. (2004). Making Sense of Children’s Drawings, Buckingham: Open University Press. 59. QCA/DfEE, (2000). Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage. London: QCA. 60. QCA/DfEE, (2000) A Scheme of Work for Key Stages 1 and 2, Art and Design Teacher’s Guide. London: QCA. 61. Anning, A. & Ring, K. op. cit, p. 41. 62. Ibid., p. 110. 63. Ibid., p. 79. 64. Ibid., p. 112. 65. Ibid., p. 87. 66. Ibid., p. 112–113. 67. Ibid., p. 96. 68. Wolf, D. (1997). Reimagining Development: Possibilities from the Study of Children’s Art, Human Development, Vol. 40, pp. 189–194.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 109

7 NEW BEGINNINGS AND MONSTROUS BIRTHS: NOTES TOWARDS AN APPRECIATION OF IDEATIONAL DRAWING Terry Rosenberg This chapter focuses on ideational drawing in designing. Although much of what is written is exportable to other areas of creative practice the illustrations used and specific observations made emerge from a design context. The chapter begins by trying to get at the quiddity of ideational drawing. It sets out to outline what ideational drawing is; not in order to lock it down, but, rather, to find loci for an appreciation of the drawing type. It then moves on to articulate the kind of thinking that operates in ideational drawing and the different processes at work that enable different prospects for future forms – forms of future – to be produced. Examples of ideational drawing of the designer John Rhys Newman are used to illustrate and develop some of the points made. The essay concludes by outlining the problematic issues that need to be navigated in order to build a platform for an appreciation of ideational drawing. The call of ideational drawing When I talk of ideational drawings I am considering types of drawing, and indeed, drawing processes, where one thinks with and through drawing to make discoveries, find new possibilities that give course to ideas and help fashion their eventual form. Ideational drawing is a process and always in-process; thinking-in-action and action-as-thinking. It is a distinct drawing type; as an act it is raw thinking and as artefact is something that is instrumental in the thinking process. In ideational drawing, physical and mental processes are linked isomorphically and crimped together. The process of drawing is at one and the same time mental and physical. Ideational drawing (as process and as artefact) is a thinking space – not a space in which thought is re-presented but rather a space where thinking is presenced. In its effectiveness, its


110

5/8/08

16:19

Page 110


period of efficacy, ideational drawing is ‘thinking’ and not ‘thought’. The distinction ‘thinkingthought’ is important. When drawing is used to ideate it is in a present tense; it is what it is in the immediacy of the thinking-act. Thought, on the other hand, is of the past, in a sense concluded, settled and in some way objectified. I say ‘in a sense concluded’ because I acknowledge that even when a drawing expresses an ostensibly conclusive thought, there is an ongoing creation, a continuing emergence of meaning, produced in the way the drawing is taken up by a spectator. In his essay What Calls for Thinking, originally presented as a lecture in 1951, Martin Heidegger posits that what beckons us to think is, simply, that which is thought-provoking. And, what is thought-provoking has not been thought; it turns away from us. What has not been thought (yet) withdraws from us. Thinking, as he describes it, is what is drawn in(to) the draft of withdrawal.1 Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking – even though he may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever.2 What is curious and interesting in this quote is that drawing may be interpreted as both, ‘being pulled into’ and ‘making marks and producing images’. The sheet of paper, the drawing support, in ideational drawing draws into itself what is drawn into the draft (thinking) and it itself performs in the draft. We are drawn into making drawing and the drawing draws us into further thinking. The images and marks in ideational drawing – drafting – produce a field of attraction for ideas, through withdrawal, into which we are then drawn as thinker/ideators. Ideational drawing is a form of thinking that attracts thinking – it is prenotional. Thinking at hand Heidegger, earlier in the same essay, proposes that thinking is something we must learn. He develops the idea that thinking is a handicraft and then proceeds to write about the importance of the activities of the hand in thinking: Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a handicraft. The hand is something altogether peculiar. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ that can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs – paws, claws and fangs – different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can handily achieve works of handicraft. But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign…Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking.3


5/8/08

16:19

Page 111

NEW BEGINNINGS AND MONSTROUS BIRTHS |

111

It is self-evident the importance of prehension within thinking. To grasp something is to know it. Francis Bacon in the New Organon,4 first published in 1620, uses the word ‘manipular’ to describe a way in which we order the world. The ‘maniple’ is the way in which we make sense of multiplicity, of the noise of the ‘infinite’ by holding that which is near in the finite space of the hand. But the hand, as Heidegger points out, is capable of more than grasping. It can for instance, point, or, sign, or, design. Ap-prehension – the mind becoming aware of, ‘seizing’, bringing into the mind’s hold – is, therefore, only one element in the dynamic of ideational drawing. The hand can stir and disturb, dislodge, carry and connect; and in ideational drawing the ‘conjectural hand’ does all of this. The ideational drawing releases what is at hand, in the hand, from grasp, so that it may return to grasp altered. Michel Serres talks of thinking as ‘naked gymnastics’. He poetically writes: The hygiene of thinking, the asceticism of thinking, comes down to gymnastics. Gymnastics means one seeks nakedness…Gymnastic or gymniosophic or gymnopedic nakedness is very close to the absence that thinks…Nakedness goes back to the undetermined. To dismiss every opinion from one’s mind, every idea, every hate, is to level off the contours of opinionated determination, it is to find the bare and barren plain. The unwritten wax tablet has lost, forgotten its determinations, with no writing, it is un-differentiated. Opinion is stable, it is stiff, it is singular, it defines someone through hates. The opinionated person is differentiated like a lobster’s claw. Inventive thinking is unstable, it is undetermined, it is undifferentiated, it is as little singular in its function as is our hand. The latter can make itself into a pincer, it can be a fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything. A hand is determined accordingly. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty…We live by bare hands. Our hands are that nakedness I find in gymnastics, that pure faculty cleared up by exercise, by the asceticism of undifferentiation. I think, un-differentiated.5 Here, what is important is the hand as a faculty; a faculty to sever, dislocate and break open, to indicate and sign, to group and connect, to manipulate and transform, and, ultimately to craft other arrangements for thinking; arrangements that allow one to think differently, in otherly ways, and not to accept what differentiates, demarcates and fixes in place the world and its objects (physical and mental) as something immutable, lying secure in a space beyond challenge and play. As much as the hand enters thinking, thinking can be of the hand. The calculus in and through which ideational thinking is produced An ideational drawing tries to produce what Rajchman calls, the ‘architecture of the impossible, the altogether-other of our invention, the surprise of what is not yet possible in the history of the spaces in which we find ourselves’.6 The ideational drawing, in producing traces of the cognitive hand, produces the otherly arrangements of thinking that allow us to approach this ‘architecture of the impossible’. It allows for otherness, in fact constructs and educes otherness the way poetry does and uses this otherness of thinking (poetic thought) as a process of poiesis or invention.


112

5/8/08

16:19

Page 112


Poetry is to be understood here in the extended sense of a play of poiesis, a creative letting go of the drive for possession, of the calculus of means and ends. It allows the rose – in the words of the mystic Silesius – to exist without why. Poetics is the carnival of possibilities…7 Rajchman’s ‘impossible architecture’ is constructed in a ‘carnival of possibilities’ – in poetics – where the need for a grasp that holds is relinquished and one releases to flight what was held in hand, so that one too might move. The ideational drawing is produced and produces (ideas) in a particular calculus, which links knowing and un-knowing in different dynamics; producing a poetics, in process and disposition. In the strange articulation that makes an ideational drawing potent (opens it to its potential) the known and un-known are drawn to and through each other. For example, in an ideational drawing one tries to release from grasp what one knows, re-view what is to be known and how it can be known, and develop the otherly arrangements, talked about above, in order to produce an (ap)prehension of what is still to be conceived in, and as, a yet-unknown future. In this, and in other instances, the known and the not-yet-known – and possibly even the notknowable work at each other. They operate on one another in much the same way as the sea and land operate on each other – the sea (un-knowing) constantly redrafts the shape of the shore. It is in these articulations, of the known, not-yet-known and the unknowable, that one produces the complex of ‘drafts’, or, ‘lines of flight’ of the prospect. It is in investigating the articulation of knowing and un-knowing, in the way they are jointed and through this jointing consequently speak, that one can begin to develop a critical appreciation of ideational drawing. It is also in understanding the particular form of knowledge that this relationship of knowing and unknowing produces that we can tender how ideational drawing may be a topic, or, function as a tool, or, be advanced as an epistemological ‘object’ in a research programme. What is given Heidegger advances the notion that human existence is enframed (gestell) by a standing reserve of technological development. The techne through which we produce our prospects draws on this standing reserve as an active resource. We are given what Rajchman refers to as ‘the history of the spaces in which we find ourselves’ and this is the active resource on which we draw. As in a mathematical proof the ideational drawing starts with what is given; and in drawing this is the world as-it-is. In ideational drawing it starts at an ‘is-ness’ of the world, but, unlike the mathematical proof it does not assume what is given to be stable. The draughtsperson, through the process of drawing, subjects their ‘is-ness’ to a critical and creative questioning, that produces an agitation in what is given. It works to overthrow the tyranny of what is given. As draughtspeople, as ideators, we need to know the ‘is-ness’ (including its past) for what it may potentially become. This is a different epistemology than that typically validated in academia. This knowledge is what Deleuze8 describes as potentia, as opposed to potestas (which is what the validating criteria for academic research usually support). Potestas is possessive knowledge; the world is taken in certain grasp; one of some authority (with this


5/8/08

16:19

Page 113


113

certain grasp one can claim to be an authority on what is in hand – our volition as academics); whereas, potentia is knowledge that catalyzes a potential to produce again and differently; to produce what is not presently constituted in the course of our history. Potestas enlightens in an intense directional lighting. What is given, the landscape of the given, is lit in a hard chiaroscuro lighting. What is lit is revealed with an almost brutal clarity while what is in the shadows is consumed by darkness and one sees in that space only that there is no light – it is merely, and absolutely, shadow. This kind of light encourages clarity, distinct knowledge and scientific unity. The edge between what is lit (and known) and what isn’t (and therefore unknown) is sharply defined. One knows definitely or one doesn’t. But illumination may be experienced in a different way. Serres again: A fairly soft and filtered light that allows us better to see things in relief the effect of [subtle] contrast[s] produced by rays and shadows that melt together, that are mixed, nuanced…This is the way we see ordinarily, really, daily…9 Scintillation In this idea of illumination, scintillation, knowing and un-knowing meld and edges blur. According to Serres the landscape ‘pulsates, dances, trembles, vibrates [and] scintillates like a curtain of flames’.10 The world is not petrified by the light, but dances – in a jouissance, a carnival in which actors (objects and subjects) swirl in extravagant juxtapositions, space and time fold and gather in new arrangements and the world is topsy-turvy – Kearney’s ‘carnival of possibility’. This knowledge is potentia – voluptuous, rhizomatic and ambiguous. The ideational drawing begins in and ends as scintillation. The given is made to ‘scintillate’ as a start to ideational drawing and the ideational drawing works back into a process where the knowledge in production is one of potentia – itself scintillation. The notion, scintillation, is a reminder of the moiré effect, that optical interference in repeat patterns that Op artists deploy to make their images vibrate. Gregory Ulmer11 highlights how Derrida, linking the words through homonymy, produces an innovatory space between the moiré (vibration) and Moira (Destiny). Ideational drawing is of this innovatory space. It functions to cause vibrations working across relations of ground and background, form and anti-form, known and un-known, linking objects and spaces in new relationships and configurations to produce idea-mirages (conceptual moiré) that ask ‘if this were to be – what then?’ The prenotional (as mirage) is drawn to prospect – moiré and Moira. Noise and Blankness The un-knowing referred to above is not passive, it is active as turbulence and activated through turbulences in the given landscape – in order. To invent, to ideate, it is important to engage with the chaotic as it bubbles up through the thin mantle of the ordered – naturally or by agency. This chaos that breaks through the thin mantle of the given order is what presents the possible.


114

5/8/08

16:19

Page 114


In an ideational drawing one needs to engage with the possible – and therefore with chaos that subtends the given order. In his book Genesis, Michel Serres advances that order is a condition of chaos. What is ordered and solid is merely a temporary state in a liquid history. This proposition is the foundation of his thoughts on the formation of matter; on the ‘birth of physics’; but he also isomorphically connects this to ‘(onto)genesis’ of any kind – production of history, social process, artistic invention and so on. Serres ‘hears noise, turbulence that tumultuous chaos that is the nurturing, primal plasma of stochastic moments of invention’12 bubbling below order and breaking through fissures. Without an extensive elaboration of the poetic thought of Serres it is perhaps sufficient and useful, here, to appreciate that Serres considers turbulence, as central to ‘the stochastic moments of invention’. For him the possible is in chaos; is in turbulence in chaos: ‘[t]he raucous, anarchic, noisy, variegated, tiger-striped, zebra-streaked, jumbled-up, mixed-up multiple, criss-crossed by myriad colours and myriad shade, is possibility itself’.13 Serres understands that there are different forms of turbulence and different spaces in the turbulence. In the vortex (his turbulent form) he finds, among other features, ‘noise’ and ‘blankness’. The ideational drawing engages the noise of the possible or moves into and through it to gain a blankness (screen fades to white) in the heart of it. These are two important dispositions in an ideational drawing – noise and blankness. In the first case, as noise, the ideational drawing is a trop(e)-ical space (fertile, overgrown with vegetal matter combined and intertwined, and it is a space of tropes, i.e. a familiar and repeated symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing that permeates thinking/ drawing). It brings into play the world in its voluptuousness; things are arranged, deranged and rearranged. Objects are connected to other objects, spaces to spaces, objects to spaces, subjects to objects and so on in an enthusiasm to see what is possible. It is all about connection and combination: this and this and this. We must…make connections, ever more connections. But, this pragmatism – this AND – is not an instrumentalism, and it supposes another sense of machine. It is not determined by given outcomes, not based in predictive expertise. On the contrary, its motto is not to predict, but to remain attentive to the unknown knocking at the door.14 The operand in noise is an ‘and’. The disposition is a compulsion to conjoin. Here the represented object does not function as a sign but rather as a trope; a vector, a directional motion, that moves from the singularity of the image to turn the mind out towards something that suggests itself in the hubbub of connections. As for blankness, in the fade to white one sees, only, and vaguely, the after-image of the world and its objects. One can see the shapes (as in Plato’s cave) but not the particularities of the object. Here one loses the object and finds only form. In this instance, in the blankness, one wanders in a ‘dangerous flock of chaotic morphologies’15 that subtend the object world. The object disappears or remains barely in view as a veiled prospect. The impulsion here is to form and transform. In this notion of blankness, drawing is thinking and acting between the not-yetformed and the formed, in the space between form and form and at the threshold between form and anti-form.


5/8/08

16:19

Page 115


115

It is impossible in the space of this chapter to compile a complete list of the processes and microprocesses – transposition, substitution, translation, dislocation, homology, antonymy etc. – through which ideational drawing is produced. Some of the numerous micro-phenomenal meshings that work through the noise in drawing and the peculiar rhythms that work in the blankness will be evidenced in the examples in the following sections. Rhys’s ideational drawing The particularities of some of these ideational drawing processes will be illustrated through examples in the work of the designer John Rhys Newman (Rhys). Rhys is Senior Design Manager of Nokia Design’s Insight & Innovation team in Los Angeles. I have known Rhys in various capacities over 15 years – as a student, a teaching colleague, as a design collaborator and as a friend. Over the period of our associations we have had numerous conversations about designing and in particular about ideation and I have had the pleasure of witnessing Rhys at work. So I am familiar, to a point, with how he thinks about ideation and to some extent can read the regularities in his ideational process. Rhys is an inveterate draughtsman; drawing is crucial to his ideational thinking. He produces drawings at his desk in the office, at his desk at home, when he is travelling; indeed absolutely anywhere. Fictions Some of the drawings he produces are made in the course of meetings he has to attend as part of his managerial role at Nokia. Before each meeting he grabs a number of sheets of colour photocopier paper, arms himself with a pencil and, during the course of each meeting, he draws distractedly. In a recent email he describes this circumstance of drawing: A lot of these drawings happen in meetings or on conference calls where I’m half listening, and half paying attention to the drawing. This semi-precious, or semi-focus to drawing seems to be a very effective strategy for me at the moment. They have fluidity which is not there if I consciously attend to them. And the lack of preciousness, removes a hesitancy that comes to the drawings, when I start to worry and imagine that someone else might actually look at these drawings. Accidents occur as my focus – attention – drifts in and out. These accidents lead me to think on things I couldn’t have otherwise anticipated. They allow my imagination to take leaps. Over the course of a year Rhys produces many drawings, which, once finished, are then stamped with a date and placed in one of a rapidly expanding set of manilla envelopes accumulating in his files. On each of these envelopes he has written merely, ‘Fictions’. These Fictions are set aside from what he calls his generative drawings (the drawings he produces in the studio to scope out, identify and develop ideas of possible future product articulations for Nokia). These drawings are part of a continuing training in drawing, ‘keeping one’s hand/eye in’, produced in a compulsion to keep drawing. But they are also an effort to use drawing to see what emerges when one relinquishes a hold on thinking; to see what leaps in thinking the act of drawing can produce:


116

5/8/08

16:19

Page 116


the leap takes us abruptly to a place where everything is different, so different it strikes us as strange…Though we may not founder in such a leap, what the leap takes us to will confound us.16 The meetings are helpful in allowing him to work with indeterminacy and engage sub-liminal processes – ‘semi-precious and semi-focus(ed)’. Rhys is engaged in what Michel Serres calls a ‘chaotic logic’ also named ‘la logique des circumstances’ which is an attempt to ‘understand without concepts’ through ‘a fluid blending (melange) of subject and object’.17 He, Rhys, through sleight of mind and through a conjecturing hand tries to dis-appear into the thing he is drawing so as to gain an ‘absence that thinks’. What Rhys is trying to do, through losing himself below a liminal datum, is gain new knowing – the potentia described earlier. What he is trying to do is break the hold of his ingrained knowing in order to embrace the blankness and/or noise of the possible. In what follows I examine a few of Rhys’s drawings. There isn’t the space for a deep read of these drawings, but I will make a few observations that may help in an appreciation of ideational drawing. Fictions 1: Floods The Fictions drawings are musings or doodles. They are not directed to a particular project, but emerge in Rhys giving himself over to drawing. What has preoccupied Rhys over the last year or so, amongst other things are floods. He has in his meetings produced sheet after sheet of drawings on the theme of floods. The drawings in Figure 1 and Figure 2 are two from this series of flood drawings. Rhys in these flood drawings is thinking-drawing, exploiting conjunction. Both pictures are busy through a process of making connection. These drawings work (are worked up) in thinking through themes on parallel planes, and in making connection across them – in free association. The drawings are clearly influenced by the topicality of global warming. The images of flooding, particularly New Orleans, were very much in his thoughts while drawing. Scenes where the flooding in that hapless city ripped artefacts from their ‘sensible’ place and brought them to other artefacts, also displaced, bringing about unlikely and mostly senseless collections of things are what foreshadow the assemblages in these drawings. The destructive images of actual floods inspire the use of flood as symbol or metaphor. Used in this way he is able to ruminate on creativity – as thinking and making. The objects in the scenes: tree, boat, oars, chairs are connected through their materiality – wood. There are processes of material transformation portrayed in the scene – growth, decay, construction (stacking), breaking. The scene is ripe with symbols of creative process (and in Figure 2, especially, with designerly process). According to Cooper’s An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols18 the boat is an ark, a bearer of life. The boat or ark, in its movement, is a symbol of transformation and translation and as a form or vessel it is often used to symbolise knowledge. In Figure 1, in the place in the boat reserved for a mast Rhys has placed a tree. And, not just any tree, a ‘damned fig’ (title of the drawing). The tree is also a knowledge symbol. It is a symbol of fecundity, combining masculine and feminine principles (the leaf, the male sexual organ, and the fruit,


5/8/08

16:19

Page 117


117

Figure 1: John Rhys Newman, Damned Fig, flood drawing, 2006.

female). As mast it performs as an ‘axis mundi’ – an orientation of the world around it; and, it, as sail, orients the boat in the ‘draft’ that will eventually propel it. Its roots break through the shell of the boat to look for water and ground beneath. They may be interpreted as prenotional rooting – breaking through the shell of the vessel (the given), searching for and allowing the absence or chaos below to come through and nurture or destroy the balance (or order) in the boat. The trunk is the unitary form that carries the ‘sap’ from roots to branches and fruits above; and these fruits may over time drop and take root again. What is conspicuous by absence in both drawings is water. In Figure 1 the boat (broken and somewhat pathetic) is up on chocks waiting for the flood. And, in Figure 2 it seems as if the water has receded leaving the boat perched on its own Mount Ararat – a stack of chairs. The chairs are not without meaning. As a 3-D designer the chair is the design object par excellence.


