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 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

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

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Readings in Art & Design Education

Edited by Steve Garner

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Writing on Drawing Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

Edited by Steve Garner Series Editor: John Steers

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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‘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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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’:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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

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1906

1948

1930

1950

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

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1925

1928

1931

1949

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

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1930

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

1944

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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

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1955

1960

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

1960

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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

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1925

1950

1960

1962

1955 Figure 6: Five adverts for Gillotts pens.

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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

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1925

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

1929

1949

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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

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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

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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).

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1906

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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-

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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,

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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 t