Thank you Ana for your thoughtful reply! You have confirmed my own beliefs.
My colleague and I have been researching young children's visual
representations in mathematics and are interested in the realationship
between these and drawings in other disciplines. I think that the power of
drawing as visual communication, as a form of expression, to make personal
meaning and make sense of the worlds and to support deep levesl of cognitive
thinking is very much undervalued in schools (certainly here in England).
In relation to Bacon's painting of human mouths, although we (now) often
separate out Leonardo da Vinci's work into medical, mechanical and so on, he
would have moved freely between the different drawings. I believe that
children do this too, but that it is the curriculum that restricts them. I'd
like to see the role of visual representaion in schools raised to that of
talk (although this also has a long way to go).
Text has dominated standard curricula in the west too long, which makes me
wonder the extent to which computers are changing this? Gunter Kress has
done some intersting work on this, for example his books 'Literacy in the
New Media Age' and 'Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design' (written
also with Theo van Leeuwen).
And you Englsih is excellent (I couldn't begin to attempt Portugese!).
Maulfry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ana Leonor Rodrigues" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 1:21 PM
Subject: Re: Are all visual rerspesentations 'art'?
> Dear Maulfrey,
>
> Being an artist myself that uses drawing very often as an artistic
> expression, I also teach art drawing at architecture faculty in Lisbon and
> investigate on the subject.
> I would not bother of defining drawing as art or not.
> It is a communicating system that also uses artistic creativity and
> imagination/sensibility, but themselves being a tool of this process of
> communication.
> I would say that one of the problems is that our way of thinking tends to
> separate thinks (of course to analyse we have to separate, but it is
> important to let the "body" that is being analysed as a whole), one is art
> the other one is not art, and so on.
> In the case of drawing one has everything inside, a precise instrument for
> analysing the visual world, a clear and unmistakable communication process
> outside verbalisation and an artistic graphic expression.
> The problem is that we seldom accept that a scientific drawing has
> artistic
> qualities (remember how medical drawings of mouths influenced drawings and
> paintings of Bacon), or that an art drawing may contain scientific
> knowledge.
>
> Drawing being a tool that at the same time is expression, being a process
> that at the same time becomes an art object is a hybrid thing that loses
> with its crystallising in a definition.
>
> Your point b) is crucial of the attitude of society towards creativity and
> learning.
> I agree with what seems implicit in the statement, that drawing should be
> a
> discipline included in the curricula of all studies, beginning with the
> free
> marks of children learning and "tasting" and "testing" the world, to all
> the
> other later developments that would benefit immensely from the methodology
> of drawing (that, again, never cesses to have artistic relations, in the
> process of making it as well as in the process of fruition).
> I hope my English is not too foreign.
> Yours
> Ana Leonor
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ana Leonor M. Madeira Rodrigues
> Faculdade de Arquitectura - Universidade Técnica de Lisboa
> home: Av. Gago Coutinho, 25- 2º Esq.
> 1000-015 Lisboa
> T.00 351 218492924
>
>
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