118

5/8/08

16:19

Page 118


The chairs are unbroken in the drawing. But are gathered in an awkward and precariously balanced pile. These form ‘a history of the space in which the designer finds him or herself’. This is history as debris (but somehow unbroken). It is not without significance that this stack appears next to, towers above, overhangs and threatens the designer’s desk. The boat with all it significances ends up after the flood lodged in this history. Figure 1 and Figure 2 offer ‘before and after the flood’ scenes – both desiccated spaces. And both are affected, in anticipation and in relief, by the ‘noise’ of water that will sweep, or has swept, all before it. What animates and ultimately brings about transformation in these drawings is flooding – the ‘liquid history’ or ‘chaotic noise’ (referencing Serres) described earlier as theme and in process.

Figure 2: John Rhys Newman, Untitled flood drawing, 2006.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 119


119

Fictions 2: In sight and mind Figure 3 offers a landscape of forms in which a few identifiable objects appear. The drawing support, performing as both tabletop and page, is cluttered with a number of artefacts, all of which are used as drawing aids: pencil, paper, sharpener, paper clip and spectacles. All of these sit on Rhys’ desktop and are in sight and at hand, indeed at his finger-tips when drawing. Figure 3 is, thus, in part, a drawing on (or about) drawing. It is in the first instance a reflection on the world in which Rhys sits; a set of drawing observations of the objects around him. It is possible to imagine how this drawing began: with the aimless sketching of a pair of spectacles that lay in front of him during a meeting or conference call. Once the spectacles

Figure 3: John Rhys Newman, Untitled drawing, 2006.


120

5/8/08

16:20

Page 120


were drawn his attention is drawn to the other articles around him. As his pencil wandered across the page drawing the objects in front of him, the arrangements of these objects in his drawing begin to suggest and thus produce a world of alternative logic – of forms and function. It may have been the bend of a paperclip or the spiral of the pencil shavings that triggered the thought of croquet hoops or helter-skelters. Rhys chose to develop these allusions, abandoning himself to a free-for-all of form development, beyond object observation and depiction. The space in the drawing at this point is no longer bound by the rigours of observation but is given over to play; the drawing articulates a space of play, but also uses the processes of drawing to discover the objects of play. Here, drawn forms grow and mutate as they are placed within the context of the drawing, responding to both the functions and forms of those other object/forms they come into contact with. The juxtaposition of scale, material, function and form allows for new possibilities; these forms are not pre-conditioned, they are born out of the context and action of the drawing itself. In this drawing Rhys moves through figuration and thus objectness to play with pure form to build an architectonic space where the recognisable interacts with the allusive forms of his imagining drawing. The Fictions are abstracts for ideas; prelude to ideating; reverie of a sort, where subliminally the world is re(-)membered in drawing – brought to mind and re-constituted in new connections and new formations – without purpose; produced in and as uncollected thought. Rhys makes a clear distinction between his Fictions, his reveries, and what he calls ‘generative’ drawing – drawing used through the full stretch of idea formation from concept to the exploration of possible structures, forms, materiality and technical details of an idea-image-thing (all simultaneously). A generative drawing is motivated to produce an idea for something beyond the drawing itself. It can begin with a spore or trigger idea. Generative drawings 1: Housing estates and sandcastles Rhys began the set of drawings, of which Figure 4, below, is an example, by asking ‘Why do we build sandcastles?’ The bucket and spade are more often than not used to build castles (or, perhaps forts) of sand on the beach. The usual bucket form conditions this type of building. It is used to form roundels and towers (with crenellations). Although, they do not determine play in the way that the recent rash of injection moulded fish, animal, clown, (actually anything) sand casting moulds do, the bucket and spade do direct towards a particular kind of building (both method and typology). In a private email, Rhys writes about the ‘draft’ that sets a course for the ideas in these drawings: [they] come from spending more time at the beach, than is possibly good for me. But they are also infused by an ongoing dialogue between Nathan [his architect brother-in-law] and myself about the transient and flexible way homes are constructed here in California (mostly due to earthquake building codes etc.). But, I also like the idea of walking onto a beach and seeing terraced homes, and maybe a half collapsed housing estate. The drawings take up from where the conversation between Rhys and his brother-in-law ends and the verbal discourse is renewed in drawing. The translation from everyday chat to drawing


5/8/08

16:20

Page 121


121

Figure 4: John Rhys Newman, Generative drawing, 2006.

is a key micro process in the ideational process of this example. There is a literalism (representational shift – word to image) that infuses the drawing. The definitions of the words ‘house’, ‘sandcastle’, ‘construction’, ‘building’ and so on are all reworked through the drawing. The drawings work in the shadow of some expectation or hope of Rhys’; they seek to tease out what it would be like to build (and see) sandhouses rather than sandcastles on a beach. The possibility for innovatory ideas is sought in the interference (moiré) patterns of the overlay of two contexts viz. beach and building site. The processes and objects of the building site are transposed to the beach. Rhys produces a challenge to the ‘regularity’ of sandcastle building by butting the sandcastle up against Californian building practices and their outcomes. The drawing in Figure 4 compares and contrasts the processes and tools of construction of the different contexts. It begins a process that de-ranges and reforms the expected form of the bucket and spade in new suggestions that come from the form and function of the tools of the building site; for instance through a shift in scale and material an excavator bucket becomes a child’s plaything. In the drawing Rhys also produces the form of the typical Californian bungalow as sandcastle. One can see him working out how to produce tools to afford the opportunity to produce the beach landscape he imagines.


122

5/8/08

16:20

Page 122


Generative drawings 2: Monkey Phone In contrast to the sandcastles, the Nokia drawing is more prosaic, or rather, more determined; Rhys is trying to find poetic moments even in what looks to be a prescriptive brief. The drawing shown as Figure 5 is from his sketchbook and is one of a number in a process to develop a product which while in development was known as the Fun Cam, or Monkey. This drawing was produced after three of his initial proposals had been selected and taken up by Nokia. This drawing revisits the proposed product. Rhys describes his motivations and drawing process: …I felt the product had lost something in the translation into CAD. So I printed the CAD drawings, stuck them in the sketchbook, and began re-drawing the form of the phone again over the page, to try and see the differences in how my hand remembered the form I had drawn repeatedly, and the 2D CAD drawings which I felt were a poor copy of my original drawings. The drawing is a collage of the 2D CAD work that I’d generated to present the concept, some bird images that I was proposing we take as bird-calls for the shutter activation audio signals (‘watch the birdie’ ha ha!), a detail of a Fresnel lens that I was considering for the product and my attempts to remember – through my hand – the sense of the phone’s form. Rhys moves through ‘noise’ in this drawing. In the bird sounds he literally engages in noise but the reference to the Fresnel lens adds further to the clamour of possibility. But Rhys also seeks a blankness in the drawing; he seeks to produce in the remembering of his hand an engagement with what is purely form. He moves between noise and blankness. The feeling for,

Figure 5: John Rhys Newman, Nokia sketchbook drawing, 2002.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 123


123

or is it of, forms marks a movement in the blankness whereas the connection of phone to lens and bird-sound is the search for conjunction. Conclusion This essay is spiked with traps – as is all writing on ideational drawing. In the circumlocutions of the essay a number of these traps were sprung – some were noticed by me (and still sprung) and, some were not (and will quite likely be picked up by the reader); some were avoidable and some were not. Many of the traps are set in the problematic that subtends an appreciation of ideational drawing, a problematic arising from its very nature. In the first place, ideational drawing is not a form of communication. The drawing is rather, a denkraum – a space where an individual thinks. The drawing does not need to make sense to anyone else apart from the person drawing – and to themselves only when they are ideating. This throws up a second point of note: ideational drawing is only potent in ‘action’. The drawing is remarkably changed when it is read post-process. Unless what is thought, the completed drawing, is drawn back into the whirly-gig of thinking-up-ideas it falls out of the process and this marks a clear difficulty in appreciating ideational drawing. Ideational drawing is only absolutely what it is during ideation. When the process has a clear outcome, a telos, it is in a sense no longer an ideational drawing. Ex post facto, that is, once the idea is in a sense realised, the drawing is merely a record, a feature in a history of the process, and no longer a part of the process proper. The trap one falls into, in this regard, is in reading drawing exclusively as a section of a vinculum (a causal thread) that traces a direct path to the final thought/idea. To appreciate more fully ideational drawing one needs to appreciate the spores that lead away to different histories than the one produced; one needs to recover the ‘lines of flight…where mutations and difference produce not just the progression of history but disruptions, breaks, new beginnings and monstrous births’.19 Drawing is a space of multiple geneses, characterised by Serres as ‘small generation, numerous becomings, abounding possibilities and disappearances’20 and one therefore needs to engage the multiplication of ideas in these drawings, whether sensible, nonsensical, useful (as new beginning) or monstrous. Ideational drawing is physico-cognitive – thinking happens through physical as well as mental action. One thinks with the stochastic reflexes of the hand; and these reflexes cannot be understood fully in reflection. The thinking hand eludes the mind’s grasp. Leading on and related to this, (and this is a trap I saw and still set off), explanation necessarily tames the unruliness of ideational drawing. Rather than explain an ideational drawing one needs to explore the ‘chaotic logic’ at work, the drafts of ‘thinking’ which ventilate the drawing. In mitigation, the brevity of this chapter militates against a fuller articulation of the chaotic logic at work in ideational drawing. It clearly would have helped build a more extensive base for an appreciation if I had plotted more fully the erratic movements of connection in ‘noise’ and the more rhythmical progressions (percussion) in ‘blankness’ in ideational drawing: and also the processes and micro-processes at work in both dynamics. This unfortunately must be deferred to a more extended piece of writing, or, indeed, handed over to the reader for further exploration.


124

5/8/08

16:20

Page 124


A final note: the ‘knowledge’ that is used in ideational drawing, and also that which it produces, is a knowledge-in-potential or potentia – knowledge for and in becoming. In this, knowledge returns to have a critical purchase on the world-as-it-is. ‘What might be’ (the ‘becomings’ the drawing articulates) is held in diacritical relationship with ‘what is’. It therefore inevitably produces a critique of the world-as-it-is. By showing ‘prospects’ (all that might be) there is of course a critique of ‘what is’, but there is also additionally the opportunity to critically engage with ‘what might be’, i.e. the prospects themselves. In other words there is opportunity to develop critiques of the future (possible). The, at times, intractable difficulties in writing about ideational drawing has meant that ideational drawing is under-appreciated as a subject for research, as a tool in a research agenda, as a critical discourse (on the past, present and future) and even just as an important process in contemporary design practice. It behoves us as researchers of drawing to draw attention to what is at work in ideational drawing and indeed how ideational drawing may work in different ways across different practices (including academic research and professional design practice). This chapter presents what amounts to a number of notes towards an appreciation of ideational drawing – marking merely a beginning. Notes 1. Heidegger, M. (1999). What Calls for Thinking, in Basic Writings, (ed) Krell, D.F., London: Routledge, pp. 369–391. 2. Ibid., p. 374. 3. Ibid., p. 380–381. 4. Bacon, F. (2000). The New Organon, (eds) Jardine, L., & Silverthorne, M., Cambridge University Press. 5. Serres, M. (1995). Genesis. University of Michigan Press, USA, p. 34. 6. Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 7. Kearney, R. (2001). The Wake of the Imagination – Towards a Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge 8. Rajchman, J. op. cit. pp. 73–75 9. Bingham, N. and Thrift, N. (2000). Some New Instruction for Travellers, The geography of Bruno Latour & Michel Serres, in Crang, M. and Thrift N. (2000) Thinking Space. London: Routledge, p. 292. 10. Carter, P. (2004). Material Thinking. Melbourne University Press, p. 8. 11. Ulmer, G. (1985). Applied Grammatology. John Hopkins University Press, p. 51. 12. Assad, M. (1991). Michel Serres: In Search of a Tropography, in Hayles N. K. (ed) (1991) Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. University of Chicago Press, p. 279. 13. Serres, M. op. cit. p. 22. 14. Rajchman, J. op. cit. p. 7. 15. Bingham, N. and Thrift, N. op. cit. p. 289. 16. Heidegger, M. op. cit. p. 377. 17. Assad, M. op. cit. p. 290. 18. Cooper, J. (1978). An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, London: Thames and Hudson, p. 14. 19. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, p. 57. 20. Assad, M. op. cit. p. 278.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 125

8 EMBEDDED DRAWING Angela Eames In this chapter I look for drawing as demonstrated through the two and three-dimensional work of the artist Michael Kidner. I consider the notion of focus and how drawing as a thinking process relates to outcome. I aim to demonstrate the significance of drawing in current visual practice. I place an emphasis on the artist’s voice, presenting edited extracts from an interview with Kidner where drawing was the topic of discussion, and on matters of approach, media and the work. In addition to a commentary the reader is presented with a proposition – the possibility that drawing, that most ancient of practices, is still alive and well in our technological age. High-focus thinking relates to the logical and analytical whilst low-focus thinking presents the opposite end of the spectrum, loss of control, creative fancy and an ability to be receptive to the unexpected or fantastic. The state of mind required when drawing involves high and low focus thinking; alert, organised and rational in a preparatory sense, the ability to survey immediate time, space and interruptions and a continuous open mindedness to the particular situation.1 We often hear in conversation or debate that drawing is common to all visual practice but what exactly is meant by this statement? In this chapter, I try to answer this question. I am concerned with ‘where is drawing’ as opposed to ‘what is drawing’. I am searching for drawing where there is seemingly no drawing. I wish to reveal the drawing practice that lies embedded within an artist’s work, drawing that would not typically be perceived as drawing. I am looking for drawing from the other end of the telescope. I believe that the resurgence in drawing over the last fifteen years is not just an expansion of the envelope to include work which might previously have been dismissed as peripheral, but that drawing has evolved continually, stemming from the needs of artists to explore potential and give insight into human experience and engagement within a rapidly changing technological world; that drawing is continually reinventing itself for a purpose.


126

5/8/08

16:20

Page 126


Michael Kidner’s individual and specific working approach is reviewed here. I use extracts from an interview that I conducted with him in 1999 and, in the following rationale, I respond to issues arising from our conversation in relation to drawing concerns. Through talking about specific pieces, I identify aspects of drawing practice which lie embedded within Kidner’s work. I make reference to traditionally understood drawing conventions but also show that it is the artist’s inquisitiveness that takes the work outside these boundaries. I investigate the development of drawing as a means of visual conjecture, examining how and why artists think and produce. I identify essentially with Richard Serra’s dictum, that drawing is a verb, in searching for the presence and/or evidence of drawing approach embedded within an artist’s practice. Edited extracts from an interview with the artist Michael Kidner AE: What do you understand drawing to be? MK: I think it’s putting down the idea in the quickest way, in the most immediate way possible. It’s like drawing an idea to me. Drawing used to be trying to recall what I was looking at but nowadays I don’t really look at the landscape or objects, so much as draw my understanding – trying to put down what I think I’ve understood about an object or an idea. There’s a painting in progress behind you which is literally using an illustration that I saw in a book of Penrose’s pentagonal tiling of the plane2 (see Figure 2). What is curious is that you never seem to have a large enough area in which to develop because it grows by each pentagon. Each pentagon is repeating itself in a larger and larger organisation. You find that you’re running out of space and you don’t really know where to stop. It goes on expanding indefinitely. However, that’s a drawing that I simply appropriated and was interested in how I would colour it or describe the system. AE: Would you see that illustration itself as drawing? MK: Well, it was a drawing that I looked at and liked, that someone else had made, but it is still a drawing, yes, very much so, because the drawing is the idea. What I was interested in was the notion of movement. When I looked at the illustration it reminded me of the feeling I have if I look over the parapet of a bridge at water swirling in currents down a river…water that forms and then disappears and then reforms somewhere else. That was the impression that I had in mind and that I wanted to be able to draw or to realise. Drawing itself wouldn’t do it, or at least would do it inadequately I thought, but it would be the first stage. I think drawing is the first stage of any idea from which you are able to evolve further ideas. AE: Just as the Penrose tiling illustration in the book has a boundary and this piece has a boundary, you talked about it being able to go on – to grow. Then you mentioned the river. The river is a nice analogy but half an analogy perhaps, because a river flows one way and is bounded by its banks. MK: …this has no boundary. AE: So one has to have the boundary?


5/8/08

16:20

Page 127

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

127

MK: As long as that would be enough to illustrate the expanding sense of the pattern. I look at a lot of Islamic pattern with interest because of the incredible sophistication of the pattern. Pattern is something quite philosophic: it’s not just a decoration, it’s not just wallpaper. I think it’s indicative of where we are at in terms of how we see ourselves in the cosmos or how we see the cosmos, our sense of space and what space is; where we are in space. It’s very different I think from the Middle Ages when they had a very clear picture of the space which they imagined around them. I think we have a fairly clear notion of space today, the space as we see from the Big Bang, but it’s not inscribed in our culture. Perhaps it didn’t seem that way to people in the Middle Ages but it was; everything, their architecture, all evolved around their notion of the cosmos. However, when you ask that question of what drawing is – in the basic sense – I think it is a diagram to put down an idea before it floats away – to materialise an idea. AE: To materialise regardless of the materials used? MK: Yes, in a sense. When I was involved in Post-Op painting…colour was more important than line. I used quite arbitrarily, two different colours – it wouldn’t matter much as long as they were different. I would pick up the first pencil that came to hand that gave me a contrast and often I found that my imagination didn’t extend to other colours so the work evolved around those two quite arbitrarily chosen colours. It used to surprise me that it worked this way. AE: Would you say that your thinking space, the space within which you move during the working process, is drawing? MK: Well, what would your answer be, if I were to ask you that same question? AE: For me it is to do with visually being able to think through continuously where, what and how one is exploring. Perhaps at the simplest level to iteratively make and break. MK: Well it is very basic – it is the idea. AE: And almost…a structuring of those thoughts – making them tangible in some way. MK: I think that’s exactly it – making tangible a dream, an imagination, in its most primitive way. AE: Do you recognise a particular working method within your drawing practice? MK: I don’t think so. In a sense every drawing has a different method depending on what you are looking for from the drawing. At my present stage of working, which is very much more thinking in terms of the three-dimensional, I have begun to mistrust drawing because it is fixed. Take one case in particular – a wave. If you draw a wave it’s only one view of that wave. If you really imagine a three-dimensional wave it could become a straight line from a certain point of view whereas in a drawing it’s always fixed as a wave – the perfect profile – the wave in profile. That seems to me to be dishonest, I think, in the sense that it doesn’t represent the wave.


