Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017

This article is one of the offsprings of an ongoing enquiry that set out to revisit drawing’s role in architecture, by weaving a field of relations between pedagogical and epistemological theories of dance, drawing and architecture. The theories situate the affective/haptic kinaesthetic body at the centre of all in-corporeal experience, perception and conception. This article examines drawing’s potential to revive the body in architectural practices, by unveiling forces and processes that compose bodies and intertwine with the corporeality of architecture. It establishes drawing as a form of dance capable of inscribing the kinaesthetic vitality of the body into architecture. It examines architect Frank Gehry’s sketches as dynamic tracings of embodied gestures and bodily logos that mediate body and environment, interior and exterior.

The article presents and discusses a portrait by the author of his mother. This appears as a young woman of the 1950s who is wearing a string of pearls. The portrait, however, is first a motif that has enabled the development of a Harris Matrix: a method of recording the results of archaeological excavations stratigraphically. This idea has resulted in the drawing’s elusive depth being transposed as cross-sectional bars of actual physical depth. Relative depths of sections of the drawing have been determined by the lengths of time involved in their manufacture. The article contains an explanation of how a matrix can be constructed from these circumstances and provides a likely visual example. The second section of the article explores a personal narrative concerning the portrait, and speculates on possible psychodynamic unconscious motives. A key concept is that of jouissance as theorized by Jacques Lacan. This concept links the author’s tendency to enjoy a rational problematic approach to drawing, as evidenced in the use of the Harris Matrix, and investigation of more psychical questions of such enjoyment’s origin. Finally, a more literal linking metaphor is to have unearthed from the portrait the figure’s pearl necklace, which had become obscured by the cross-sectional bars of depth.

This article examines the relationship between drawing and design for sixteenth-century silver objects as a process of translation from two-dimensional objects into complex three-dimensional forms. The works of Albrecht Dürer and Wenzel Jamnitzer will serve as protagonists, since Dürer was particularly known for his masterful skills in drawing, while Jamnitzer excelled in both drawing and goldsmithing. Drawing as an artistic endeavour has been overshadowed in the literature of the goldsmithing process, despite its significant value to sixteenth-century metalworkers. Drawn designs of sixteenth-century objects such as those by Dürer were collected as prized possessions, but many were also discarded or re-worked as fashions changed throughout the centuries. Drawings for silver objects by both Dürer and Jamnitzer epitomize the meaningful role of this medium on the craft of goldsmithing.

This paper advocates for the use of drawing as an interdisciplinary research tool and argues in favour of drawing as a method by which to improve the observation and reading of artefacts. I suggest that the process of drawing, in slowing down the process of looking, can facilitate close observation of artefacts and thereby help to reveal subtle clues and hidden narratives. I call this method of attentive looking The Slow Approach to Seeing. The genesis of that idea and its extension as a pedagogic tool are described herein. This methodological position is supported with reference to John Ruskin, John Berger and James Elkins.

This paper reports on a series of drawing workshops held at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, which tested an original pedagogical strategy designed to help dyslexic and/or dyspraxic art and design students who had reported difficulties with their abilities to make accurate representational drawings. A group of non-dyslexic/dyspraxic RCA students volunteered as control group, and both cohorts completed three days of workshops in the Drawing Studio of the RCA. Results of recorded interviews eliciting student observations as they drew, and a questionnaire in the form of a Likert scale, administered before and after the workshop, indicate positive shifts in both cohorts’ attitudes towards specific aspects of the stages involved in the production of accurate representational drawings of still-life set-ups, the human skeleton and the clothed life-model. Assessment of the drawings produced indicates positive shifts in the two cohorts in geometric accuracy and other qualitative criteria embedded in the teaching strategy such as control of scale, proportion and illusions of depth. Both cohorts displayed similar positive attitude shifts and both sets of drawings indicated similar positive shifts in visual qualities. An interim conclusion posits that the pedagogical strategy appears to enhance the abilities of both dyslexic/dyspraxic students and non-dyslexic/dyspraxic students to make accurate representational drawings. This result correlates closely with the findings of an earlier, prototype workshop held at the RCA in July 2012. It is suggested that similar pedagogically inclusive strategies might produce positive results in the context of secondary schools as part of a more inclusive curriculum.

