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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
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Digital cosmopoiesis in architectural pedagogy: An analysis through Frascari
By Yvette PutraAbstractThis article derives from three observations of architectural drawing: the current ubiquitousness of digitization, the ongoing disputation of digitization in architectural pedagogy and the capacity of architectural drawing to simultaneously represent and communicate qualities of tangibility and intangibility. In its analysis, this article refers primarily to the writings of Marco Frascari (1945–2013), who was, through works such as Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (2011), a strong critic of digital drawing. This article begins with an overview of the effects of digitization on architectural drawing, which are summarized in terms of their deleteriousness on the intangible qualities of architectural drawing, as seen predominantly in perspectives and sketches. This article then defines intangibility in architectural drawing and locates it within Frascari's theory of cosmopoiesis, and identifies marks, entourage (especially human entourage) and narrative as key elements of cosmopoiesis in architectural drawing. Finally, this article analyses the effects of digitization on architectural drawing from the standpoint of cosmopoiesis, with an emphasis on the key elements that were identified earlier, before concluding with some recommendations for preserving cosmopoiesis when drawing in a digital environment. This article holds that, in architectural pedagogy, a complete return to analogue drawing is neither feasible nor necessary because what is required instead is an awareness of the main areas in which digital drawing is most likely to fail, so that digital drawing retains the cosmopoietic qualities that characterize some examples of analogue drawing. This article argues that an understanding of the cosmopoiesis of architectural drawing is vital to transcending the apparent incompatibility of intangibility and digitization.
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Drawing as a democratic space within higher education, fine and applied arts: Categorization, process, outcome
By Andrew HallAbstractThis article tracks the presence, influence of and development of drawing as a creative practice in Higher Education, Art and Design at Central Saint Martins (CSM) University of the Arts London (UAL) since 1896. Connecting to both a historical and a contemporary discourse on the practice of drawing within this institution, the article explores the educational role that drawing has played in the fine and applied arts (in particular, graphic communication design) and its present state of evolution as an embodied practice within an expanded field that is intrinsically and fundamentally linked to the creative process and final creative outcome. Also cited are notable academics, creative practitioners and critical theorists who have made it their goal to open up the practice of drawing as a democratic space for all to participate in, and one can observe this territory through three distinctive, although interlinked, lenses: categorization, process and outcome.
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Analogue x digital: Parallel techniques for design learning
Authors: Linda Matthews and Samantha DonnellyAbstractWith urban space under the ubiquitous scrutiny of digital visioning technologies, the city is now imaged by means of a pixel grid containing ephemeral, qualitative data presented as colour, brightness and shape. Unlike traditional analogue pictorial representational modes, the digital image is a highly transformable mechanism with an unstable distribution of data across its pixel array. As a consequence, representation in the form of spatial abstraction demands not only a new approach to the learning and implementation of traditional disciplinary drawing practice, but a rethinking of the alignment and cooperative nature of analogue and digital drawing models when applied to effective design development. In a pedagogical context, the transition of spatial representation between analogue and digital modes has profound implications for how the student connects seminal drawing and design processes to both the sensorial realm and the physical experience of lived space. This paper therefore explores the enhancement of tertiary learning in digital and abstract literacy through new drawing techniques. Underpinned by a new relationship between representation and envisioned physical space, the techniques are applied within learning environments in parallel with existing analogue pictorial procedures. By building curriculum for foundational students that provides a framework of linked spatial experiences aligned across analogue and digital domains and coupled with tasks focused on the development of conceptual thinking, it proposes increased student success in future studios and professional practice.
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Drawing – learning: Letting art teach
More LessAbstractContextualized through the writing of Gert Biesta, this research proposes that as both artists and educators we should 'let art teach'. It proposes a position for student and teacher that focuses upon developing a curiosity-driven desire for meaningful dialogue with the world through broader educational and existential experience. In this context, and seen through the lens of drawing artist, musician, educator and postgraduate researcher, the article invites a first-person reflective discussion of two experiments from the author's ongoing practice-led research, which bring together an embodied knowledge of music and drawing practice, to uncover how drawing may be valued as an enactive physical, cognitive and perceptual process of poesis. By moving beyond the self-conscious desire to make an artwork, the experiments using blind drawing, bilateral mark-making and sound engage with ideas of 'unknowing' and Biesta's notion of 'interruption' to explore how drawing may offer access to different types of learning. Standing inside my practice, I understand that in the act of drawing, I can neither fail to generate ideas, escape my own existence, nor leave a mark upon the world.