128

5/8/08

16:20

Page 128


So drawing is only very much a first stage. I’ve been trying to draw with fibreglass rods in three dimensions to eliminate that illusion. When the rods are twisted in space they are fixed but out of the picture plane. It’s that notion that drawing is always an illusion of reality which has interested me I suppose. The feeling that two dimensions is a very inadequate description if you want to describe your notion of reality. AE: So the word you used earlier – diagram, they are in fact three-dimensional diagrams? MK: Yes, that’s right – exactly. They illustrate an idea. AE: In my view your drawing/pieces of work seem to encapsulate time. They seem to rationalise and make visible aspects of dimensionality, matter and possibilities of which we are visually unaware – drawing as the visual realising of the invisible, two and three-dimensionally. What’s your response to this? MK: Time is something which has been very important in a lot of contemporary art. Once you get into a time based medium it’s a different ball game. If I go to a film – and I’ve seen quite a few films that are incredibly impressive in the memory – what you remember about them is often a surprise. I’m thinking particularly of ‘Last Year in Marienbad’.3 You have to remember what it was like when it was first shown to appreciate it. I don’t think it would have anything like the same impact now. However, at the time, I was very impressed by the film – by some of the devices used in the film to be specific. I think it’s a different sort of art. I’m looking for a contemplative experience. It’s not an art that can catch you unawares. It’s an art that you look at and then you put it in the cupboard or back on the shelf and you have to take it out to look at it and then you put it back again – it’s not around. Therefore, it’s not in that sense a part of the environment. This is obviously a personal thing but I resist the notion of using actual time. AE: Is there a greater tendency when using actual time to be purely illustrative? In other words, one conducts a narrative on film rather than exploring aspects of time itself? MK: For example, if you were faced with reviewing twenty videos, you have to allow three weeks instead of three hours to look at them. It presumes on the spectator’s time. And the trouble with time-based art is that if it’s not interesting you’ve committed yourself to looking. You can spend nine hours being bored or frustrated, but the last one might leave an indelible impression or memory. I do think it’s a very different thing and a different way of looking. Possibly it’s a more contemporary way of looking because whereas people won’t spend more than fifteen seconds in front of a painting at the Tate, they will spend fifteen minutes in front of a video. Anything that moves seems to attract an audience. I think it says something about contemporary culture. AE: I suppose there’s the notion of the promise, or perhaps the viewer’s desire, that in the coming seconds or minutes there might just be something that interests? An expectancy level – one stands in front of a painting and thinks ‘well that’s that, I’ve seen it’, and stops looking. MK: That’s quite true, so you never have to look into yourself. You’re always looking for what the picture’s going to provide. That’s what I mean by passive looking. Movement is entertaining


5/8/08

16:20

Page 129

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

129

because it’s always changing. It does reflect the pressure of time on people today, which I’m sure didn’t exist a hundred years ago. When you look at the sort of lifestyle around us – take newspapers for example, once people were happy to sit down and read for perhaps two hours or more. Time is more pressured now. If I go to a museum, maybe I have an hour, I’m kind of looking at a picture thinking ‘what is it, what is it saying to me, what is it about’ and that completely obscures the picture. That’s why I don’t really like museums at all. I look best when I’m not looking – when the painting is looking at me as it were and when I’m not even thinking about it necessarily. It just catches me and that is for me what a picture should be doing – looking at the spectator rather than the spectator looking at it, and nudging the spectator occasionally. AE: Do you feel that in your exploring, as you are drawing or making objects, that you’re actually contributing to that speed, in as much as you seem to me, to be exploring two, three, four dimensions, through the elastic pieces and aspects of place/space. Are you then contributing to the wealth of knowledge that furthers technology? MK: A lot of the world as we understand it is invisible to the eye. I think we must acknowledge the fact that the structure of the world is invisible particles or bundles of energy. The Japanese notion of the human being belonging to a much bigger system is healthier than one where we try to control the system. In this sense the Japanese philosophy is wiser. One of the things which I do think affects a work far more than I used to, is its environment. Even in an exhibition say, you put the wrong paintings next to each other – you can kill them all. The environment in which a work is placed, or perhaps the relationship between the environment and the work, is almost as important as the work itself. The work becomes, as it were, a node in a bigger organisation. The environment can contribute to the sense of the work. AE: Perhaps you could talk about ‘Seven Chords’ because of what we touched upon earlier – the boundary of a piece. It seems to me, in the case of Seven Chords that its boundaries are integral within the physical extensions of the piece itself. MK: The Seven Chords piece interested me because of the way it folded up into a circle, in fact three loops. However making it was quite difficult. I would have to go back and think about the concept that really came out of drawing on flat sheets of elastic in earlier works. I had begun to think about space as a kind of contained energy – not as an everlasting expansion but as something that is contained within itself. Elastic seemed an appropriate material to use but the natural state of the elastic was relaxed or shrunk. It needs something to keep it in tension when stretched. Seven Chords came out of the notion of working with elastic and glass fibre rod. The elastic was somewhat flat and with the tension it bent into curves. I began to realise that an odd number of curves would not join into a continuous line in the picture plane but with an even number (for example a hexagon) I could drag with a continuous curve. With a three, five or seven-sided figure the join would have a nasty kink unless you twisted the whole thing out of the picture plane to join it up smoothly. I got interested in the fact that Pentagon was just such a thing. It’s a wavy line with five points but in order to join it up it had to be twisted out of the picture plane. Seven Chords was an extension of that piece. It’s just one more set of curves added but in making it you have to work with the rods – it is a little bit like a wrestling match.


130

5/8/08

16:20

Page 130


The width of the elastic made a difference though. It was in fact a real problem designing the thing so that the elastic would unfold without being twisted up round the whole figure. In essence, the whole thing started as three circles piled on top of each other and if you opened them in the right way the whole thing would happen correctly. It took ages to work out the system of joining it. I’m often trying to think of problems that I couldn’t imagine a computer handling. AE: Thinking about these chord pieces, when you describe the processes you talk as a painter – you talk about ‘coming out of the plane’. One would perhaps find sculptural references easier to accept. What do you feel about that? Do you feel you’re a painter or someone who works through painting? MK: They relate more to relief. They are self-contained objects – objects in their own right. They don’t seem to be referring to landscape or outside themselves…At one point I had a painting, a colour painting, literally two circles on a ground. They were perilously held to the picture plane and there was a kind of energy, colour energy, in the balance. I had an elastic piece next to it and I was comparing the two. One was actual elastic and rod energy and the other was implied colour energy and I was really surprised how in many ways the colour painting actually seemed to have more energy than the elastic and the rod. I was interested in that but I didn’t do anything about it other than record the fact to myself. I suppose it’s similar to television – if you make the thing actual rather than implied you, in some sense, kill the implied energy, you illustrate too much. AE: You negate it…? MK: I suppose energy that is only implied is often more telling for the spectator. There was some critic talking about criticism who described my work, or rather myself, as an abstract realist and I thought that was rather an interesting paradox. But, going back to colour, is colour also drawing? …How would Bridget Riley talk about drawing? It’s terribly important. You can’t use colour without some kind of boundary – red is for ever if it’s just red and where it ends becomes a shape. AE: But when involved in the act of painting, it ends on a painted surface with various colours ending in relation to other colours. It sets up an interaction between differing areas of colour. Could that be described as drawing? MK: Exactly. My view is that it is drawing, but it’s different…But then, what does one mean by drawing? What was that rather nice schoolboy story I recall – a young schoolboy who described drawing as ‘I draw round my think’. Rationale: Drawing issues stemming from the above extracts 1. Conjecture Kidner works directly in two, three, four dimensions etc. He acknowledges, intuitively, different spatial location, different material, different approach, different outcome. He considers the appropriateness of material in relation to the ideas he is thinking about, that is, how to visualise


5/8/08

16:20

Page 131

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

131

Figure 1: Michael Kidner, Column no. 2 in front of its own image, 1970, acrylic on canvas with photographs, 213 x 320 cm.

a proposition. His working approach is one of unknowing, moving hopefully toward a position where he might know more. He takes up an exploratory stance; ‘What would happen if?’ During the making process his conjecture is countered by actuality at every move. Think about the idea; think about the problems of physically making visual incarnations of that idea. Think about material, positioning, location and try something. Light the blue touch paper, stand back and see what has really happened. How far has the outcome adhered to the original intention(s)? Has it veered off course and, if so, what has this new direction or series of events brought to light? Can the unanticipated, the chance happening, be used now or at a later date? Thus we have a visual thought process which step by step leads to the production of objects and artefacts and which has been the condition of humankind’s contribution to living on the planet, culminating in architecture, functional design and cultural artefact. Perhaps Kidner’s notion of making diagrams of the cosmos is pertinent here. Whether planning a spatial environment, designing a building or life drawing, the approach is the same, the artist or designer attempts to understand the nature of time, space and matter through physically engineering an alternative scenario. Further he/she attempts to stay alert to the happenchance aspect of their labour, keeping an eye out along the way, for those events which were not apparent at the outset. In this way they accommodate growth within their visual experience and in the generation of further work. As far as the drawer is concerned this is the condition of drawing. Draw, look,


132

5/8/08

16:20

Page 132


see what has happened and anticipate what might yet happen. What does the drawing reveal to the drawer during the process of drawing? Who’s looking at whom? What is the drawing saying or demanding and how might we respond to that demand? As Kidner says, ‘Looking at the spectator rather than the spectator looking at it and nudging the spectator occasionally’. 2. Ordinary/extraordinary I use ‘ordinary’ to mean the regular, the general, the everyday, the expected in some ways, as in response, or kicking off without intention or consideration and responding intuitively to a particular set of circumstances or situation, or feeling. Is this action actually intuitive or do conditioned responses automatically come into play? Some artists would argue that this

Figure 2: Michael Kidner, Penrose tiling illustration adapted, 1999, coloured pencil, 15 x 15 cm.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 133

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

133

approach would necessarily mean the latter, allowing habitual action and response to determine the work and at the same time reduce the potential for the unexpected, the unforeseen, the unpredictable and the extraordinary to be revealed. Kidner falls into this category. Immediate and unplanned action prompts unpremeditated action on the part of the drawer but in most cases this can predicate work which is limited by previous experience and tried and tested skills. The strategic or planned approach would seem to infer a controlled, perhaps enforced, course of action, pre-empting work of the same order but nothing could be further from the truth. When strategic rigour is employed in the light of intention, (what am I interested in, what am I trying to do, where am I going with this, what is it that I see out there?) these conditioned and habitual modes of working and thinking can be eliminated. When following a seemingly unnatural path (to the letter), the drawer is forced to let go of familiar thoughts, actions, and ways of working and is forced to take a somewhat uncomfortable path, a path which he/she has not trodden before. Faced with new issues, criteria and options, decisions must then be made (within the new rules) to cope with them and as a result new territory (for the drawer at least) is entered. However, in all probability, both ways of working are actually employed by the drawer as he/she navigates the terrain, setting up the rules, attempting to adhere to them but bound by the frailty of human nature, often breaking those rules. The ordinary as impulsive and instinctive action is pitted against the extraordinary as a peculiar and seemingly abnormal tactical approach. The drawing process involves a to-ing and fro-ing between the ordinary and the extraordinary; between the known and the unknown. In Kidner’s working approach there is a curious alliance between his bumbling along in the everyday and his sudden stepping off the edge. 3. Containment For Kidner, neither the act of drawing nor the forming of an object are confined by conventional boundaries of past visual endeavour. Material, location, longevity and the idea itself are confronted. It is for the artist, in relation to the work in progress, to determine the physical, even virtual, boundaries – the extent to which each individual idea can be explored and the boundaries and parameters within which the idea is specifically realised. The physical properties of material itself are stretched, as in the proposition that elastic might be pulled to its fullest extent, tempered by an almost naive insistence that it remain there – containment by nature. Whilst Kidner acknowledges issues of presentation, and is even bored by them when they are indicative of decorative afterthought, he makes no concession in the making process. His mind is elsewhere. When working on a commissioned installation this is still the case but the environment has intuitively entered into the equation. It becomes an integral part of the work – containment of idea and place. The rawness of his objects in terms of their physical make-up often means that the pieces age – a condition of matter and a containment of time. The traditional drawer is governed by these same principles; material, location, longevity (of both the work and the time available to work) and the reason for drawing in the first place. When drawing in the life room the drawer is intuitively aware (or perhaps should be) of the environmental conditions wherein the model is located; confined or spacious, hot or cold,


134

5/8/08

16:20

Page 134


Figure 3: Michael Kidner, Looped circle, 1978, paper, nails, wood, elastic, ink, 79 x 69 cm.

pressured or relaxed, intense or laid back, slow or fast, dark or light. When recording/drawing on the hoof with camera or conventional media (pencil on paper) this intuitive awareness persists. It is the decision of the individual drawer to allocate their own parameters or to hone in on specific criteria in relation to their intentions during their allotted drawing time. Besides these factors there are the physical, perhaps even virtual, containment aspects of the material


5/8/08

16:20

Page 135

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

135

or media being used; large pieces of paper, notebooks, laptops, cameras or the environment itself (drawing on walls). Last but by no means least is the fervent hope on the part of the visual practitioner to use whatever medium is appropriate to the task at hand to push the envelope of visual possibility – containment of dependency. 4. Uncomfortability Kidner operates from the position of the explorer, pushing the boundaries of visualisation, in his search to produce some form of physical equivalence to the ideas swirling around in his head. The resultant works, whether formed of belts of stretched, black, elastic tensioned between

Figure 4: Michael Kidner, Working drawings of round column, 1984, coloured pencil on paper, 305 x 83 cm each and Round columns a/b, wooden disks and wire, 74 x 18 cm each.


136

5/8/08

16:20

Page 136


white, bent, fibreglass rods or painted on canvas, possess a raw aesthetic. There’s immediacy in the transition of thought, through action to outcome, which in the main remains unchanged, at least as long as it ‘does the job’. The artist and the work remain on the edge, in a somewhat uncomfortable position, with regard to how these resultant efforts might be received by the viewer. They are sorties into a world of possibility, often posing questions as opposed to providing answers, which are apt to confuse an audience. However, this is the very nature of new work – to step into untrodden territory, rather than to regurgitate or refine previous work. Faced with a blank sheet of paper, the drawer begins to explore what might be in front of them, working observationally or simply by generating marks across a surface. Having an intention at the outset allows the drawer to strategise, that is, how best to work toward this intention. Marks might stem from a conscious or involuntary mindset or from an initiated and controlled set of actions but both approaches are subject to the conditioning of previous experience on the part of the drawer. The difficulty is to relinquish the ‘habitual’ and to operate in a continually responsive, possibly imaginative and receptive manner. Allowing the accidental, the incidental, the intentional and perhaps the unintentional to merge in the results. To some degree this also implies a relinquishing of the ‘brain’ – an encounter with the uncomfortable. A comfortable encounter usually indicates the habitual approach and consequently a feeling that we have seen it before, whereas the confrontational encounter indicates a shift or change that is not immediately or easily accommodated and predicates something different. Kidner’s objects and images are not absorbed easily on first viewing. There seems to be nowhere to put them. They are not easy to catalogue within an historical visual archive. In time this discomfort on the part of the viewer, yields to a more comfortable state as the objects and images meld into a changing consciousness which informs our perception of a changing world. 5. Still Kidner is super-sensitive to the notion of time and duration, though his work resides firmly in the territory of the ‘still’. He might stretch elastic from its shrunken and relaxed state to a tensile state and there he will force it to remain. He might suspend a piece, such as Seven Chords (Figure 5) from the ceiling and with the interference of a breeze it will rotate briefly before returning to a condition of stasis. Movement in time is inferred in the main, but within his work there is an acknowledgement of duration in his awareness of the momentary. In the long drawn out process of thinking, making, breaking and making again, time figures as both contemplative and instantaneous. The work reflects this in its straightforwardness, its adherence to the provision only of what is necessary. It has a beautiful clumsiness. Beyond the individual work, his entire lifetime of making, presents simultaneously, a series of punctuated periods of visual thought. The images illustrating this chapter range from work carried out in 1970 through to 1999. Pattern, growth, interruption, continuity, awkwardness and the sublime – all are investigated, played with, absorbed and catered for and are apparent within an extensive range of materials and forms. In essence it is the ‘still’ artefact which governs for Kidner. Even when affected by the moving image as in the film ‘Last Year in Marienbad’, it is for him the notion of the moment or even a sequence of individual moments which endure as a memory. No surprise then that his objects are ‘stills’ but he is also extremely


5/8/08

16:20

Page 137

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

137

conscious of what that demands of his audience – a contemporary twenty-first century audience, which he feels now resides in the realm of the moving image. Time itself has allowed this reflection. Drawing for Kidner is a continuum. In the procession of years the specific is approached with a fastidious attention to the unseen, the invisible, allowing in retrospect for the invisible to be seen. A reflection of the drawing process itself but also an overriding awareness that in order to break new ground, each moment of doing contributes to another sense of the ‘whole’. For the drawer these moments of doing, looking, thinking and reflecting are critical within the process of making a piece of work but they also provide on completion of the work a retrospective viewpoint. 6. Sensibility Touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell – our five senses, all attended to when drawing but perhaps touch is the overriding Figure 5: Michael Kidner, Seven chords, 1989, sensibility which thinkers/makers/artists employ. As drawers we sense material, fibreglass rod, elastic, cork, tape, 150 x 110 cm. whether that be the material we are using or the material we are observing. We are empathetic to distance, space and place, near and far, compression and stretch. We are aware of condition, transparency and opacity, ethereal and solid, clarity and blur, light and dark – and all the in-between states of being. The properties are as endless as matter itself. We probably talk about these characteristics in the privacy of our own heads and then move on to making that mark, cutting that piece of wood or placing that camera. It is touch which informs the artist of the nature of material and sight which completes the understanding. Traditionally artists have demonstrated an innate and comprehensive understanding of materials, methods and not least their tools. They build a mental library of awareness as they progress through doing. Kidner spans matter in his work employing whatever substance or material he feels appropriate to his ideas at the time. Our traditional understanding of drawing has been the mark (graphite or charcoal) located on a flat plane (paper), a two-dimensional entity, usually an interpretation of activity within three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. In analysing this scenario (the drawing) imagine being able to analyse a cross-section through the paper, to slice through a drawing to reveal the layers of graphite or varying densities of charcoal or other material applied to the surface…What then? With the aid of a microscope we might draw a different conclusion. We would be presented with a transverse aspect revealing evidence of


138

5/8/08

16:20

Page 138


Figure 6: Michael Kidner, Siamese pentagon, 1999, fibreglass rod and tulle, 152 x 152 cm.

layers or areas of substance having being applied to the ground (in this case the paper which would have its own inherent properties). However thin this might be, it nevertheless offers a third dimension, scale permitting. The two-dimensional drawing is an assimilation of both visual information observed, generated or invented and a fusion of material itself. If this is the beginning then drawing in three dimensions with slightly more appropriate media is merely an extension of the process. In the case of the chord pieces Kidner takes his line off the paper, so to speak, and bends it through air. His scribing takes place volumetrically. He requires us to walk around and possibly through the drawing. He wants us to experience the drawing. He thinks and plots through space.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 139

EMBEDDED DRAWING |

139

In summary, just as the computing environment has grown out of the traditions of visual art practice (that ever insistent enquiry into the nature of place/space/time) and the needs of industry as the producers of necessary or unnecessary artefacts, so too has there been an unspoken awareness that in order to navigate through this technological space we need to be able to think through matter and across dimension, to think in space, or draw. Drawing provides an essential means of prodding and probing, doing and undoing, glimpsing and maybe, seeing and experiencing reality and virtuality: If I construct a wireframe within a three-dimensional computing program like 3D Studio Max, what exactly am I doing? I believe that I am drawing. I know that I am not painting, sculpting, printmaking, filming – perhaps I’m not even making – but I am drawing. The experience and knowledge derived from previous practical pursuits in the material world serve to inform my thinking and working procedures but those decisions regarding what to do and what to do next are governed primarily by my experience as a drawer. My projections or conjectures with regard to the intangible stem from an awareness of the tangible and those of the invisible from an awareness of the visible and vice versa.4 Notes 1. Eames, A. (1998). From Drawing to Computing and Back Again. Drawing Across Boundaries Conference, (CD ROM), Loughborough University. 2. Gardner, M. (1989). Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers and the return of Dr Matrix, Revised edn. New York: W H Freeman. 3. Resnais, A. (1961). Director, Film. Last Year in Marienbad. 4. Eames, A. op. cit.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 140


5/8/08

16:20

Page 141

9 RECORDING: AND QUESTIONS OF ACCURACY Stephen Farthing This chapter tracks the relationship between accuracy, self-expression and invention within a sample group of drawings whose purpose is apparently to record accurately the way things look. The story starts with the drawings of a contemporary artist and a First World War soldier, neither of whom were intentionally making records as far as we know. I then move on to the eyewitness accounts of Dürer, Rembrandt and the slavery poet Captain John Marjoribanks. After that I compare the records of three explorers: Sydney Parkinson, who went on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, J W M. Turner, who was sketching in the Swiss Italian Alps during the first part of the nineteenth century and Mid-Shipman Septimus Roe who recorded the coastal profile at Rio. Moving along a time line that eventually gets us to the present day I turn to the Modern period, not to Turner, but a ‘Gift Drawing’ made in 1843 by Emily Babcock, a member of the Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York. I conclude with Katie Cuddon’s twenty-first century drawn-on-a-computer Mantelpiece Maps. Working with not just fine art but a range of historical examples taken from the author’s book, The Bigger Picture of Drawing, this chapter explores the human element in those drawings made specifically as records. Recording The greatest test of a recorder’s ability and a gift to anyone interested in making records is to be present, recording instruments in hand, at a significant event. There are, for example, drawings of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the burning of the Palace of Westminster, and photographs of the first men on the moon and of president Kennedy getting murdered in Dallas, but these were gifts to the recorder, they weren’t ‘normal’ days. What happens on a special day should be fairly straightforward. Provided the recorder has sufficient technical skill they simply do their best to get down on paper the essence of the event, then with whatever time is left over, record as much detail as possible.


