Hi everyone.

Peter, I'd completely forgotten about this extract – thanks for bringing it to my attention again.

I think I'd like to instil in the students that drawing is done with the eye and, if possible, to prompt them to consider the hand more as a mechanical device for executing the drawing. The knowing comes through looking, the looking forming part of the drawing. This is something that some of my colleagues and I were discussing last week and if I can get the undergrads to even consider this when making work, I think I'll have achieved something. 

The other thing that I'm going to factor in (and forgive me if someone else has already posted this) is to set up in the lecture theatre and play them some films (La Jetee, The Lives of Others, The Spirit of the Beehive etc, etc) and have them make at least 100 drawings through the films duration; explaining that representation isn't the goal…harvesting visual research is.

Dan

From: "McBurney, Peter" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: The UK drawing research network mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:46:08 +0100
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Divergent drawing exercises

Lucy’s email regarding trace reminded me of John Berger’s discussion of the differences between western drawing and Chinese calligraphy in terms of the relative spatial positions of artist, object (or life model), and drawing.

 

 

 

-- Peter

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“Where are we, during the act of drawing, in spirit?  Where are you at such moments – moments which add up to so many, one might think of them as another life-time?    Each pictorial tradition offers a different answer to this query.  For instance, the European tradition, since the Renaissance, places the model over there, the draughtsman here, and the paper somewhere in between, within arms reach of the draughtsman, who observes the model and notes down what he has observed on the paper in front of him.   The Chinese tradition arranges things differently.  Calligraphy, the trace of things, is behind the model and the draughtsman has to search for it, looking through the model.   On his paper he then repeats the gestures he has seen calligraphically.  For the Paleolithic shaman, drawing inside a cave, it was different again.  The model and the drawing surface were in the same place, calling to the draughtsman to come and meet them, and then trace, with his hand on the rock, their presence.”

p. 123 of John Berger [2005]:  Berger on Drawing.  Edited by Jim Savage.  Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire:  Occasional Press. 

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From: The UK drawing research network mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of lucy ward
Sent: 17 September 2011 12:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [DRAWING-RESEARCH] Divergent drawing exercises

 

Hello there,

 

I would like to add a suggestion to this thread and then ask for suggestions in return.

 

I am planning a workshop on the idea of the trace. I mean the trace in the sense of tracing movement, action or time. Or that drawing might be the leaving of a trace.

So far, I have some activities where my class will draw the movement of my hands as I move them in patterns in the air, and then draw from videos of other actions, like the hands of a conductor as he conducts an orchestra, linking their hands with his. These ideas come from the work of Morgan O'Hara, www.morganohara.com. It is a kind of drawing with no subject, or drawing that is a recording rather than representation.

 

I hope this adds to the list of 'divergent drawing exercises', but does anyone have any ideas as an extension to this, as I seem to have hit a bit of writer's block?

 

Lucy