Hi, This is my first posting to Drawing Research, and I would like to throw
in my two cents worth regarding this topic.
A definition of sorts came to me one day after thinking about a Photography
teacher (a bit of a radical) who had categorically told me that drawing was
dead as there was no place for it any more since photography had taken over!
I was incensed by this idea, being a person totally devoted to the art of
drawing. I didnt have a quick answer for him ( I might have called him an
idiot though!).
The definition that later came to me was this-
"A photograph is like lifting a print from reality.
A drawing is like lifting a print from the mind's impression of reality".
As a definition of drawing it is certainly not perfect, but I think that it
gets at what drawing really is - a way of making concrete and shareable the
experience of aspects of the drawers reality.
My early training was at a very classical art school in Sydney, where we
drew with pencil and charcoal from plaster casts of Roman, Greek and
Renaissance busts and flayed figures.
I did this for three years as well as lots of painting and of course lots of
nude and draped figure studies.
Such a curriculum of training must seem absurd to many, yet what I
experienced by its practice was very unexpected.
After a solid year of drawing these plaster casts and nudes I found that I
started to experience what I can only describe as an untouched area of my
brain being opened up and used. I had purposely stopped most reading and
literate activity in that first year so as to try to gain (at the age of 35)
a more visual mind. Drawing for up to 8 hrs a day, sometimes 7 days a week,
I found that my verbal and literate activity started to shutdown somewhat.
What replaced this activity was a sort of virtual room in my mind in which
any thing that I looked at was modelled in a blob of golden floating matter
which took on the form of the object I looked at. I found that I could then
consciously move that 'form' around in my mind and inspect it from all angles.
Classical training has always emphasised the first importance of the artist
being able to sense 'form' and this was my experience of the development of
this ability.
Contrary to the perception held by some that classical drawing training is
synonymous with the 'academic' tradition, I found that myself and most of my
fellow students and teachers were all very open minded and experimental
drawers, 'drawn' to using these traditional skills for expressing our own
very contemporary experiences of life NOW.
(It is an interesting subject worthy of further discussion that many of the
seminal masters of modern art had had several years classical training
before they took flight in their unique and poetic personal directions.)
It was long considered (at least in the 20th century) that this type of
training was a means to an end, not the end in itself. Of course some people
do get stuck just there, producing technically beautiful but aesthetically
sterile works. This does not at all have to be the case, and I believe that
it purely personal choice.
Whilst at the school I became friends a quadraplegic artist. He asked me to
teach him the classical tradition, and for two years I went to his studio
for two days a week and he drew plaster casts and nudes with a pencil and
brush in his mouth! He never asked for me to go easy on him technically, and
i didn't. One day while we were drawing a female nude model I did a quick
line drawing for him to explain some point. He remarked, half jokingly, "its
easy enough for you!".
I decided to have a go at doing a drawing his way, so I stood behind him,
with this long pencil on the end of an arrow shaft, and drew the nude. My
jaw muscles just about went into a spasm!
The drawing I produced, wobbly line and all, still did justice to the model
, and I showed my friend. He laughed when he saw it and told me that he
hated me even more! What we both realized from this experience was that the
drawer cultivates the mind first and foremost, through constant practice and
experiment and focus and liberated play.
If your mind can draw then you can express that drawing with anything,
drawing with the hand (or both hands at once), with the mouth or the foot,
or with a stick in the sand, scissors cutting paper, or with a digitizing
pen and tablet drawing into a virtual world.
As a final two cents (four all together), regarding the idea that "black is
not a colour". At the classical art school we began figure painting using a
limited pallette that seems to date back to at least the ancient Romans.
We used Red, Yellow, White and Black to mix all the flesh tones.
The preferred black was Ivory Black, which is actually a very dark green.
Blacks seem to all be either warm (tending to red) or cool (tending to
blue/green). This is the palette used by Rubens and Hals and Rembrandt.
So black produces beautiful flesh shadows etc.
Many artists now are only tuned into the saturated colours, but the
traditional idea was that a tasteful balance of colour saturation and
desaturation (greyed colours) were essential elements of picture compostion.
Not that I totally agree with that. An artist has to be true to their
inspiration work by work, and should do what they sense the work is
demanding, regardless of the rules and traditions of others.
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