142

5/8/08

16:20

Page 142


It is however more usual to find the recorder staring out at yet another landscape, human face or vase of flowers, not so much wondering if they can ‘get it down on paper’ as struggling for a strategy to make what they are looking at more interesting, and that is where the water between recording and accuracy seems to get muddied. So when David Hockney, an artist who draws both well and apparently effortlessly, develops quite late in his career an interest in an intermediate-technology drawing-aid, the camera lucida, I suspect that it’s not because he’s finding it more difficult to draw or is seeking greater accuracy, but more likely has run out of challenging subjects and is looking for ways of challenging himself further. In a similar way, when Septimus Roe a mid-shipman on the troop ship Dick jollied up the coastal profile of Rio, that he had drawn into the log as a navigation aid for others, by adding a flock of seagulls and a touch of light cumulous, he was not so much putting the icing on the accuracy cake, as exercising his sense of authorship. Not intended as records In time all drawings become records, but only some are intended as records. There is for example a drawing of a child trying to cut off a cat’s tail that is in the collection of The Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, which has become a record of, not an event, but of the relationship between a father and son. The cat drawing is bound into two volumes of letters written by a Sergeant Major W L Britton to his son Billie while serving at the Western Front.1 The letters were written in soft pencil, and were mostly no longer than thirty words, saying nothing much, other than ‘there is a present on the way’, or ‘I hope you like the drawing’ which was in fact the main point of every letter. A note in the IWM index tells us that the letters are ‘of no military importance’; this said, they are quite possibly the most perfect father to son messages. The subject of Britton’s ‘drawn messages’ ranges from how uncomfortable it is to be a foot soldier in the trenches, through cartoons of deluded Germans with spikes on their helmets, to imagined domestic mischief back home. The most accomplished is probably that image of a five-ish year-old boy sitting with his legs apart on a rug, his left hand firmly holding an escaping cat’s stretched-out tail and the right a pair of scissors, open and ready to cut. The image could be a record of a real event but was, more likely, drawn as a love token, a narrative to amuse, and to say, ‘I am thinking of you’. The reason the drawing and the letters became part of the inventory of the IWM was not because Britton was famous, nor because of any special gift he had as an artist, but because his letters were saved either by Billie or his mother, then over time gradually accumulated value as a record. A record of the type of letter sent home by a soldier from the front, and of what a father at the start of the last century might think appropriate to joke about with his young son. Although this letter was never intended as a record, unlike most drawings that were designed to be records, it is limpidly honest and not just accurate but infallible – a status that I suspect records only achieve when they are not originally conceived as records.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 143

RECORDING: AND QUESTIONS OF ACCURACY |

143

For the past forty years the American artist Chuck Close has recorded his changing appearance not as a primary intention but as a by-product of placing portraiture, and in particular self-portraiture, at the centre of his artistic practice. Since the late ‘sixties, working from gridded-up photographs, he has translated the colours and tones located within an originating grid into paint, graphite or ink and planted the results into a receiving grid one square at a time. The principles of his working method haven’t changed that much over those years, the detail of his translation strategy noticeably has. One of his first self-portraits is a drawing in graphite on paper. Self Portrait 1968 is based on a photo-booth head shot of the artist as a cool guy with all-over-the-place dark hair, black plastic Buddy Holly glasses, a ratty moustache, stubble and a half smoked cigarette sticking out of his mouth. Nearly forty years later, Self Portrait 2004–2005 pictures Close, as we know him today, wearing perfect designer spectacles, a neatly trimmed beard and a smile. The important distinction between the two images for the artist is not that they record how his face has changed over time, but that they record his developing translation strategies. Siri Engberg said of these self portraits: Over time his self-portraits have emerged from their grids as soft edged images in grissaille, as fields of variegated dots, and as dazzling mosaics of discrete, brilliantly hued shapes. In viewing these works together, we not only see a single face changing over time but also witness the artist’s evolution in his constant quest to reinvent the means by which an image can be built.2 Engberg’s assessment of Close clearly positions the artist as I think he would like to be seen, as a cutting edge artist not a portrait painter. Not a man recording the passing of time, but a man of his time, or as Close put it: I thought the most important thing about post-war American painting – the overriding issue – was a sense of ‘alloverness’. Whether it was Pollock’s skeinlike ribbons of paint in which there really was no difference from the left edge to the right edge…[or] Stella’s black stripe paintings that just kept going. If you were an ant crawling across it, there were no areas that were thicker, thinner, whatever – this commitment to the whole rectangle. Now, I wanted to overlay on top of the portrait that commitment to the whole, to the rectangle, and make every piece as important as every other piece.3 Self Portrait 1968, the image of the dishevelled artist with a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, was drawn to be understood within cutting edge art terms, not traditional notions of portraiture, as an experiment, not a record. If this is true, then I suspect Close’s early drawing fails, because what his audience inevitably gets tied up with is the impressive illusion and the similarity between the artist’s photographic source and his drawn outcome. In Close’s later, more abstracted, less imitative-of-photography images, I suspect this problem goes away and as a matter of course we get involved with the way the image is depicted and that ‘sense of alloverness’ that he tells us he is chasing. Interestingly, in spite of the logic underpinning what Close tells us he is doing, his self portraits remain, whether he likes it or not, quite accurate records of the changes over the years of his facial terrain.


144

5/8/08

16:20

Page 144


Having started with two examples of drawings that were not intended as records and explored the possibility that drawings not intended as records can become remarkably honest and accurate records, I would now like to turn to a group of drawings that were made specifically as records and have remained that way. Intended as records Portraits clearly make an important contribution to the part of drawing that is about recording. Whether it’s the potter’s daughter in Pliney’s myth drawing around the shadow of the profile of her lover, or Dürer recording the appearance of the movers and shakers of his day, ‘saving’ likenesses has played an important part in the history of western culture. In 1520 for example, Albrecht Dürer declared his intention to engrave a portrait of Martin Luther as a ‘lasting memorial’.4 Over the next six years he drew from life portraits of a number of key figures of the early Reformation, amongst them Erasmus and Pirckheime, but not Martin Luther. Luther for some reason slipped through the net, but that detail, although interesting, is not the important issue. What’s important is the notion of the ‘lasting memorial’. The point of Dürer’s portraits according to David Hotchkiss Price was to ‘preserve the appearance of people after they died’,5 an ambition I suspect Dürer also worked with when he drew his flawed but much better known posthumous portrait of an Indian Rhinoceros. The degree to which it is flawed is illustrated if one compares Dürer’s Rhinoceros with Rembrandt’s drawn from life, Three Studies of an Elephant with Attendant.6 The former is drawn like a medieval map whose firmness of line is clearly designed to mask the cartographer’s improvisations and lack of knowledge, while the simplicity, speed and lighter touch of the latter clearly takes accuracy for granted in this life-like representation. We know Rembrandt got the elephant right and assume he was there in front of it as he drew. So why do I think the elephant was drawn from life? Archival research tells us that there was an elephant and handler wandering about Europe in the year the drawing was made and that Rembrandt most probably met them. More important however, is that unless Rembrandt cunningly forged his sketch to look as if it were an eyewitness account, it is drawn in the way people draw when they draw from life, if they are working quickly. Gestural pencil sketches done without erasure and after-the-event-polishing don’t vary much in their appearance. Over time, one made in 1650 can look as if it were made in 1950. They are the draftsman’s informal handwriting made on ‘automatic’, an automatic that Rembrandt is unlikely to have had any interest in fabricating. Grey areas I started writing with the idea that there may be just two types of drawn record; those made in the presence of the event and those made after the event. Unfortunately, as attractive as this proposition seemed, I suspect it is really more complex. There is of course a difference between a hurried note taken in the field and a finished drawing made with as much time as it takes, after the event, on a drawing board at home. But between these poles there are some drawings that were purposely made to appear as if they were in the field, and even more that were started in the presence of their subject then tidied up and/or finished elsewhere.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 145


145

It might seem reasonable to assume that drawings made in the presence of what they depict would emerge at the top end of the accuracy scale, but in reality this is not always the case. Accuracy is not just a question of skill it can also be affected by honesty, free will and genuine mistakes. An interesting example of a very genuine mistake emerges in a finished version of a sketch made from life on Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. When Cook landed his ship on the North Island of New Zealand the spiralling geometric patterns that both followed and obscured the facial expressions of the Maoris that greeted them was an experience that was not just shocking but worth recording. The first drawings of these tattooed people of the Rongowhakaata were made by Sydney Parkinson at Poverty Bay. We know from the work of D R Simmons7 that the starting point of every Maori facial tattoo is a drawing that divides the face into four primary fields, whose boundaries intersect horizontally through the eyes and vertically through the nose. In addition there are four secondary design fields located at the edges of the boundaries of intersection and a fifth that is the outer edge of the face, as it travels around the hairline to the jaw. Within this structure primary fields are filled symmetrically and to use Simmons’ own words, ‘the areas of individual variation are thus at the edges or the junction points of the major design fields, along the centre line from chin to forehead, or along the junction between the forehead fields and the lower face fields, that is at the corners of the eyes and temples’.8 So although a Maori facial tattoo may appear at first sight to be symmetrical, significant and detailed information is carried in minor regional variations. On the first voyage Sydney Parkinson made two portraits of the same man, the first, a pencil drawing from life,9 the second a more finished pen and wash drawing developed from the first pencil sketch.10 The pencil sketch is an almost full face image showing only the left-hand side of what we know to be a full facial tattoo, with the right remaining untouched, presumably because Parkinson assumed the design was symmetrical. The more finished pen and ink wash drawing which was clearly constructed after the event, shows the subject in half profile looking in the opposite direction to the sketch it is based on, with the image that was on the left of the sketch now drawn onto the right side of the face. Knowing that engravers and artists often ‘flip’ images, this reversal at first sight doesn’t seem significant, but given what Simmons tells us about the fields of the face and how meaning is carried not so much through symmetry as asymmetry, we discover that this flip presents a problem. An important difference is that the tattoo is sketched for the left-hand side of the face, the side that depicts the father’s lineage. In the pen and wash sketch the designs are placed on the righthand side, the mother’s side. These two sides are rarely identical in the area between the upper cheek spiral and the jaw. So an assumption of symmetry made during an observation, became twisted, then monumentalised during a refining process and what the artist believed in good faith to be a better record turned into a less accurate record than the quick sketch it was drawn from.


146

5/8/08

16:20

Page 146


Artistic licence In chapter 2, Book 4 of Modern Painters, its author John Ruskin finds himself in the Swiss Italian valley of Faido confronted by the reality of a place he thought he knew through Turner’s drawings, but he simply doesn’t recognise it! Seeing the differences between the actual place and what he thought was Turner’s faithful record of it, Ruskin weighs the worth of the artist’s imagination against an ability to make accurate records, and in doing so finds a way out of his predicament by recasting him as a visionary, not simply an eye. It is always wrong to draw what you don’t see. This law is inviolable. But then, some people see only things that exist, and others see things that do not exist, or do not exist apparently. And if they really see these non apparent things, they are quite right to draw them; the only harm is when people try to draw non apparent things…11 His conclusion is that great artists should be permitted to blend the cerebral with the tangible while amateurs should resist the temptation because they will never improve on nature. With this as his starting point Ruskin goes on to reconcile the dilemma of the mis-match between place and record by coining the phrase, The Turnerian Topography.12 Purely topographical drawings, he argues, are those where nothing is moved and as such are simply records made by holding a mirror up to nature. The Turnerian Topography however records not just the place but also the place as either Turner thought others should see it, or possibly as he wanted to remember it. Ruskin tells us that Turner achieved his objective by moving, adding and enlarging mountains and if need be, felling trees. Within the Turnerian Topography a place may be rearranged for the benefit of the viewer. An example of Turner talking us through this process occurs when he records his thoughts on the view while looking down Lake Geneva towards Lausanne: …it is not possible now to obtain a view of the head of the Lake of Geneva without including the Hotel Byron – an establishment looking like a large cotton factory – just above the Castle of Chillon. This building ought always to be omitted, and the reason for the omission stated. So the beauty of the whole town of Lausanne, as seen from the lake, is destroyed by the large new hotel for the English, which ought, in like manner, to be ignored, and the houses behind it drawn as if it were transparent.13 Not all of Turner’s topographical drawings however, involve formal intervention or pictorial dramatization. A large number are simply records of the rise and fall of the terrain and as such have nothing much to do with invention, let alone creativity or art. They are quite simply accurate records of the way it was. The Turner Bequest has within it a large number of line drawings of this type made while Turner was ‘set’, so to speak, ‘on automatic’. These drawings simply translate the view into a line, a line that is almost continuous and made without erasures. To draw in this way, the recorder must lock their hand into a perfectly calibrated relationship with their eye, so that as the eye works its way across the landscape, the hand and pencil automatically follow, leaving the pencil’s trace. With questions of accuracy and invention still in mind, I would now like to turn to a place supposedly synonymous with truth – the drawings sailors learned to make in ships logs as part


5/8/08

16:20

Page 147


147

of their education as navigators – and the midshipman John Septimus Roe. The detailed drawings by twenty-year-old midshipman Roe, made from the troop ship Dick during May 1817 of the now familiar image of Rio and Sugar Loaf mountain, appear to be both accurate and well within, if not surpassing, any expectation of quality at that time. The art of navigation involved a variety of skills, notably sketching and mapping; to recognize and reproduce coastlines was an essential aspect of the surveyor’s task, providing a record of the ship’s voyage and enabling others to follow in their tracks. The coastal view was an integral component of maritime charts and logbooks, part of a common visual code rendering the maritime world intelligible to navigators.14 In an essay that uses Roe’s logbooks as a means of exploring some larger issues relating to observation, drawing and navigation, Felix Driver and Luciana Martins come to the conclusion that: Roe was no Humboldt…he was always under the eyes of superior officers, and constantly in search of their approval…Roe’s watercolours were both experiments in a way of seeing and attempts to secure a place in the world. Viewed in this way, rather than as finished products, they appear less triumphal and more fragile, drawing our attention to the vulnerability as much as the power of the cartographic eye.15 In 1867 John Ruskin published The Elements of Drawing, a teach yourself drawing package that at first sight may seem to be all wrapped up in seeing and making accurate records. By the end of it however it becomes clear that Ruskin also understands the importance of ‘vision’, but just cannot find a way of building it into the exercises. Mechanical aids This part of the story cannot conclude without an acknowledgement of the role mechanical aids and drawing machines have played in trying to override not just the vulnerability of the draftsman’s eye, but also in feeding both the draftsman’s and audience’s desire for greater realism and accuracy. During the 1830s when Fox Talbot dumped the camera lucida and returned to the less portable image produced by the camera obscura, his very logical conclusion was to also dispense with the pencil and replace it with light sensitive paper. A few years later Sir John F W Herschel, christened the process Photography, a word he derived from the Greek photos meaning light, and graphein to draw. So out of one man’s frustration with trying to learn to draw with a very difficult to use mechanical aid, came an invention that enabled us to mechanically harvest and chemically fix accurate images of the world. A discovery that changed our approach to recording the appearance of things forever. As the twentieth century unfolded, photography gradually replaced drawing as the primary means of making visual records. Cameras were taken on expeditions to record the topography, flora and fauna, to war and into space and finally every conceivable location to record both important and trivial moments.


