July 2009
What is drawing?
Because Drawing is the subject of this year’s Summer School, I have been asking myself this question and thought it would be helpful, not least to myself, to set down some ideas about drawing!
Drawing is fundamentally the expression of form upon a flat surface. You are giving visual form to your ideas and feelings and communicating them through graphic symbols and marks. From pre-historic man scratching the shapes of animals on a cave wall, or Matisse cutting pieces ofcoloured paper with a pair of scissors and pasting together a collage, or Paul Smith scribbling the design for a suit on the back of an envelope, or Cezanne making a painted mark on a canvas- it is all drawing.
In order to express youself well visually you need to be able to draw well. Drawing is the fundamental forming skill that is essential to all the visual arts.For instance, when you paint you are constantly drawing, expressing form. As the great french painter Ingres said “drawing includes three and a half quarters of painting”!
Ideally technical ability is something that becomes second nature to the artist (and involves a great deal of practice!), but remember that technique is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The true value of artistic drawing is the ability it gives you to express your ideas and emotions and communicate them.
Mechanical accuracy versus artistic accuracy
Ultimately it is the quality of thought and feeling driving the technical means that makes a great work of art. However, to begin with we must learn the basic language of drawing which starts with learning to interpret your visual perceptions, practising technical skills, and developing manual dexterity. Once we have learnt how to see and translate and communicate visual information, we can learn to draw expressively. You will be able to draw not only what you see but what you feel about what you see. This involves selective emphasis in your drawing according to your own perception. The artistic expression of form depends on what Harold Speed terms Form Values (see his quotation below). Look at any drawing by say, Rembrandt or Goya, and you will see this heightened perception of form.
In the western tradition of drawing, we study how to create the illusion of three dimensions on a 2-D surface. Working directly from observation is a great way to learn about all the necessary elements of how to draw accurate and expressive shapes, how to model solid forms using line and tone, and how to relate each part to the whole image.
Once you have learnt to see and draw well from nature you will be able to use this knowledge and understanding to help you visualise and draw subjects from your imagination.
I do believe that anyone can learn to draw, but as with most skills, it does require a will to practice and improve. However there is huge pleasure and satisfaction to be had from being able to draw well. It is also very therapeutic and a good mental exercise. It is a very pure activity that refreshes you. Many a life drawing student has said to me that they were very tired and stressed before the class, but felt much calmer afterwards! You become absorbed in a state of “relaxed concentration”. It helps you develop clear thinking and feeling, and put you in touch with your inner self.
More thoughts on drawing
“The hand can only draw what the eye sees”. Michaelangelo
Drawing is discovery, drawing is thinking on paper. It helps you analyse and understand your subject (and yourself!). Even when you draw from direct observation you are abstracting and translating what you see into a shared symbol system and communicating it.
Drawing can be the most direct, immediate and spontaneous expression of an artists’ mind or it can an expressive work of art in its own right.
Types of drawing
The sketch- a spontaneous and rough notation of a first idea drawn from nature or the imagination. It is a record, a history, of the artist’s thoughts and feelings.
The study– a more thoroughly analysed and developed drawing,in order to clarify the structure and shapes of forms, in preparation for a painting or sculpture.
Finished drawing– bringing elements of sketches and studies together into a final composition
Drawing is about developing a graphic language that is adaquate to express your visual and emotional response to your subjects. You are translating what you see and feel into a system of marks.
Great artists play with the conventions of graphic language, to meet their own expressive needs, and by so doing extend our understanding of the shared meanings and associations that are communicated. They will invent and extend the visual grammar of marks and forms. For instance, look at Rembrandt’s many wonderful sketches, mostly in pen (quill or reed) and ink- of landscapes,of imagined scenes from myths or the bible, and genre- street scenes and characters. Also ckeck out Picasso’s series of sketches for his great painting “Guernica”, from the first tiny scribble that sowed the seed, gradually developing into the powerful finished statement.
SOME INTERESTING QUOTATIONS…
“The Arts have always been and always will be the Offspring of Liberty”
“Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.” Albert Camus
Emile Zola- “A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament”.
Jean-Auguste Ingres- “Drawing is the honesty of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours: drawing does not consist merely of line. Drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane and modeling. See what remains after that. Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting.”
Francisco Goya- “Always lines, never bodies! Where does one see lines in nature? I see only forms, forms that are lighted, forms that are not, planes that are near and planes that are far, projections and hollows. I see no lines or details, I don’t count each hair on the head of a passerby, or the buttons on his coat. There is no reason why my brush should see more than I do.”
Auguste Rodin- “…to speak truly, all is idea, all is symbol. So the form and the attitude of a human being reveal the emotions of its soul. The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is.”
Jean-Baptiste-Chardin- “One uses paint but one paints with emotion….”
Edgar Degas- “A picture is first of all a product of the imagination, it must never be a copy.”
Picasso’s confession: A statement reputedly made to Giovanni Papini, which was included in an interview that apperaed in Libre Nero in 1952. I’m not sure if it’s true, but for parts of Picasso’s work part of me agrees with what is said. However, as the creator of works like “The three dancers” and “Guernica” part of me doesn’t!:
“In art the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous.
I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me.
By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles. rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortunes, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term.
Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may apppear, but it has the merit of being sincere”.
Picasso on modernism:
“Beginning with Van Gogh, however great we may be, we are all, in a measure, autodidacts- you might say, primitive painters. Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must re-create an entire language. Every painter of our times is fully authorized to re-create that language from A-Z. No criteria can be applied to him a priori, since we don’t believe in rigid standards any longer. In a certain sense, that’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad”.
ON THE EXPRESSION OF FORM:
“Before you can express anything you must feel something to express, and so felt the mechanically accurate photographic facts are heightened in effect; certain things stand out to the subordination of others. The dead mechanical facts of vision are ordered and arranged under the influence of of the feelings that accompany artistic perception into a vital impression, something subtly different or crudely different according as the artistic perceptions are refined or not. The expression of this heightened perception of form, I would call the expression of form values.” Harold Speed