A process for identifying key elements that make up a drawing style would make it much easier to teach drawing students how to borrow critical elements from experienced artists and art connoisseurs’ different ways to see drawings. This paper starts developing a model of style grammar in drawing. A comprehensive literature review suggests line length, width and expressiveness, local and global tone, pattern and depth as expressed through form, outline, shape or object position are likely to be the most important traits to a drawing style. To test and validate the list based on human perception, a multidimensional scaling card sorting procedure was employed. Quantitative estimates of the visual features produced four dimensions; smudge, depth, tone and line expressiveness. Future statistical analysis may prove that the four identified dimensions will provide significance for comparison measures of style that can guide the development of a rule set for intelligent borrowing and design reuse.

Creative practice in the Japanese martial art of Aikidō involves constantly reassessing one’s situation and priorities by blending with, and maintaining control of, relational interactions to generate collaborative strategies from a variety of positions. This article describes how, as a design researcher, drawing-acts enabled me to conceptualize the co-creative possibilities of Aikidō movement practices. This design-led ethnography combined autoethnography and visual ethnography to explore the process of design drawing to visualize my lived experience, and the drawing of design (practice) as a way of documenting my experiences of movement. Drawings are not just lines: over time drawing-acts illuminated how Aikidō movement practices are a way of leading – designing – co-creative relationships between people within collective creativity.

The considerations put forth in this paper are part of ongoing and yet-to be-resolved research about the possibilities of thinking, imagining and visualizing the atmospheric conditions of a given site using the basic elements of representation: points, lines and colours. Moreover, this article seeks to introduce certain ideas about time from a non-linear perspective, which are implicit in my thinking as well as in my work and the way I have chosen to draw.

An examination of the artist/cartoonist David Shrigley’s work through the prism of philosopher Simon Critchley’s writing reveals a melancholic space of play where humour and obliquity allows the difficult but necessary expression of the unspeakable. A historical overview of melancholy and a close reading of the philosophical and psychoanalytical subtexts of humour in and through drawing opens up a reading of Shrigley’s work illuminated by the triad of nihilism, humour and a long historical strain of melancholy. Critichley, whose work on humour sits within the larger context of his work on nihilism, expands from Freud on melancholy and humour to articulate a self that is constituted as a mournful melancholic. Shrigley’s manipulations of the tropes of drawing produce a wistful ironic distance equivalent to Critchley’s self that ‘smiles and finds ourselves ridiculous in our own impossible mourning’. Shrigley’s work explodes this state towards materialism, immateriality and loss apposite to the work of Benjamin, Derrida and Agamben.

The drawings of British artist Sally Taylor (1977) are composed of heads of various descriptions; blockheads, confused heads, hysterical heads, heads with mouths and heads without, heads full of menace and heads full of glee. The pressure of these recurring motifs, which emerge from as many as 200 drawings a day, mark out Taylor’s practice as an active negotiation of repetition and difference. Norman Bryson famously characterized drawing as an act that resists the finality of the image to instead suspend a moment of ‘becoming’ (Bryson 2010: 150). The nuanced consistency of Taylor’s prolific output exemplifies Bryson’s understanding of the medium. What interests me here, however, are the performative aesthetic and material operations that make these drawings call to one another and their audience. The aim of this article is to consider the inextricable relationship between form and content in the works Taylor exhibited in That Head That Head at the Rabley Drawing Centre, Wiltshire (26 September – 29 October 2016). To do so, I argue, is to situate their aesthetic as a negotiation and transformation of the social politics of making art in the Great Britain at the beginning in the twenty-first century.

Drawing and Dialogue, Deanna Petherbridge (2016) London: Circa Press, 191 pp., ISBN: 9780993072154, h/bk, £24.95

Draw to Perform 3, Crows Nest Gallery, London, 30–31 July 2016