148

5/8/08

16:20

Page 148


By the end of the twentieth century photography required no special skill and as a result gradually became not just a part of the artists’ and scientists’ tool kit but an integral part of the entire developed world’s social life. Today, most photographs remain eyewitness accounts, but just like drawings they can be improved and enhanced after the event. Because of photography’s ‘eye witness’ beginnings we tended, until the mid-twentieth century, to believe that photographs were direct quotes. Today however, because of our ability to intervene on outcomes, we tend not to believe in them in quite the same way. The eyewitness Captain John Marjoribanks’ preface to his poem Slavery: an essay in verse, demonstrates how clearly he understood the authority of eyewitness status. This little production…is not the offspring of hypothesis, the dream of theory, but the simple recital of what fell under the cognisance of my own senses; and may be considered as an additional link in the chain of evidence.16 In his introduction to this poem in The Poetry of Slavery Marcus Wood authenticates Marjoribanks’ position, but positions him not so much as a front line observer as a well-informed craftsman. Marjoribanks states in his preface that the verses were written in Jamaica, in October 1786, and adds that he has not changed a word since the establishment of the abolition societies. He adds that he is publishing the poem because it bears such a close relation to the facts that are laid out in Clarkson’s notorious ‘Abstract’, which bears a mass of eyewitness evidence against the slave trade. Marjoribanks also talks of how when living in the West Indies he recorded all of his experiences and reactions to slavery in poems which he set down in a commonplace book.17 While accepting a level of authenticity it seems fairly clear from the verse that he was not out there like a reporter in the field, notebook in hand, ducking the bullets, but at home reflecting on his experiences, sitting at a library desk managing to rhyme ‘gave’ with ‘enslave’. If this is true it raises an interesting question: if an eyewitness account is too heavily ‘packaged’ does it dilute the message? Not in the case of Majoribanks, Wood argues: Within the extensive footnotes the horrific factual details of slave torture and abuse are fully developed, Marjoribanks seems to feel an aesthetic reluctance to introduce the worst factual details into his elegant couplets.18 Just as the margins of the Bayeux tapestry bring dreams, visions and vernacular life to bear on the events leading up to the Norman invasion of England, so Marjoribanks’ footnotes bring torture and hard-to-live-with historical fact to his rolling rhyming couplets. A different kind of example of eyewitness reporting or recording, but one that also has its origin in words, turns up in North America in mid-nineteenth century Shaker culture. There are just under 200 known surviving Shaker Gift Drawings, all drawn by just 16 ‘Believers’ between 1839 and 1859. Usually drawn on quite ordinary paper in pen and ink, and on occasions


5/8/08

16:20

Page 149


149

filled in with watercolour, they are perhaps the smallest and most tightly defined category of drawings in existence. No maps, no charts, and no pictures or paintings, shall ever be hung in your dwelling-rooms, shops or office. And no pictures or paintings set in frames, with glass before them, shall ever be among you.19 The fact that these drawings (referred to by Believers as: sheets, lines, rewards, presents or tokens sometimes prefixed with the word ‘Sacred’) ever survived, let alone served any purpose within Shaker communities, seems to have remained obscure until about 1920. Everyday life for a Shaker was a ‘gift’, but it was the special events, originated by spontaneous spirit possession, that prompted the making of the Gift Drawings. Known not as artists or scribes but as Instruments, the thirteen women and just three men responsible for making these drawings were positioned within Shaker society as conduits or disinterested recording devices with the ability to record messages from the spirit world. Contemporary documents refer to the Gifts as ‘in the line of writing’,20 one supposes, to play down any pictorial or decorative connotations and build up their purpose as records. It seems that these Gifts were accepted even though they were clearly in contravention of the Shaker ordinance that forbade graven images because of the importance placed within the religion on what they recorded. The Narrow Path to Zion, was drawn in 1843 by Emily Babcock,21 a member of the Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York. Drawn in pen, brush and ink on eight separate sheets of paper each about 4 x 13 inches cut from a feint lined 8 x 13 inch exercise book, then joined to make a scroll, the resulting eight and a half foot long (just under 3 metres) drawing, is devoid of any obvious emotion and expression. The path is made by two tightly ruled parallel lines drawn through the centre of each page, that continue until half way through the final sheet, when it breaks into ‘salvation’ and turns into a rendering of the elevation stone block walls of Zion in elevation, surrounded by a very simple depiction of fruit trees, flowers and shining angels. On each side, the path has obstacles dotted along it at irregular intervals – neatly labelled emblematic depictions of obstructions the ‘traveller’ might come into contact with on their journey towards salvation. Like an elegant tool catalogue, tongs, a hammer, an axe, spears tomahawks and pincers are set out along the roadside. Scattered amongst them a second category of natural obstacles made up of predominantly stones and snakes. As a clearly drawn annotated map The Narrow Path to Zion raises two interesting questions; the first is how to categorise it as a drawing, the second how we check its accuracy. Clearly the only person qualified to comment on its accuracy is the person who dictated the image to Emily, so as we assume the narrator’s presence during the making of the drawing, we in turn assume its accuracy. The question of categorisation is, I suspect, more complicated. Because the drawing was made from another person’s account of what they understood as ‘an event’, it could quite logically be argued that it should be treated like Dürer’s drawing of the Indian Rhinoceros, as a record made by piecing together second hand information. If however we


150

5/8/08

16:20

Page 150


classify the event as something that can only be translated into an image through words, then Emily Babcock’s first hand access to the words make her effectively an eyewitness. Recording today As a way of tying up some loose ends, I would now like to reconsider the ground we have covered using some more up-to-date examples. Towards the end of the twentieth century, at a point when most artists and scientists had not only got the hang of but were becoming positively empowered by digital technology, David Hockney seemed to turn the Fox Talbot story on its head. Throughout his career Hockney consistently displayed an interest in both new developments in photography and new technology and embrace them as an important part of his work. Then, just as high resolution digital photography became accessible, he turned his technological clock back one hundred years and immersed himself in the laborious process of recording the appearance of things through a camera lucida. A decision difficult to reason other than as a means of making an activity he was finding too easy once again difficult. This is a possibility that artist Tom Phillips hints at in his review of Hockney’s book on the exploration of optics, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters: Hockney suggests that Ingres used a camera lucida (a prism on a stick that causes the scene in front of the artist to be projected on to his sheet of paper) for the initial blocking of features, refocusing to capture the outlines of the costume. I suspect that to an artist of Ingres’ fluency (and rigorous training) such an operation with its problems of movement and parallax would be an encumbrance.22 Drawing machines, which today I suspect must include the digital camera and computer, have clearly played their part in helping us make records. Whether it was to help us see further, more clearly, or to assist us in getting our marks on the paper in the right place, the purpose of all mechanical aids was first to enhance accuracy, then speed. Up until the invention of photography however, optics clearly didn’t draw, and behind every camera lucida and obscura there was always a hand struggling to capture a contour. Today that is no longer necessarily the case. The point and shoot camera and photo manipulation software together take care of the whole process, not just a part of it. With this thought in mind I would now like to return to the contemporary. Graham Gussin, (b. 1960 London), is an artist who has used new technology to make digitally generated drawings of what he calls ‘sonic collisions’. These are not hand-made but digitally rendered traces of the sound track from a pornographic film colliding with a sci-fi movie. He said of his records of sound meetings, these ‘soundscapes’: I was interested to make a translation from a physical/visceral dimension through a piece of technology, a kind of ‘what happens when body meets a machine?’ The resulting image is a map of activity, carrying stored information that could possibly be recalled. A recorded incident becomes a place.23 Whether it is Turner drawing the Alps or Roe the Brazilian coastline, new physical frontiers real or imagined clearly remain attractive subjects to record. In her essay, Conquering Space, Kate


5/8/08

16:20

Page 151


151

Macfarlane describes the drawings that the Californian artist Russell Crotty (b. 1956) made of what, for the time being, still seems to be the final frontier. The drawings are the result of long hours spent star-gazing and represent the ultimate escape from static conceptions of space. A fascination with the sky and outer space is universal and timeless and he chooses the traditional medium of pen and paper to record what he sees. Like Henri Michaux in his mescaline drawings, he is using finite marks to suggest the infinite. The hundreds of strokes of his ballpoint pen portray the composition of the universe…24 Crotty’s drawings are of course not accurate representations of the heavens. They are roughly and energetically drawn and are, in Ruskin’s terms, pure Crottian astronomy. Still in space, but this time from secondhand sources, is British artist Malcolm Dakin who writes about his drawing Very Distant Mountain Range: This drawing of a mountain range on Mars conveys my general passion for exploration of illusional qualities. I aim straight for that language of representation which, when translated onto the flat surface plane, embraces traditional landscape issues. The horizon might have been sand dunes and rocks: for me it became a mountain range. The ambiguities of this photograph generated experiences of time, perspective and distance during the intimate, small-scale process of its transformation into this drawing. I deliberately chose this image, offering as it does an extreme contrast with very recent ‘high-tech’ Mars photos. It is, in fact, a decaying Times Newspaper photo from August 1976, taken by the Viking 1 space probe, technologically a revelation back then but now rendered frail, mystical and nostalgic, not unlike listening through surface noise, to a celebrated 1942 Hollywood recording of Beethoven’s Archduke trio.25 Finally I would like to return to earth and consider a drawing that was made in a very similar way to most of the drawings we have already considered. Probably drawn not very long after the event, using notes and memories and a way of drawing familiar to the recorder and of its time. Katie Cuddon’s drawn-on-a-computer Mantelpiece Maps are probably most elegantly described by herself: As a babysitter for an agency I often find myself welcomed into the living rooms of strangers. I know little of their background or their characters, simply where the loo, tea and children are located within their home. By mapping their mantelpieces, the stage of domestic and social aspiration, I began to clarify the type of people they may be and provide a guide others can then read.26 A conclusion I started with the proposition that it is more likely that you will find the recorder staring at the mantelpiece, not so much wondering if they can draw it as struggling to find a strategy to make it interesting, than find them out there recording the appearance of exotic aliens. So when David Hockney developed his interest in the camera lucida, I suspect he simply needed to find a new challenge in drawing. When Septimus Roe added a flock of seagulls and a touch of light cumulus to his coastline records, he wasn’t so much putting the icing on the cake


152

5/8/08

16:20

Page 152


of accuracy, as exercising his right to personalize a naval record. So today in the absence of both an exotic and a culturally shared sense of a new frontier, recorders are consigned to work somewhere between the prosaic and their own imaginations. At one end of the scale is our instinct to record with photography our friends and families eating and playing, and at the other, our imaginations searching out new ways of making records and new things to record. Notes 1. W L Britton 77/175/1, Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, Two bound volumes containing works of art produced during his service with the 13th Hussars in India, 1901–1913, and with the ASC on the Western Front and in Salonika, 1914–1918. 2. Engberg, S. (2005). Chuck Close Self Portraits 1967– 2005, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, p. 119. 3. Siri Engberg / Madeleine Grynsztejn Interview (2005, July), Walker Art Gallery. 4. Price, D. (2003). Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, University of Michigan Press, p. 225. 5. Ibid, p. 307, footnote 40. 6. Rembrandt von Rijn, ‘Three Studies of an Elephant with Attendant’, 1637, Black Chalk, 23.9 x 35.4 cm, Albertina, Vienna. 7. Simmons, D. (1986). Ta Moko: The Art Of The Maori Tattoo, Auckland: Reed Publishing. 8. Simmons, D. (2006). Ta Moko: The Art Of The Maori Tattoo, Auckland: Reed Publishing, reprint, p. 25. 9. Parkinson, S. ‘Portrait of a New Zealand Man’, 1769, BM ADD. MS 23920 f56, British Library. 10. Parkinson, S. ‘New Zealand Man’, 1769, BM ADD. MS 23920 f55, British Library. 11. Ruskin, J. (1843). Modern painters, Book 4, Chapter 2, Part V, Of Turnerian Topography, s.2. 12. Ibid., Chapter 2. 13. Ibid., Chapter 2, Part V, Of Turnerian Topography, s.7. 14. Driver, F. & Martins, L. (2002). Visual Histories, John Septimus Roe and the Art of Navigation, c.1815–1830, History Workshop Journal, Issue 54, p. 145. 15. Ibid., p. 150. 16. Marjoribanks, J. (2003). Slavery: an Essay in Verse, in Wood, M. The Poetry of Slavery, An AngloAmerican Anthology 1764–1866, Oxford University Press, p. 195. 17. Wood, M. (2003). The Poetry of Slavery, An Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1866, Oxford University Press, p. 195. 18. Ibid,. p. 195. 19. Millennial Laws, or Gospel Statutes and Ordinances, 1855. 20. Wells, S & Youngs, I. (1842). Records Kept by Order of the Church entry 1/30/1842, NYPL, 7.191. 21. Babcock, E. ‘The Narrow Path to Zion’, 1843, Shaker Manuscripts collection, Manuscripts and Archive Division, New York Public Library. 22. Phillips, T. (2001, November 2). Review of Hockney, D. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, TLS, p. 12. 23. Gussin, G. (2002). Space Traversed, Drawing on Space, The Drawing Room, p. 12. 24. Macfarlane, K. (2002). Conquering Space, Drawing On Space, The Drawing Room, p7. 25. Dakin, M. with reference to his drawing ‘Very Distant Mountain Range’, 2005, Pencil and Graphite on Paper, 43.5 cm squ. The Jerwood Drawing Prize Catalogue 2005, p. 37 (of catalogue section, unpaginated). 26. Cuddon, K. with reference to her drawing ‘Mantelpiece Maps’, 2005, ink jet on paper, 72 x 97 cm. The Jerwood Drawing Prize Catalogue 2005, p. 33 (of catalogue section, unpaginated).


5/8/08

16:20

Page 153

10 DRAWING: TOWARDS AN INTELLIGENCE OF SEEING Howard Riley This chapter explores the notion of a pedagogy of drawing, and the alternative philosophical bases on which it might be built, in art schools today. A matrix is offered that charts functions of drawing, enabling users to put sense into drawings and to make sense out of drawings through a process of intelligent seeing. The chapter is primarily aimed at those who seek to teach drawing but it is equally provocative for those who seek to learn drawing. Using examples of recent studio practice the chapter offers reflection on student drawings, suggesting they reveal elements of an intelligence of seeing. It begins by sidestepping a contentious issue concerning definitions. Concept and percept The ethos of a drawing pedagogy for our times elaborated here is derived from the Hegelian concept of art: Hegel’s elaboration of a normative philosophy of art provides an opportunity for avoiding the difficulties in defining art per se, by exploiting the notion of a determination. The difference between a definition and a determination is explained by Stephen Bungay: A determination is not a definition because a definition excludes possible examples delimiting the object at the outset. A determination is a theory, a framework of universal explanation, which then must demonstrate its own explanatory power through its differences and its instantiation.1 Within such a framework of universal explanation, Hegel identifies a place for art: halfway between intellectual understanding and sensual experience. For Hegel, the distinguishing feature of art is the ‘sensual presentation of the Idea’.2 This is here construed in practical terms as a balance between conceptual intrigue; the degree to which a work can afford viewers fresh mental insights on the theme or concept to which it alludes, and perceptual intrigue; the degree


154

5/8/08

16:20

Page 154


to which the manipulation of the material qualities of the work might stimulate perceptual experiences which cause the viewer’s gaze to linger, and perceptual complacencies to be challenged. The degree of balance between conceptual intrigue and perceptual intrigue is here advanced as a useful criterion with which to assess qualities of drawing (as process) and drawings (as outputs). Studio tutors who understand and contribute to the development and application of theories of perception and communication through their own practice, be it writing or drawing, are best placed to devise, and encourage students to develop, drawing projects specifically designed to address the balance between conceptual intrigue and perceptual intrigue. Anyone involved in today’s art schools needs to recognise an expanding paradigm of contemporary theoretical bases from which to synthesise and analyse artwork – Wolfgang Iser’s3 recent book identifies no less than twelve. More than ever before, a burgeoning research culture demands of drawing tutors a much higher degree of articulacy in theoretical issues, as well as a fluency in the much more complex mix of materials, media and methods deployed in contemporary drawing practice, and visual arts practice in general. These days, in order to facilitate in students an intelligence of seeing,4 tutors need an awareness and understanding of the alternative philosophical bases from which a pedagogy of drawing may be formed. Underlying the history of change in the organisation of art education there is a history of change in the pedagogical methods adopted by teachers of drawing. The two histories may appear dissimilar, since the former is driven by the perceived educational needs of a social formation, the latter by a series of competing philosophical positions defined by ontological and epistemological parameters. Since the two are rarely explicitly discussed in art schools, few teachers of drawing are fully conversant with both. However, it is suggested here that there is a connection between the two histories, which is important for drawing tutors, since any philosophical attitude toward the teaching of drawing is constructed in response to an educational need, and the social nature of that educational need conditions philosophical attitude. A dialectical relationship is evident between the two. Alternative philosophical bases for the teaching of drawing Four broad philosophical bases, from which a variety of pedagogical methods may be derived, are identified in Figure 1, and discussed in terms of their relationships to the social contexts in which they flourish(ed). 1. Rationalist: Analytical objectivity ‘Objective drawing’ may be discussed in terms of an ontological position common to two philosophical bases: those of rationalism and empiricism, which share the belief that reality is a given absolute to be revealed either by reasoning or by empirical observation. Objective drawing is the term most often applied to drawings based on the Renaissance development of Euclidean geometry and the codification of artificial perspective. Such an ego-centric construction of geometry may be seen as the visual expression of social attitudes of that time, when the notion of the individual and their central position in the world was significant. An emphasis upon distance-values may be discerned. The notion of ‘accuracy’ when applied to drawing which assumes the drawer’s single eye at a fixed viewing point, is bound up with


5/8/08

16:20

Page 155

DRAWING: TOWARDS AN INTELLIGENCE OF SEEING |

Philosophical base

1

Ontological attitude to drawing

Rationalist

Epistemological attitude to drawing

Methodological approaches to the teaching of drawing

Analytical

Assumption of fixed viewer position. Application of anatomical knowledge, perspective techniques. Distance-values emphasised. The Academy approach.

‘OBJECTIVE’ Reality as absolute

2

Empiricist

Observational

Application of measurement techniques based on the natural sciences. Ruskin’s ‘innocent eye’. Coldstream’s ‘measured verification’. Haptic and proximal values.

3

Pragmaticist

Psychological

Exploration of emotional responses. Emphasises the ‘individual eye’. Distortion of drawn elements, to induce disturbance of emotional response (Kandinsky and Itten).

Semiological

Cross-cultural visual studies. Explicit experimentation with both viewer-centred and object-centred representations. Ecological relationships. Distance, haptic and proximal values.

‘SUBJECTIVE’ Reality as an individual experience

4

Constructivist

‘RELATIVIST’ Realities recognised as social constructions, including the above categories.

155

Figure 1: An illustration of the correlations between the four philosophical bases, their ontological and epistemological parameters, and key methodological approaches to the teaching of drawing.


156

5/8/08

16:20

Page 156


rationalist criteria of mathematical measurability and linear geometry. William Coldstream’s teaching at the Euston Road School epitomises this attitude. Ironically, ‘objective drawing’ has come to refer to drawings which are viewer-centred, a term derived from the investigations of David Marr5 into the recognition and representation of the spatial orientation of objects. In Marr’s terms, object-centred drawings do not take into account any specific viewing position. Although outside the scope of this discussion, it is interesting to note that John Willats6–7 has explained how young children make object-centred drawings, and progress to making viewer-centred drawings. 2. Empiricist: Observational objectivity In the eighteenth century period known as the Enlightenment, a growing confidence in the abilities of individuals to achieve knowledge of the world through empirical, scientific techniques became evident. Such an attitude of confidence in the scientific method was later adopted by John Ruskin8 in his teaching based on the concept of ‘the innocence of the eye’ and vision as ‘patches of different colours variously shaded’ to be simply recorded on the drawing surface in a one-to-one correlation. Thus, ‘accuracy’ was deemed to be measured by the degree of correlation between what was thought to be the retinal image, and what was drawn, with an emphasis upon recording the proximal and haptic values displayed in the scene. Betty Edwards9 theorised this position on the basis of neuro-biological research into the functions of the brain’s hemispheres. Her work was inspired by earlier research, e.g. that of Roger Sperry.10–11 The materials-based visual studies undertaken on the Bauhaus preliminary course under Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers may be broadly classified under this empiricist, observational objectivity heading. 3. Pragmaticist: Subjective expressionism The advent of mass-democratisation and mass-industrialisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may be cited as factors in the development of a European Modernist aesthetic. One consequence of this, during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a burgeoning consciousness of the dialectical relationship between the masses and the individual. Faced with such overwhelming mass-social forces, the psychological need for people to maintain and express an individual identity became crucial. Challenges to academic analytical objectivity gave rise to more pragmatic approaches to art production, based on the notion of the subjectivity of the individual eye. Reasoning, according to pragmatist philosophers such as William James,12 is dominated by personal and emotional factors. Reality, already challenged as a given absolute, was construed more as an individual subjective experience, to be expressed through non-objective, nonacademic means. Drawing that explored individual emotional expression was undertaken outside recognised academia, often through the artists’ atelier network, where private students would study under artists whose individuality was recognised. Distortion in drawn visual elements was deemed to express a disturbance of emotions. This belief applied to both figurative distortions, as in the examples of the German Expressionist groups Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, and to non-figurative, abstract work, in which the painting itself became subject-matter in its own right.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 157


157

Many approaches to the teaching of drawing in the twentieth century may be understood as amalgams of the empiricist and pragmaticist philosophical bases. For example, the basic courses developed by Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Tom Hudson and Harry Thubron in the 1950s which were to influence pre-diploma and foundation courses in British art colleges for so long, (and acknowledged by them as being influenced by Itten, Moholy-Nagy and Paul Klee) may be understood as a combination of empiricist observational objectivity and pragmaticist subjective expressionism. The reason for the longevity of these viewpoints, and the courses founded upon them, is that they appeared to resolve a pedagogical divide between fine art and design that had perturbed visual education in Western Europe since Renaissance times. Only now, in the midst of another social revolution colloquially termed the digital revolution, do such courses seem inadequate. 4. Constructivist: Relative constructivism There is a fourth philosophical base to consider. The constructivist believes that to understand the world one must interpret it. The development of structuralism in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the post-structuralist responses of the 1960s and 1970s have enabled the application of constructivist insights to a wide range of human communication activities, including drawing. A relativist ontological position may be aligned with an epistemology based on a semiological negotiation of meaning so as to justify a pedagogical methodology which addresses cross-cultural drawing practices. This methodology, through recognising the previous three, allows students to be increasingly conscious of their own and others’ social formations, and to be aware of how their drawing practice affects and is affected by their habits of perception and their conventions of visual representation. A constructivist basis is therefore considered the one with most potential from which to construct a pedagogy of drawing for the twenty first century. Criteria for judging the quality of research within a constructionist paradigm have been proposed by Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln.13 These criteria provide important pointers for those seeking to develop models of drawing education including drawing research, and are described as the five criteria of authenticity which possess a number of distinguishing characteristics: first, fairness, that is, a demonstrable openness between researcher and subjects (in this case, between tutor and students); second, ontological authenticity, or an indication of expansion in the range of the students’ personal ontological constructions; third, educative authenticity, or an indication of the students’ improved understanding of the ontological constructions of others; fourth, catalytic authenticity, an indication of the degree to which the students have been stimulated to action; and last, tactical authenticity, an indicator of how the students have been empowered to act beyond the confines of the research parameters. The identification and clarification of the four philosophical bases to the teaching and practice of drawing, and the clarification of a set of criteria with which to assess the quality of research into the practice and teaching of drawing, affords a further crucial step towards a new pedagogy of drawing which this chapter now goes on to discuss. That is, the social functions


