David's email below ties in very much with a book I read a while back:
'Drawing on the right side of the brain' by Betty Edwards (2001)
HarperCollins. She talks about how our educational system focuses on
developing our logical and verbal skills (left brain) while our
holistic, visual and creative skills (right brain) are neglected.
Drawing is very much the medium of our right brain and as such is the
expression of creative thought. Our dominant left brain's medium is
verbal rather than visual. To cope with the visual, it catalogues
visual 'short cuts', if you like, for the things we see, such as faces,
trees and people. When people say they can't draw, what they are saying
is that their left brain is directing their hand to illustrate these
short cuts, to produce naive drawings. It is only through the practice
that David describes that the right brain has the opportunity to
flourish and sidestep the left brain's tendency to dominate.
It has become clear to me that drawing has a place in every area of
education (and life). So often a knotty problem is easily solved by
making a drawing of it. Mind mapping is an excellent example.
--------------------
Caroline Calascione
267 Kings Road
Kingston, Surrey KT2 5JJ
07733 333027
[log in to unmask]
from [log in to unmask]:
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.
|