158

5/8/08

16:20

Page 158


of drawing and the construction of a theoretical model which maps the whole domain of drawing as a matrix relating social functions to compositional choices. The social functions of drawing The process of communication may be understood through three main functions, operating simultaneously. First, to convey some aspect of our experience of the world; second, to express our attitude or mood regarding our experience, and also to position the receiver in terms of mood and attitude; third, to structure these two into a coherent, perceptible form. The first two functions are here labelled the Experiential and the Interpersonal. The third may be termed the Compositional function. The socio-linguist Michael Halliday14 first provided a model which identified the range of available choices – what Halliday termed a system – from which specific selections may be related to the functions of language in specific social contexts. Michael O’Toole15 has demonstrated the power of Halliday’s insights when they are applied to the analysis of painting. He offered a systemic-functional semiotic model of painting in which he substituted the labels Representational, Modal, and Compositional for Halliday’s original terms Ideational, Interpersonal, and Textual describing the three functions of language. Subsequently, O’Toole16 demonstrated the versatility of Halliday’s model by adapting it to theorise how sculpture and architecture may be understood in relation to their social contexts. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen17 have also used Halliday’s insights to illuminate the study of graphic design and other forms of visual communication. They have argued that in a literate culture, the visual means of communication may be construed as rational expressions of cultural meanings, amenable to rational accounts and analysis. The problem, they claimed, has been that literate cultures have ‘…systematically suppressed means of analysis of the visual forms of representation, so that there is not, at the moment, an established theoretical framework within which visual forms of representation can be discussed’.18 To further the work of these pioneers of a systemic-functional semiotics of the visual, here is proposed just such a theoretical framework within which visual forms of representation – specifically drawing – may be discussed. It is proposed that the theoretical framework may inform the production of drawings, and that it may also function as an instrument for evaluating qualitative shifts in students’ attitudes evident in their drawings. A Systemic-Functional Semiotic model of the domain of drawing Such a model is represented in Figure 2, where the Experiential function of drawing relates to a drawing’s ability to represent some aspect of our experience of the world, be it physical, emotional or imaginative. The Interpersonal function deals with how drawings may express the maker’s attitude to their experiences, and may position the viewer in terms of attitude and mood. The Compositional function deals with the systems of available choices of media, surfaces and marks that combine to make visible, to realise, the other two functions. The heading Levels of Engagement in the chart refers to the hierarchical layering within which engagement with the drawing is possible. The Matrix of Systems of Choices emphasises the systemic nature of the model: these ranges of available choices do not simply allow meanings to be negotiated at any single functional level, but affect all functions as a whole.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 159


FUNCTIONS OF DRAWING LEVELS OF ENGAGEMENT

INTERPERSONAL

EXPERIENTIAL

The drawing as displayed in context

Inter-textuality Systems of geometry; persp., orthographic, oblique, inverted persp., & topological. Size and format Framing devices Location options.

Systems of modality: mood, attitude, positioning: viewercentred, object-centred Public / private Intimate / monumental

Systems of theme: Physical, emotional, imaginative experiences, narrative, historical genre Realistic / abstract Interplay between objects, poses, events.

Sub-divisions of the drawing’s surface

Secondary geometry Gestalt relationships: horizontal, vertical, diagonal axes Proportional relationships Tonal passages (aerial persp.)

Systems of gaze: eye paths, focus points Dynamic / static Calm / excited Balanced / unbalanced.

Primary geometry Actions, poses, events, objects Awareness of distal and proximal perceptual values.

Relative size of marks Relative orientation of marks Relative position of marks Colour, tone and texture contrast – boundaries Pattern Rhythm False attachments.

Deep / shallow range of depth illusion Foreground / background range of positioning Stability / instability Scale Heavy / light

Distance between surfaces Edges: occlusion of one surface by another Direction Transparency / opacity of surfaces Atmospheric conditions Quality of light Time of day Awareness of haptic perceptual values Weight.

Size relative to picture surface Orientation relative to picture surface Position relative to picture surface Combination of surface texture and drawing medium Picture-primitives.

Psychological orientation Range of textural meanings: wet / dry; hard / soft; matt / gloss Denotation level of meaning.

Spatial depth Effects of gravity and other forces Effects of light and water upon material surfaces Scene primitives.

Combinations of drawn marks

A drawn mark

MATRIX OF SYSTEMS OF CHOICES

COMPOSITIONAL

MATRIX OF SYSTEMS OF CHOICES

Figure 2: Chart of functions of drawing and levels of engagement.

159


160

5/8/08

16:20

Page 160


Social meanings to do with the drawer’s and viewer’s experiences within the real world, and also the tenor of the relationship between drawer and viewer are all realised simultaneously through the systems of Theme, Modality and Geometry. Choices from these systems are realised as particular modes of drawing which are themselves realised as appropriate combinations of drawn marks upon a surface. In this chart, the varieties of geometries derived from the variety of ways of seeing, become some of the systems available to the Compositional function in order to realise – make visible and available for negotiation – the Interpersonal and the Experiential functions. Combinations of selections from the available systems of compositional choices allow the drawer to give visible material form to modulations of their physical, emotional and imaginative experiences of the world. Reciprocally, those combinations are modulated through and related to the viewer’s own experiences of the world. Thus the proposed model may facilitate both a means of putting sense into drawings, and making sense out of drawings. Crucially, the inclusion of the variety of levels of perception within the systems of choices available in the Experiential function acknowledges the variable foci of perception of both drawer and viewer. The model is the organising principle, which underpins the proposed five premises set out below, upon which a new curriculum for drawing might be based. It enables the design of drawing exercises which focus students’ attention upon specific problems of visual representation, as well as being a means of assessing the resultant drawings. For example, students who are able to derive the world-view of another culture from the analysis of its drawings become increasingly aware of ontological possibilities other than their own. Such awareness allows students to deconstruct their own, taken for granted, beliefs about perceptual matters, and affords the possibility of elaborating more sophisticated ontological constructs through drawings. Examples of such drawing exercises and student responses to them in the form of drawings are illustrated and evaluated at the end of this chapter. Five premises for a curriculum for drawing A future curriculum for the teaching of contemporary drawing practice could be premised upon five specific aspects of the two fundamental theoretical bases relevant to all visual art production: those of visual perception and visual communication: 1. Seeing and believing If students are to develop the capacities necessary to manipulate the balance between the conceptual and the perceptual in drawings and artworks in general, it is essential from the outset that studio projects are designed to encourage students to understand that perception is a) culturally-conditioned, and b) capable of being ‘tuned’ to different levels of attention. How we see the world is conditioned by what we believe. This is easily illustrated for students by showing the variety of ways that different cultures, with differing belief-systems about space and time, for example, have devised to represent the relationship in pictures. Once students are aware of their own ontological constructs, they become more flexible about recognising the validity of those of others, and also more capable of inventing alternative constructs which can inform the creative production of drawings, and ultimately the production of artworks in a variety of media.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 161


161

2. Levels of perception Three levels of information about the world can be identified in the structure of the light arrays arriving at the eyes.19 These may be explored in studio or elsewhere through drawing exercises designed to focus perceptual attention on the haptic level, at which information about surface qualities such as texture and colour may be accessed; the distal level, to do with information about relative distance, size, scale and depth of field; and the proximal level, which provides information about the overall pattern and rhythm relationships in the visual field as a whole. The honing of such an intelligence of seeing is crucial if students are to manipulate and control the degree of perceptual intrigue in their drawing, and ultimately in any material practice generating visual artwork. 3. Functions of drawing Alongside the exploration of perceptual values, students would be introduced to the theoretical bases of visual communication via either set projects or student-driven projects. Students understand at an early stage that a mental concept, an idea for an art work, needs to be transformed into visible, tangible form in order to be shared within an art world. The teaching challenge is to impart practical methods which can facilitate such transformation. O’Toole’s20 systemic-functional semiotic model of the visual arts has been adapted to provide a model of the domain of drawing illustrated in Figure 2, and this has proved to be a valuable aid both in structuring studio activities and empowering students’ practice.21 Such clear structuring of the drawing process may be imparted both through illustrated talks and one-to-one discussion over a student’s work. 4. Strategies of creative communication Roman Jakobson theorised the two poetic devices of metaphor and metonym as characteristic realisations of the two fundamental processes of selection and combination through which the compositional, or in Jakobson’s term, the poetic function of communication operates. Metaphor, refers to the substitution of one sign for another from the same paradigm; metonymy refers to the process whereby one sign becomes contiguously associated with another. The poetic function foregrounds the equivalences between visual elements of a composition, producing visual pattern, rhythm, symmetries and harmonies (or their opposites), which draw attention to the look of the work. In Jakobson’s22 famous phrase: The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. An understanding of the power of these devices as vehicles to make visual equivalences of conceptual ideas will surely empower students’ practice. Other rhetorical tropes can also be explored to good effect in drawing practice, and so oxymoron, irony and pun might usefully be introduced and illustrated in visual work. 5. Drawing as a process of transformation Ultimately, drawing practice is construed as a process of transformation: ■ Transformation from concept or percept to artwork via systems of geometry, lens-based and/or time-based media, or three-dimensional materials: the tradition of representationalism.


162

5/8/08

16:20

Page 162


■ Transformation of individual perceptions into social communication: the tradition of expressionism. ■ Transformation of cultural values into material form: the tradition of art as socio-political comment, or, more contemporaneously, intervention in the social process through sitespecific installations, performances, multi-media presentations, all of which might incorporate drawings, and would certainly be enhanced by a degree of visual vibrancy facilitated by an intelligence of seeing developed through the practice of drawing. Upon these five premises it has been feasible to pilot a teaching programme for a course in contemporary drawing practice at first year BA level, examples from which are illustrated below. The challenge is to persuade colleagues – both in-house academics and visiting practitioners – that the time has come for more integration of perception theory and communication theory within the drawing curriculum. Illustrative examples of student work Figure 3 is presented as evidence of the catalytic and tactical authenticity of the pilot project. This drawing is generated from a series of studies carried out during a project designed to explore Levels of Perception. Analysed at the level of Sub-divisions of the Drawing’s Surface, the drawing displays a high degree of intelligence of seeing, affording the viewer ample information about textural qualities of the various plants represented, as well as strong illusions of depth. The Golden Section proportion of the vertical and horizontal axes which sub-divide the drawing’s surface, and the smoothness of the eye-line from the focal point of the intersection of those axes, the Bird of Paradise flower at left foreground, through to the complexity of forms at

Figure 3: Drawing by Amanda Maria.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 163


163

right background, may be read by the viewer as metaphor for the complex harmonies to be found in the structures of natural forms. A project on the theme Functions of Drawing afforded an opportunity for students to consolidate their understanding of the three functions of drawing introduced in illustrated talks. In particular, attention was drawn to the possibilities of positioning the viewer in terms of a particular mood, attitude, or sensibility which students may wish to convey about their experiences of the subject matter under observation. Such positioning may be facilitated by the drawer’s selection and combination of appropriate marks and compositional devices within the drawing. One of the considerations suggested to students in the project brief concerned the vulnerability of the unclothed life-model within the potentially harmful environment of the drawing studio. Figure 4 illustrates one student’s attempt to communicate his empathy with such vulnerability. At the level of engagement The Drawing as Displayed in Context, the viewer is positioned close to the foot of the drawing-donkey which supports the life-model, within reach of the slippers acting both as a focal point and an entry point into the compositional space. At the next level of engagement, Sub-divisions of the Drawing’s Surface, the slippers act as a full stop to the diagonal axis formed by the upper leg of the drawing-donkey, and the dash-lines which pierce the model’s head and connect to the top edge of the drawing. Another diagonal axis, an even stronger one,

Figure 4: Drawing by Adrian John.


164

5/8/08

16:20

Page 164


emanates from the same top connection point, grazes the model’s back, and pierces the floor close to the slippers. The angle of this second axis is repeated across the surface of the whole drawing, at different scales of length and tonal density, representing one leg of the tripods supporting the easels. This combination of sharp, angular elements appears cutting across the thighs of the model, and cutting into the model’s right elbow, shoulder, and back. At the level of each drawn mark, the consistency of sharp-edged linearity throughout every single mark not referring to the model pointedly contrasts with those marks that do refer to human flesh; indeterminate soft smudges of tone. At each level of engagement, compositional decisions make visible the empathetic experience of the drawer, and invite the viewer to share the feeling of such experience. The drawing is presented here as evidence of the catalytic authenticity of the pilot research project, since it may be argued that the stimulus of the drawing programme enabled the student to articulate an empathetic response. Figure 5 illustrates a response to a project exploring the theme Seeing and Believing, in which the robust solidity of a large-scale (six feet square) heavy gauge drawing paper is completely rendered with graphite stick. Engaging with this work at the level of A Drawn Mark, each hand-made scribble of the graphite is standardised in terms of size and orientation, so that the rough surface texture of the paper is

Figure 5: Drawing by Russell Mags.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 165


165

compressed by each mark to produce a polished sheen of graphite. The viewer is able to interact visually with this surface, since any movement of viewing position sets off a shimmer of surface reflection and illusions of spatial depth. Upon this shimmering surface, four totemic columns have been stamped from a wooden plank routed with patterns of linear marks. (The verb to rout refers to the facility for making marks upon a surface – a facility that is ignored in the hallowed-but-flawed basis of a well-rounded education, the ‘3 R’s’. It might well replace wRiting, so that the 3R’s become Reading, Routing and ‘Rithmetic, acknowledging the importance of visualcy, as well as literacy and numeracy). The printing ink mixed with sand produces a completely matt finish in stark contrast to the graphite’s sheen, with the result that the irregular patterns of linear marks appear to dance upon the matt surface. The liveliness of the light, small-scale irregular linear marks contrasts with the largescale, heavy, regular rhythm of the four columns spaced evenly across the whole drawing.

Figure 6: Drawing by Nigel Williams.


166

5/8/08

16:20

Page 166


Engaging with the drawing as a whole, the viewer may discern another contrast: between the intimacy of each hand-cut mark and the (relative) monumentality of scale of the overall work. This drawing is visual evidence of the possibilities of how viewers’ conventional understanding of drawing as a static medium might be challenged through its perceptually-intriguing qualities. It is a drawing which articulates visual oppositions, one which invites viewers to ponder upon the arbitrariness of their own cultural conventions, and the relationship between belief systems and how they affect perception. Such direction of visual research sustained the student well beyond the period of the Seeing and Believing project. It is presented here as evidence of the catalytic and tactical authenticity of the pilot teaching programme. The drawing illustrated in Figure 6, made whilst exploring the Drawing as a Process of Transformation theme, evolved from the student’s study of projective geometry systems which transform the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. An awareness that systems of geometry usually assumed a flat plane of projection stimulated inquiry into the possibility of projecting onto a non-flat surface. Discussion around the notion of a ‘cone of vision’ implicit in artificial perspective geometry developed into the idea of inventing a system for geometrically projecting what was noticed in the cones of vision onto a cone of projection. A paper cone was duly constructed and arranged at eye level, apex pointing to eye. With one eye closed, so as to flatten the cone perceptually, the student proceeded to mark the cone at appropriate distances from the eye, the marks representing the salient scene primitives (corners and edges). When the paper cone (or pyramid, to be precise) was laid out as a surface development, an original projection system was revealed. Here is evidence of the ontological and educative authenticity of the pilot project. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, in the heat of the digital revolution, make no mistake about the continuing relevance of drawing. Not for its own sake, nor for any notion of accurate representation of the appearance of things, but for its unique ability to nurture an intelligence of seeing which informs the widest range of visual art practices, from painting, performance or installation to the multi-modal possibilities of digital technology yet to be explored. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Bungay, S. (1987). Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 25. Graham, G. (1997). Philosophy of the Arts. An Introduction to Aesthetics, London: Routledge, p. 174. Iser, W. (2006). How to Do Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Riley, H. (2001). The Intelligence of Seeing, PhD thesis, University of Wales. Marr, D. (1982). Vision. A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information, New York: W.H.Freeman. Willats, J. (1977). How Children Learn to Draw Realistic Pictures. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Vol. 29, pp. 367–382. Willats, J. (1997). Art and Representation. New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, New Jersey: Princeton U.P. Ruskin, J. (1857). The Elements of Drawing and the Elements of Perspective London: Dent, p. 3. Edwards, B. (1981). Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, London: Souvenir.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 167


167

10. Sperry, R. (1968). Hemisphere Disconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness. American Psychologist, Vol. 23. 11. Sperry, R. (1973). Lateral Specialisation of Cerebral Function in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres. In McGuigan, F.J. and Schoonover, R.A. (eds.) The Psychophysiology of Thinking, New York: Academic Press, pp. 209–229. 12. James, W. (1943). Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, London: Longmans. 13. Guba, E. and Lincoln, Y. (1989). Fourth Generation Evaluation, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 14. Halliday, M. (1973). Explorations in the Functions of Language, London: Edward Arnold. 15. O’Toole, L.M. (1990). A Systemic-Functional Semiotics of Art. Semiotica, Vol.82 Nos. 3/4, pp. 185–209. 16. O’Toole, L.M. (1994). The Language of Displayed Art, London: Pinter Press. 17. Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge. 18. Ibid. pp. 20–21. 19. Gibson, J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston Mass: Houghton Mifflin. 20. O’Toole, L.M. (2005). Pushing Out the Boundaries: Designing a Systemic-Functional Model for NonEuropean Visual Arts. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 85–99. 21. Riley, H. (2002). Mapping the Domain of Drawing, International Journal of Art and Design Education Vol.23, No.3, pp. 258–272. 22. Jakobson, R. (1958). Closing statement at the conference on Style in Language: Linguistics and Poetics. In Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) (1960) Style in Language, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, p. 358.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 168


5/8/08

16:20

Page 169

11 DIGITAL DRAWING, GRAPHIC STORYTELLING AND VISUAL JOURNALISM Anna Ursyn Does an artist who works exclusively in digital media need to possess ability for drawing? This question is already quite an old one but it still haunts our attempts to devise relevant art and design education today. Some hold that developing skills with computer software packages eliminates tedious hand-drawing exercises in much the same way that a facility for typing (on a computer or a typewriter) eroded the need to develop calligraphy skills. Others counter with the opinion that only through traditional drawing practices can students develop essential cognitive abilities, particularly the hand-eye coordination that is so frequently cited as lying at the core of art and design ability. Whichever side one’s sympathies lie it is a fact that advances in software have allowed artists to create levels of complexity in their drawing works that rival, but not necessarily replicate, the complexity of traditional practices. For this reason, some in education encourage students to fully immerse themselves in digital technology at the expense of following more traditional routes to skills development. This chapter examines the two sides of the debate and suggests that drawing as ‘storytelling’ might provide a useful bridging phenomenon between traditional and new drawing practices. Visualisation in a digital environment Do we think in pictures? Well, where communication is required we take for granted that including images with text can, in many situations, outperform text alone. Visualisation can increase our ability to convey, compare, evaluate – in short, to think.1–2 Increasingly, the data we generate is too complex to read and some form of information visualization is required in order to understand it. There have been many stimuli to the huge growth in information visualisation, including usability issues such as the need for interactivity and the sheer volume of data we are presented with. In fact, some hold that our cognitive ability to undertake visualisation has significantly shaped the tools we have made. As Ittelson suggests ‘the ability to perceive objects and events that have no immediate material existence made possible the visualisation and creation of tools’.3


170

5/8/08

16:20

Page 170


It seems difficult to argue against the essential role of aesthetics in visualisation. Some artists map numbers into sensory experience. For example, Evans4 creates visualizations of sounds and the sonification of images into sounds, thus the visual rendition of a music form might be considered music for the eyes. But to what extent is visual competence a prerequisite for attaining aesthetical solutions in visualization? Lengler5 suggests that a visual competence depends on a balance between digital art literacy and technological literacy. Others define a broader visual literacy that facilitates an expressing of concepts through visual means and a constructing of meaning by integrating visual messages. And what of the role of drawing in this? There are many digital image makers who don’t draw; who scan and copy items or use Internet resources, and then apply filters to transform them into line drawings. We can see this trend in animations and feature films. Has the meaning of drawing been totally changed in electronic media, where images are interactive, linked, and open-ended? James Faure Walker6 suggests that for drawing makers, and indeed for many people, there exists both a virtual connection to the world and, at the same time, a physical isolation from it. He defines important differences between the pre- and post-digital in terms of changes in the speed of working, approaches to the outputs as art objects, and changes in the philosophical perspective. Questions for those engaged in drawing research today might include: to what extent our drawing outputs should rely on the foundations provided by technological developments, to what extent has digital art defined its own specific language and what might contribute to the emerging field of aesthetic computing? Paul Fishwick defines aesthetic computing as ‘the study of artistic, personalized, formal model structures in computing’.7 For him, aesthetic computing goes beyond representation and events in technology. The digital environment is not only the province of the artist. Scientists and engineers produce outputs for analyzing and disseminating information in a visual form and analysts construct realtime portfolio textures for visualising financial data. Meta-search engines employ visualisation to provide aggregated results visually. Professionals of various fields display their data in the form of web-accessible maps with icons and relations among the sites as labeled paths.8 Visualisation techniques often include small multiple drawings that represent sets of data through miniature pictures, to reveal repetition, change and pattern, and facilitate comparisons. And once comparisons have been made other images can provide the important messages, for example, Chernoff cartoon faces have, from the 1970s, evolved into a tool such that a smiling face represents a positive state in visualized data.9–10 But such formal approaches to representation through digital drawing are only part of the story. Game-players construct avatars, visual representations of themselves, their friends or celebrities for use in Wii Nintendo games and a host of other applications. Also there has been a rapid increase in the use of visual, as opposed to written, blogs to support networks of people who create animated stories, games, cartoons, or digital doodles. Ken Bernstein, an artist who favours automatic drawing, created doodle-based artwork on a wall that insulates residential buildings from traffic noise and dust on a busy street in Boulder, Colorado. According to Bernstein,11 automatic drawing follows a sensibility rather than a thought process. And it’s this sensibility we need to develop in the digital environment. But blog doodles are only one amongst many forms of graphic representations used in networks. Short digital films and photographs found on sites such as YouTube (www.youtube.com) offer us ‘stories’ with


5/8/08

16:20

Page 171

DIGITAL DRAWING, GRAPHIC STORYTELLING AND VISUAL JOURNALISM |

171

drawings incorporated in their constructions.The use of drawings in these environments is still emerging and it remains to be seen how written, verbal and drawn communication might offer some symbiosis for expression and communication in virtual worlds. The spectrum of the roles that drawing can assume has broadened considerably with technological developments in online communication and digital drawing tools. Sophisticated web page tools, digital imaging, scanning, e-mail, blogging, wireless communication, programming, electronic writing, animation, virtual environments, and compressed or streamed video may now be intertwined in the making of drawings. It has become more difficult to distinguish what Sullivan has termed ‘the line between analogue and digital’12 as well as to see a distinction between physical and virtual forms – creations of mind, programs, data structures or information networks. The visual quality of digital images depends upon the single points of projected light in an image – the pixels and their intensity. The number of pixels in an image, its resolution, is a key determinant. Early computer-generated drawings were made without the possibility of seeing the consequence of the algorithm, the programming, before printing it. With the development of tools such as graphic tablets and increased processor capabilities there were improvements to user interaction and drawings acquired some of the characteristics of analogue drawing. The introduction of wireframe rendering facilitated the creating of three-dimensional drawings, which was further enhanced by developments in virtual illumination, shading, and assigning depth. At the same time, new digital manipulation software enabled artists to exploit photographs as source material in the making of drawings. Drawing returned to being a kind of modeling through the use of 3D software that facilitated rendering, texture mapping, changing light source, shading, ray tracing for creating effects such as chrome and glass, or wrapping a two-dimensional image onto 3D geometry. The traditional boundaries between drawing in two dimensions and building in three dimensions have now become significantly blurred and iterations across the divide are now common in the practices of artists and designers. Drawing as storytelling Drawings can have strong storytelling properties. By adding visual storytelling to traditional drawing, drawing makers become immersed in a fourth dimension, wandering across time and space. Storytelling by drawing pictures is about delivering emotions; visceral, emphatic, or voyeuristic. When we paint colors on a computer screen we evoke emotional responses from the audience. Animation in storytelling allows us to slice through the time dimension to enhance dramatic actions, show suspenseful obstacles, and build tension before resolving a conflict. Figures and characters offer flexibility in the communication path through transformations or by inducing interactivity. Drawing as storytelling can act as a crucial interface between the visual and the verbal. We might see this capacity in sketches that serve as a starting point to create manga, blogs, and even product and architectural schemes. Such drawings evoke personal experience in the mind of the viewer through received and perceived information. Thus the viewer becomes the cocreator of the art. As Broadhurst13 points out, digital storytelling can coexist with other


172

5/8/08

16:20

Page 172


techniques such as video, performance (with physical and virtual interaction), visual surveillance, motion tracking, and artificial intelligence. Stories require a ‘container’, as every story needs to be told differently for each medium, be it a graph, animation, web, manga, film, theatre, radio, podcast, or comic. The writer needs to tell a story to match the framework, timing and technical requirements of each medium and more and more attention is being given to the narrative part of a visual display. Digital storytelling is becoming an important factor in managing communication in business, education, and training. Teaching drawing and computer graphics is now part of the collaborative interdisciplinary curricula for many art and computer science undergraduates. For this reason, an Internet studio course ‘Storytelling for New Media’ has been devised for students participating in the Art & Technology program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Semiotics: metaphor, symbol and icon How can digital drawing enhance our means to convey semiotic content? Many view digital technologies as helpful in translating old and new information in visual messages, and through using drawings to present abstract concepts. The creation of digital visualisations or simulations often involves the use of symbols, metaphors and/or caricatures as synthetic signs that can make a message sharper. Humour may well play an additional role in this. Of course, metaphors are to be found in literature and music as well as the visual arts. They tap into cognitive abilities to abstract the essence of an idea. Many believe that musical analyses are not scientific explanations, but metaphorical ones. For example, one can envision a continuum encompassing sound qualities; silence, sound, and noise, represented as a grayscale. According to Desain and Honing,14 metaphors in music theory inform and shape the ways we theorize about music. In music theory, notions of rhythm, timing and tempo are often associated

Figure 1: Matthew Tolzmann, Two Directions for Two Trombones. The upper and lower outlines indicate to the musicians where changes are to be made in pitch and volume.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 173


173

Figure 2: Anna Ursyn, ‘Rats’. Drawings of rats, first from observation (on the left side) then sketches from drawings (on the right side) served for designing a mockup for the pages of a book.


174

5/8/08

16:20

Page 174


with physical motion (like walking). But it is the phenomenon of visual metaphor that concerns us here. While all metaphors support the development of an understanding of an abstract or unfamiliar domain through another, more familiar, concrete domain, visual metaphors uniquely assist in the organizing and structuring of information, facilitating a recreation of knowledge in the mind of the receiver through making concepts visible.15 ‘Two Directions for Two Trombones’ created by Matthew Tolzmann, is a visualisation for trombone playing. A scanned, transformed, and mirrored drawing of a silhouette of downtown Denver served as a guide for playing two trombones. The outline of the image served as a guide for music improvisation directing the changes in pitch (upper outline) and volume (lower outline). Symbols – highly abstracted drawings that attempt no realistic representation – may support developing systems of ideas, recognizing particulars, and discerning relations and concepts. By exploiting symbols and metaphors we may render complex data more transparent, holding the user’s attention through a distinction between signals and their referents. Some symbols, such as the depiction of ying-yang, can convey messages of which we are not always conscious but there is some consensus that we are also programmed to respond to other signals that might indicate, for example, danger. A drawing’s content may also be approached iconically. There is no question that iconography has been exploited by product design and marketing, as they seek to imbue products with both the emotion and poetry of a particular material culture. Tufte’s16 principle that product semantics should ‘add clarity and add detail’ can be seen in numerous design drawings that reveal designers attempts to integrate the iconography of a concept with a process of refining and clarifying; the detail and the whole emerging organically and symbiotically. Drawing can be a research tool in itself; it shows how something grows or declines, and how a thing might act on its surroundings. Drawing is, in essence, a modelling tool. When creating mockups during, for example, the design of pages for a book, sketching can assist the extraction of the core requirement, revealing the essential and paring away the irrelevant. Figure 2 illustrates this process. Visualizing abstract notions Being creative requires a capacity for abstract thinking and drawing can provide an excellent tool to support this. Abstraction may refer to any simplification of forms, symbols and words. The process might include organising knowledge, looking for relationships, identifying irreducible properties and erasing similarities and characteristics (visible or semantic) that are not crucial. Hayakawa17 defined a hierarchical system of abstraction, taking the form of a ladder of levels, and illustrated by a cow named Bessie. From general physical reality, through perceived reality and the characteristics abstracted for a common cow (referring to, for example, ‘livestock’, ‘farm assets’, ‘general asset’, and coming to ‘wealth’) he attained a high level of abstraction. This ladder was used by Ben Hobgood, an interdisciplinary student of computer science and art at the University of Northern Colorado, to devise a graphical representation to assist the learning of the C++ computing language (see Figure 3). It was designed to show a learner with little or no programming experience how the basic structure of C++ works by connecting its user-defined elements with visual symbols. First, he exploited the ‘abstraction ladder’ relationships and selected irreducible properties of the cow. Next, he


5/8/08

16:20

Page 175


175

Figure 3: a, b, and c. Ben Hobgood, illustrations from C++ Cow Program.

visualized abstract data perceived in a simple C++ program that asks for the pounds of food that one wishes to feed the cow, and which then reveals how many steaks can be provided in return. (a) Example of a C++ header file or class declaration. This is a declaration of the class called ‘cow,’ or more formally a ‘class declaration.’ (b) Example of a C++ class definition, cow.cpp of the class called ‘cow’ that was declared above in the cow.h file. This file describes exactly how the abstract data type ‘cow’ works. (c) Example of a C++ file that uses the cow data type. The abstract data type ‘cow’ declared in cow.h, and defined in cow.cpp is used as a data type to collect information about the cow class (called Betsy, a black-and-white cow), betsy.cpp. Becoming a visual journalist With the advance of new media, there are many new and emerging approaches to drawing that are waiting for research and many questions arise. Are traditional approaches to drawing still valid given new digital tools? In what ways do new technologies offer new opportunities


176

5/8/08

16:20

Page 176


for producing visual outputs and how might these support future design activity? As with earlier developments the marketers are not slow to spot the opportunities. The implications for imaging and representations in a competitive consumer marketplace are immense. Take for example the emerging field of ‘infomercials’ – the conveying of both information and commercial in one hybrid form. The efficiency of static or dynamic messaging depends on the period of viewing the image (looking and seeing often mean two different things). For example, your eye may note a poster on a bus stop, taking milliseconds to decide whether your visual interest in an ad’s design merits further exploration, for example, reading the copy. Creating meaningful outputs is increasingly vital to organizations and increasingly these depend on visual representations. A capacity for controlling, manipulating and devising appropriate representations is increasingly the function of business and industry and the ability to draw may lie at the root of this. For a company producing knives the task becomes how to build-in appropriate connotations while designing-out the unwanted ones; is a particular knife intended for cutting meat, cutting onions etc? What are the cues that present associations of knives with violence? The technical means of representations, the sophisticated software and hardware, are no more than tools which must be guided by a human understanding of expression and meaning in the forms created. There are good reasons for cooperative research involving both artists and scientists. As discussed above there are clear priorities in design but in art too drawings inspired by emerging and opaque science-related concepts may uncover and convey meaning. In my own field, research has become part of an interdisciplinary collaborative curricula between computer science and art. It is supported by artists and computer graphics specialists producing outputs that provide research-oriented experiences that engage students from varying disciplines.18 Can anybody create digital artwork? There are a growing number of computer scientists who become novices in art, as well as artists who learn programming. With the vanishing boundaries between the various ways of delivering information (be it through the book, newspaper, TV, video, blog or web), a more important priority emerges: that is, the importance of everyone having skills of ‘visual journalism’. Visual journalism applies the fundamentals of verbal and visual communication in a multi-media world, emphasizing form as well as content for effective storytelling and providing transition from the traditional to the verbal-combinedwith-visual working style. Some hold that skills in visual journalism should include skills of drawing. However, it is not so clear what skills and knowledge are necessary and how it should be taught. According to the existing trend for media-merging, online journalists and TV reporters work on multiple levels; with stories, interactives, audio, images, photos, and video. Digital storytelling in the form of text, images, and animated graphics is their business. It is also increasingly becoming ours. Some in journalism hold that to be effective the verbal tradition of journalism must fully integrate the visual, acknowledging how audiences perceive and think visually as well as verbally. The explosion of electronic media means we all have to respond to this challenge.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 177


177

Notes 1. Eppler, M. & Burkhard, R. (2004). Knowledge Visualization. Available from URL: www.knowledgemedia. org/modules/pub/view.php/knowledgemedia-67. (Accessed 5th November 2007). 2. Eppler, M. (2006). Toward a Pragmatic Taxonomy of Knowledge Maps: Classification Principles, Sample Typologies, and Application Examples in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Visualization, pp. 195–204. 3. Ittelson, W. (2007). The Perception of Nonmaterial Objects and Events, Leonardo, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 279–283 4. Evans, B. (2007). Artist Statement, Electronic Art and Animation Catalog, A Computer Graphics Annual Conference Series, a publication of ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 264–265. 5. Lengler, R. (2006). Identifying the Competencies of ‘Visual Literacy’ – a Prerequisite for Knowledge Visualization, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV’06), pp. 232–236. 6. Faure Walker, J. (2006). Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 7. Fishwick, P (ed). (2006). Aesthetic Computing, Leonardo Book Series, Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press. 8. Mostafa, J. (2005). Seeking Better Web Searches, Scientific American, Vol. 292, No.2, pp. 67–73 9. Loizides, A. & Slater, M. (2001). The Empathic Visualisation Algorithm (EVA): Chernoff faces re-visited in Conference Abstracts and Applications, Technical Sketch SIGGRAPH 2001, p. 179. 10. Loizides, A. & Slater, M. (2002). The Empathic Visualisation Algorithm (EVA) – An Automatic Mapping from Abstract Data to Naturalistic Visual Structure in Proceedings of the iV02, 6th International Conference on Information Visualisation, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE, pp. 705–712. 11. Bernstein, K. (2005). Expression in the form of our own making, in Proceedings of the Special Year in Art & Mathematics, A+M=X International Conference, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, pp. 5–9. 12. Sullivan, K. (2000). Between Analogue and Digital, Computer Graphics, Vol.34, No.3, p. 5. 13. Broadhurst, S. (2005). Interaction, reaction and performance: the Jeremiah project, in Proceedings of the Special Year in Art & Mathematics, A+M=X International Conference, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO, pp. 12–16. 14. Desain, P. & Honing, H. (1996). Physical motion as a metaphor for timing in music: the final ritard in ICMA, Proceedings of the 1996 International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco, pp. 458–460, 15. Lakoff, G. (1990). The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on Image-Schemas? Cognitive Linguistics, Vol.1, No1, pp. 39–74 16. Tufte, E. (1992). Envisioning Information, 3rd printing with revision, Cheshire, Connecticut, Graphics Press. 17. Hayakawa, S. (1990). Language in Thought and Action, 4th edn, New York: Harcourt Brace. 18. Lewis, M. Palazzi, M. Parent, R. Tarantino, M & Zuniga-Shaw, N. (2006). Designing Collaborative Interdisciplinary CG Experiences in the Curriculum, in ACM/SIGGRAPH Educators Program Panel, Full Conference DVD, a publication of ACM/SIGGRAPH.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 178


5/8/08

16:20

Page 179

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Angela Anning Dr Angela Anning is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Leeds and a member of the National Evaluation of Sure Start team at Birkbeck College, London. She taught in Further Education and secondary schools before training to be an early years teacher. She taught for many years in nursery and infant classrooms in inner city Manchester and gained a headship of a Nursery/Infant School in Salford. She moved into Higher Education where she trained primary teachers and launched a Childhood Studies degree. Her curriculum interests are English and Art and Design. She has published extensively on early childhood education, children’s services. A particular research interest is children’s drawing. Angela Eames Dr Angela Eames is an artist and educator in digital imaging. In her drawing practice she focuses on the interplay between the material and the virtual – on those aspects of drawing which continually connect between our past and our future. Angela was amongst the first fine artists to engage in the electronic realm, beginning to work with computer imaging as early as 1987 and has pursued a relentless drawing path, toward the establishment today of a place in higher education for drawing (implementing BA and MA Drawing courses at Camberwell College of Arts). She was content coordinator for the BAFTA nominated and BIMA award winning ‘Seeing Drawing’ DVD project. She has delivered papers at many conferences and exhibited her work internationally and nationally. Stephen Farthing Professor Stephen Farthing RA is Rootstein Hopkins Chair in Drawing at the University of the Arts, London. He studied at Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London. His extensive teaching career includes Canterbury College of Art (1977–79), the Royal College of Art (1980–85), Head of Painting (1985–87) and Head of Department of Fine Art (1987–89) at West Surrey College of Art and Design. From 1990 he was Ruskin Master at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Professorial Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford until 2000.


180

5/8/08

16:20

Page 180


Stephen Farthing has exhibited extensively, including the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1989, South America and Japan. In the John Moores Liverpool Exhibitions he was a Prize Winner in eight years between 1976–99. He was Artist in Residence at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1989, elected Royal Academician in 1998 and in 2000 was made an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 2000, Duckworth published, The Intelligent Persons Guide to Modern Art. He was executive director of the New York Academy of Art from September 2000 until August 2004. James Faure Walker James Faure Walker is a painter, digital artist, and writer, living in London. He studied at St Martins (1966–70) and the Royal College of Art (1970–72). He has exhibited widely in Europe and the USA. In 1998 he won the Golden Plotter at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany. His Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer, was published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006. He co-founded Artscribe magazine in 1976, and edited it for eight years. In 2002 he was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the AHRB. He is a Research Fellow at SCIRIA, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. His work can be found at www.dam.org/faure-walker and http://commentart.com/ artists/display/10050. Steve Garner Dr Steve Garner is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University. He chairs a second level course titled Design and Designing and contributes to courses on web design and digital photography. He is currently supervising 3 PhD students. Previously he was Programme Leader for BA and BSc courses in Industrial Design and Technology at Loughborough University. Research interests include the use of representations – particularly sketches – in design, the relationship between two and three-dimensional representations in design, rapid prototyping and usability assessment. Steve Garner is Director of the international Drawing Research Network (www.drawing.org.uk) and has published widely on drawing and designing. He is currently a co-investigator in a Research Council-funded collaborative project into shape grammars in design. Deanna Petherbridge Artist Deanna Petherbridge is research Professor of Drawing at the University of Lincoln, and her practice is drawing-based, although she has undertaken large-scale mural projects and designed for the stage. She was Arnolfini Professor of Drawing, University of the West of England Bristol, 2002–06, and Professor of Drawing, Royal College of Art,1995–2001 where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research. She has written, lectured and broadcast widely on art, architecture and drawing and undertook a six-part lecture series Drawing towards Enquiry at the National Gallery London in association with the University of the Arts, 2006. Her most recent one-person exhibition was an installation of drawings in Sir John Soane’s house Pitzhanger Manor in the exhibition Petherbridge Alone with Soane, 2007. Forthcoming publications include The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice, to be published by Yale University Press in 2009, a trans-historical study which theorises and contextualises drawing practice. Howard Riley Dr Howard Riley is Head of Research at the Dynevor Centre for Arts, Design and Media, Swansea Metropolitan University. He trained at Hammersmith College of Art, Coventry


5/8/08

16:20

Page 181

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS |

181

College of Art, the Royal College of Art, and holds a doctorate in the practice and teaching of drawing from the University of Wales. His research interests include the social semiotics of drawing, the pedagogics of contemporary visual art practice, generative art, and multimodality. He has published widely in these areas and contributes regularly to international conferences on the visual arts, as well as having exhibited what he terms ‘pedagogical drawings’ in the UK, Malaysia and Australia, where he was Senior Lecturer in Drawing and Art Theory at Curtin University, Western Australia throughout the 1980s. Terry Rosenberg Terry Rosenberg is Head of Design at Goldsmiths College. He is a practicing artist, design theorist, teacher and designer. Recent research interests include the representation of ideas and ideation through representation, particularly how we model thought (the settled) and how we think (un-settled ideas) in representational models. He regularly presents papers at conferences, has contributed chapters to books and has published a book on drawing. He is actively engaged in researching through designing. He is the project leader on a Leverhulme-funded research programme titled The Mediatised View which seeks to design scopic devices for the London Eye. The devices are ‘discursive objects’ engaging with, amongst other things, the performance of the ‘spectral’ in mixed reality constructions and the effect of new technologies on the production of socio-cultural space. www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/media-research-programme/ Richard Talbot Richard Talbot currently holds an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts and is leader of the Master of Fine Art course at Newcastle University. He gained his BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, his MA in Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and was awarded the Rome Scholarship in Sculpture in 1980. He completed a commission with Neil Talbot at Westminster Abbey in 2004 and his drawings have been widely exhibited – most recently in the Jerwood ‘Drawing Breath’ exhibition. He has published and presented research relating to the practice and history of linear perspective in Tracey, the Nexus Journal of Architecture and Mathematics and most recently at Renaissance Vision, at ECVP 2007 in Arezzo. His work can be seen at www.richardtalbot.org. Anna Ursyn Dr Anna Ursyn is Professor of Visual Arts at the School of Art and Design, University of Northern Colorado. She has been Programme Committee member, organiser and Chair of the Digital Art Symposium and Online Digital Art Gallery D-ART for the International Conference on Information Visualisation iV between 1997 and 2008. Also Art Gallery organiser and keynote speaker for the Special Year on Art and Mathematics, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2005. Her work is published in Art of the Digital Age by Bruce Wands, Painting the Digital River by James Faure Walker, Digital Printmaking by George Whale & Naren Barfield, The Best of 3-D Graphics CDROM by Vic Cherubini, Leonardo 1993, 2002. and Computer Graphics (ACM/Siggraph 1991, 1997, 2004, 2007). Portfolio: www.ursyn.com Ernst van Alphen Dr Ernst van Alphen is Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His publications include Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Reaktion Books 1992), Caught By


182

5/8/08

16:20

Page 182


History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford University Press 1997), Armando: Shaping Memory (Nai Publishers 2000) and Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (University of Chicago Press 2005). His research interests include twentieth century and contemporary literature, cultural and visual studies, and Holocaust studies.


5/8/08

16:20

Page 183

INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. abstraction 31, 174–5 Académie Royale 29 advertisements see The Studio Aerograph airbrush 80–2, 81 Afonso, A 17–18 Albers, Josef 156 Alberti, Leon Battista 29, 34–5, 53 American Eagle Co 76 Andre, Carl 89 Animal Studio 71 Anning, A 101 anthropological research 17–18 architecture 28, 30, 32, 33–5, 36–7 Armando 59–60, 62, 63, 64, 65 Fahne 63, 64 Untitled 60, 61 Arnheim, R 16, 98 ars 61, 62, 63 art education children 97–105, 102, 103, 104, 105 research see under drawing teaching methods: concept and percept 153–4; philosophical bases for 154–8; premises for 160–2; social functions of drawing 158; student work 162–6, 162, 163, 164, 165; systemic-functional semiotic model 158–60

art schools advertisements 71, 73, 76, 77 drawing methods 87 see also art education art therapy 96–7 Athey, C 95 Autolycus 71, 72 Aycock, Alice 46 Babcock, Emily 149–50 Bacon, Sir Francis 111 Bacon, Francis 37 Badiou, Alain 88 Barthes, Roland 62–3, 64, 68 Baudrillard, Jean 24 Bauhaus 32, 156 Benjamin, Walter 65–8 Berger, John 17, 24, 25, 32–3, 46 Bernard, Emile 31 Bernstein, Ken 170 Betti, C 22 Beuys, Joseph 46 Blanc, Charles 30, 31 Bonnard, Pierre 78 Borough Johnson, Ernest 83 Borromini, Francesco 53 Bradshaw, Percy 71, 73, 76 Brangwyn, Frank 83


184

5/8/08

16:20

Page 184


Braque, Georges 78, 86 Brazil, coastal profile 142, 147, 151–2 Britton, Sgt Major W L 142 Broadhurst, S 171–2 Bryson, Norman 52 Bungay, Stephen 153 Burt, C 94 Cage, John 46 calligraphy 63 CAM production systems 35 camera lucida 142, 147, 150, 151 camera obscura 147, 150 Campaign for Drawing 22 Caro, Anthony 46, 86 Carpenter and Westley 83 Cézanne, Paul 31, 87 Chernoff, Herman 170 children’s drawings art therapy 96–7 education 97–9 reappraising 93 research into 13, 93–6 socio-cultural theories 99–106, 102, 103, 104, 105 Cizek, Frank 97 Clegg, Alec 98 Clement, R 98 Close, Chuck 143 Clowes, Daniel 90 Cobra group 35 Coldstream, William 87, 155, 156 Conceptualism 61 Constable, John 91 Constructivism 32 Cook, Capt James 145 Cox, David 91 Cox, M 95 Crotty, Russell 151 Cuddon, Katie 151 Dakin, Malcolm 151 Davis, J 96 Day, Lewis 83 De Stijl 32

Deleuze, Gilles 37, 112 Derain, André 86 Derrida, Jacques 60–1, 68, 113 design 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35 Design Research Society 18 design see also ideational drawing Dexter, Emma 88 Deyneka, Alexander 89 diagrams 37 Diderot, Denis 30 digital drawing 169 abstract notions 174–5 drawing as storytelling 171–2 recording, role in 150, 151 research 13, 23–4 Royal Academy Schools 90 semiotic content 172–4 visual journalism 175–6 visualisation in digital environment 169–71 drawing accuracy 141, 151–2; artistic licence 146–7; drawings in the grey area 144–5; drawings intended as records 144; drawings not intended as records 142–4; eyewitnesses 148–50; mechanical aids 147–8; modern recording 150–1; recording 141–2 defining 27–31; as autonomous practice 32–3; bricoleur and engineer 35–6, 36; correlation between drawing and looking 31–2; as dialogue 33–5; neither medium nor message 37–9; sketch and diagram 36–7 research 15–18; coming of age 24–5; establishing a critical discourse 18–20; towards an agenda 20–4 teaching methods: concept and percept 153–4; philosophical bases for 154–8; premises for 160–2; social functions of drawing 158; student work 162–6, 162, 163, 164, 165; systemicfunctional semiotic model 158–60 theoretical distinctions 59; Barthes 62–5; Benjamin 65–8; Derrida 59–61; Dürer 61–2; Krauss 65


5/8/08

16:20

Page 185

INDEX |

three-dimensionality 43–5 views articulated in The Studio 87–91 see also children’s drawings; digital drawing; embedded drawing; ideational drawing drawing equipment, advertisements 71–87, 72–5, 77, 79, 81, 85 Drawing Research Network 17, 18–20, 23, 25 Driver, Felix 147 Dubuffet, Jean 35, 86, 90 Duchamp, Marcel 46, 47–9 ductus 63, 65 Dufy, Raoul 78 Dunster, David 37 Dürer, Albrecht 59, 61–2, 63–4, 68, 144 Dyson, A 97 École des Beaux Arts 30 Edwards, Betty 156 Eisner, E 98, 99, 100 Elkins, James 50–1 embedded drawing conversation with Michael Kidner 125–30 rationale 130–9 Emilia, Reggio 97, 98 Engberg, Siri 143 engineers 33–4, 35 Erasmus 144 Euston Road School 156 Evans, B 170 Evans, Robin 37 Faber, A W, pencils 74, 76, 86–7 Faure Walker, James 170 Fish, Michael 23 Fishwick, Paul 170 Flickr 24, 25 Flower, Beatrice 71 Forest Hill, Press Art School 71, 73, 76 Fox Talbot, William Henry 147 Frieze 83 Frith, William Powell 78

Gainsborough, Thomas 91 Games, A 76 Gardner, H 96 Gehry, Frank 36–7 Gentle, K 98 Giacometti, Alberto 90 Gillott’s pens 78–80, 79, 86 Glass, F J 83 Gleizes, Albert 31 Goldsmiths College 46–7 Golomb, C 94, 96–7 Goodenough, F 94 Goodman, N 96 Goodnow, J 94–5 Gordon, Miss Grant 71 graffiti 65 Guarini, Guarino 53, 56 Guba, Egon 157 Gussin, Graham 150 Gwalt 61–2 Halliday, Michael 158 Hamilton, Richard 46, 157 Hawkey, Captain 82 Hayakawa, S 174 Hegel, G W F 153–4 Heidegger, Martin 110, 111, 112 Henderson, Kathryn 33–4 Hennessy, Peter 83 Herschel, Sir John 147 Hesse, Eva 89 Hinton, C H 48 Hobgood, Ben, cow program 174–5, 175 Hockney, David 89, 142, 150, 151 Holbein, Hans the Elder 61, 62 Holly, drawings by 103–4, 103, 104 Hoptman, Laura 22 Hudson, Tom 157 Huttenlocher, Britta, work by 67, 68, 69 ideational drawing defining 109–10 discussion 123–4 examples 115–16; fictions 116–20, 117, 118, 119; generative 120–3, 121, 122

185


186

5/8/08

16:20

Page 186


production processes 111–12; noise and blankness 113–15; scintillation 113; what is given 112–13 thinking 110–11 ingenium 61–2 International Journal of Art and Design Education 22 Iser, Wolfgang 154 Ittelson, W 169 Itten, Johannes 155, 157 Jakobson, Roman 161 James, William 156 Jerwood Drawing Prize 10–11 John, Adrian, drawing by 163–4, 163 Johns, Jasper 46 Kandinsky, Wassily 31, 32, 155 Kellogg, R 94 Kemp, Martin 52, 53 Kennedy, J F, US President 141 Kidner, Michael conversation with 125–30 rationale of drawing issues 139; conjecture 130–2; containment 133–5; ordinary/extraordinary 132–3; sensibility 137–8; still 136–7; uncomfortability 135–6 work by: Column no. 2 131; Looped circle 134; Penrose tiling illustration 126, 132; Seven chords 129–30, 136, 137; Siamese pentagon 138; Working drawings of round column 135 King, Philip 46 Kingston School of Art 87 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 86 Kitaj, R B 89 Klee, Paul 31, 86, 157 Klimt, Gustav 97 Koerner, Joseph 61 Koh-l-Noor pencils 72, 74 Kooning, Willem de 90 Kossoff, Leon 87 Kovats, Tania 88

Krauss, Rosalind 65 Kress, Gunther 99–100, 158 Krut, Ansel, Nailing a Head 37–9, 38 Lacan, J 52 Lengler, R 170 Leonardo da Vinci 16, 45, 55, 56, 86 Lèvi-Strauss, Claude 35, 37, 38 LeWitt, Sol 89 Lianne, drawing by 105, 105 life drawing 17, 19, 32, 89–90, 163–4 Lincoln, Yvonna 157 linear perspective 45–56, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 154–6 Lockard, William Kirby 16 Love, Terence 22 Lowenfeld, V 97 Lucebert, Floating farmer 35–6, 36, 38 Lucquet, G 93–4 Luke, drawings by 102, 102, 103 Luther, Martin 144 Macfarlane, Kate 150–1 McGowan, Alan 19 McGuirk, Tom 20 Mags, Russell, drawing by 164–6, 164 Malchiodi, C 96 Malevich, Kasimir 31 Malton, Thomas 49–50 Perspective study 50 Man Ray, Dust Breeding 47, 48 Maori tattoos 145 Maria, Amanda, drawing by 162–3, 162 Marjoribanks, Capt John 148 Marr, David 156 Martin Wood, T 91 Martins, Luciana 147 Mary, Queen of Scots 141 Matisse, Henri 78, 86, 90 Matta, Roberto 46 Matthews, J 98–9 Mayhew, Margaret 17 Merleau-Ponty, M 24, 49, 52 Modernism 31, 32, 89–90, 98, 156 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo 156, 157


5/8/08

16:20

Page 187

INDEX |

Mondrian, Piet 31 Moore, Henry 84 Morgan, M 98 Morris, Robert 61 Munnings, Alfred 78 MySpace 24 Newman, John Rhys, ideational drawings by 115–16 fictions 116–20, 117, 118, 119 generative 120–3, 121, 122 Nokia 115, 122 Nolde, Emil 86 O’Toole, Michael 158, 161 Pahl, K 100 Paine family 82 painting 27, 29, 30, 66–7 paints, advertisements 84, 85 Pariser, D 96 Parkinson, Sydney 145 Pasmore, Victor 157 pencil advertisements 72–8, 72, 74–5, 77, 84, 86–7, 89, 91 pens 78–80, 79, 84, 85, 86 Perez-Gomez, A 56 Petherbridge, Deanna 23, 88 Phillips, Tom 150 photography 84, 147–8 Piaget, J 94 Picasso, Pablo 78, 86, 87, 88, 90 Piero della Francesca 45, 50–1, 52, 53, 56 De Prospectiva Pingendi 51 The Flagellation of Christ 51, 53 Piles, Roger de 29 Pirckheime, Willibald 144 Pitchforth, Vivian 87 Plato 49, 114 Polanyi, Michael 34 Polke, Sigmar 90 Price, David Hotchkiss 144 Prince’s Drawing School 90

187

Rajchman, J 111–12 Ramos, Manuel João 18 Rapidograph 78 Rauch, Neo 89 Rawson, Philip 16, 24, 32 Read, Herbert 97–8 Reeves, artists supplies 76, 84, 85 Rembrandt 39, 144 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 29–30 Rich, Alfred 83 Ring, K 101 Robbins, Edward 28 Rodchenko, Alexander 31, 32 Roe, John Septimus 142, 147, 151–2 Rosand, David 28 Rouault, Georges 78 Royal Academy 29, 78, 84, 90 Rubens, Peter Paul 29 Ruskin, John 16, 31, 83, 84, 146, 147, 155, 156 Saint Martins School of Art 46, 87 Sale, Teel 22 Salwey, Jasper 83 Sambourne, Linley, The Arming of Joan of Arc 78–80, 79 sculpture 27, 30, 43–7, 53–5 Selfe, L 96 Serres, Michel 111, 113, 114, 116, 123 Shaker Gift Drawings 148–50 Simmons, D R 145 Simon, drawing by 104, 105 sketches 29, 33–4, 36–7 Slade School of Fine Art 87 slavery 148 Smith, David 46 Sperry, Roger 156 Squirrell, Leonard 83 Steadman, Ralph 76 Structuralism 35, 157 The Studio adverisements 71–87, 72–5, 77, 79, 81, 85 editorial 87–91 Sullivan, Graeme 22


188

5/8/08

16:20

Page 188


Suprematism 32 Surrealism 61 Talbot, Richard Glass 2, 43, 44 Missing the Target 54 Perspective developed from √2 pattern 53 Tanner, Robin 98 Tàpies, Antoni 90 Taylor, Brook 49 teaching methods see art education Thistlewood, David 16 Thubron, Harry 157 Titian 11 Tolzmann, Matthew, Two Directions for Two Trombones 172, 174 Tonks, Henry 87 Tracey 25 Tufte, E 174 Turner, J W M 31, 141, 146, 150 Turquoise pencils 72, 76–8, 77, 84 Twombly, Cy 63–4, 65, 89 Ulmer, Gregory 113 Unwin, Simon 33 Ursyn, Anna, Rats 173, 174

Van Leeuwen, Theo 158 Vasari, Giorgio 29 Venus pencils 75, 76, 77 Vesely, Dalibor 56 Viola, W 97 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 30–1 vocabulary 19 Wallis, Karen 17 Watt, Alexander 78 Westminster Palace 141 Whittet, G S 88 Willats, John 95–6, 156 Williams, Nigel, drawing by 165, 166 Wilson, Brent 93 Wolf, D 106 Wolff’s Royal Sovereign pencils 72–6, 74 Wood, Marcus 148 YouTube 170–1 Zimenko, Vladislav 89


5/8/08

16:20

Page 189


5/8/08

16:20

Page 190


5/8/08

16:20

Page 191


5/8/08

16:20

Page 192


An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays by leading artists and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analyzing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Writing on Drawing is a forward-looking text that provokes enquiry and shared understanding of contemporary drawing research and practice. An essential resource for artists, scientists, designers and engineers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline.

Writing on Drawing

Writing on Drawing


Garner



Steve Garner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University. He is Director of the international Drawing Research Network. ‘This is an impressive achievement. As an academic who wishes to explore drawing as a cognitive process and as an artist working in the mass mediated world where the language of drawing has found a vital role, this book will be invaluable for me and to my students.’ Professor Mario Minichiello, Birmingham City University ‘The past decade has seen a change of attitude towards drawing. Its importance as an element in human intelligence is now widely appreciated. However, there has not been a clear picture of research in the field or an agenda for future investigation. Writing on Drawing fills this gap. It gives an insight into current work and it is clear that a paradigm shift is underway. Drawing is of course strongly identified with art and design but it is now being seen in a much broader context. The contributions to this book give a new insight into this fascinating activity.’ Professor Ken Baynes, Loughborough University

>H7C.,-"&"-)&*%"'%%",

Supported by:

%%

. ,-&-)& *%'%%,

www.intellectbooks.com

Readings in Art & Design Education


Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

Drawing Conclusions

Successful Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

Drawing Conclusions

Machine Drawing

Drawing Blood

Master Drawing

Engineering Drawing

Figure Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

Landmark Essays on Basic Writing

Anatomy and Drawing

Geometric and Engineering Drawing

Drawing Dead

Animal drawing

Drawing Dead

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Dead

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Conclusions

Workshop Drawing

Drawing Closer

Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

Drawing Conclusions

Successful Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

Drawing Conclusions

Machine Drawing

Drawing Blood

Master Drawing

Engineering Drawing

Figure Drawing

The Practice and Science of Drawing

Landmark Essays on Basic Writing

Anatomy and Drawing

Geometric and Engineering Drawing

Drawing Dead

Animal drawing

Drawing Dead

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Dead

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

Drawing Conclusions

Workshop Drawing

Drawing Closer

Recommend Documents