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Drawing as research: Correlating skills and practices with surgical training
By Jenny WrightAbstractThere are highly creative and meticulous elements to both fine art drawing and surgical practices, especially with regard to close observation, use of tools and interaction with materials. Both artists and surgeons have a dynamic, physical interaction with surfaces, as well as an ability to review and select key features from complex structures. Building on my own drawing practice and observations of surgeons' work I have been able to develop a method for comparing and evaluating drawings. Analysing series of images made by students at Kings College Dental Institute, London, I correlated their data from the HapTEL learning system which was used to practice drilling and removing caries from a virtual tooth, and found evidence of a link between drawing aptitudes and a particular surgical skills. My work supports evidence of positive application of arts practices, with the possibility of building future work incorporating drawing and surgical training.
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Tracing the Genealogical Self: Entanglements of drawing with Tim Ingold's Lines
Authors: Ilgım Veryeri Alaca and Betül Gaye DinçAbstractThe Genealogical Self Project is a component of a basic drawing course open to undergraduates from diverse disciplines and cultures, and engages students in critical drawing activities at Koç University, a liberal arts college in Īstanbul. By introducing a chapter from Tim Ingold's book, Lines: A Brief History, to the course, we aim to revisit the elements and processes that constitute drawing education, and what lines and mark-making mean in art and daily life. Thus, Tim Ingold's anthropological approach to elements of drawing opens a door to the expanded capacity of this art in general and invites students to interact with a text that handles parallel topics such as line. The project offers students an experimental way of building a drawing via inspiration from the text covered in the course and by inspiring them to base their work on myriad sources from their life going beyond drawing physical objects.
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Drawing out: Encounter, resistance and collaboration
Authors: Majella Clancy and Stephen FelminghamAbstractThis collaborative paper is written against the backdrop of a current crisis in art education and provision in UK secondary schools. Education policy and the introduction of the European Baccalaureate (EBacc) has led to an increasing decline in the hours of arts teaching and number of arts teachers in England's secondary schools (Cultural Learning Alliance 2018). The results of this educational turn are well documented and the effects are being felt now in higher education, in wider culture and in the outcomes for young people in their creative capabilities, global outlook and wellbeing. Drawing pedagogy is considered with reference to this wider context and through the lens of Gert Biesta's philosophy of education that brings children and young people into dialogue with the world. It juxtaposes Tim Ingold and John Dewey in a discussion of a collaborative drawing project, Ailleurs (Elsewhere), an exchange between Plymouth College of Art (PCA) and Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo ESBA) in 2017. The intention is to bring a pedagogy of collaboration, resistance and encounters to bear, to argue for drawing as a singular means of working within this set of tensions. The text concludes that as research or enquiry-led teaching is at the root of an increasing amount of University teaching, finding a route into this from results-led education is a clear challenge to higher education and it sets out a collaborative, peer-to-peer learning strategy as an approach to drawing pedagogy.
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Learning drawing: Sustaining the primacy of visualcy within a neo-liberal artschool curriculum
By Howard RileyAbstractThe paper champions an articulacy in drawing – visualcy – as central to a visual arts pedagogy, arguing that the one domain of human inquiry which distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines is surely that surrounding the faculty of vision. The ascendency within the artworld of a relational aesthetics often devoid of perceptual insights is traced through a brief history of the relationships between visual artforms and their sociopolitical contexts, culminating with the shift of emphasis away from the perceptually intriguing and towards the contemporary imperatives of a professional practice defined in terms of the neo-liberal values permeating the UK Higher Education sector since 2010. The text rehabilitates the Formalist notion of enstrangement as a means of revitalizing the primacy of perceptual inquiry over 'looking through language', and is illustrated with drawings by the author.
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The rupture as a drawing-in of experience
More LessAbstractThe rupture as a drawing-in of experience constructs perspectives on architectural education, as an act of architectural discourse proper in order that architectural education might facilitate the learning of how to draw-in experience as a process. This paper unpacks material engagement theory from the vantage of drawing and elicits three levels of engagement; of action, object and meaning together with a fourth proposed here, that of experience. It goes on to follow a student-led project using rupturing as a methodological approach to understand the role of drawing and the four aspects that influence practitioners: the act of drawing as a means to illuminate fields of learning as distinct paradigms of design strategies; the process of drawing as a strategy of architectural work; the construction of a drawing process and Learners Journey as a sequentially mapped out procedure of work; and the experiencing of drawing in broadening the context to develop a new terroire or theory of drawing. These four aspects of drawing evidence an emergent theory and methodological approach in using drawing to engage with cultural and architectural conversations, materially. Through the process of rupture, this text positions drawing at the heart of a reframing of the interactions with things and experiences of material agency and material imagination through the act of drawing. Rupturing as a method therefore offers the potential for significant and insightful opportunities in understanding the role of drawing and its ability to further MET theory's main aims. The paper also puts forward the notion that the role of drawing more broadly may sit along materiality, material turns and its techniques to interact into and through a wider anthropological study of drawing as a comparative study in the materiality of art; the way drawing affects our learning, our thinking and our understanding of culture and matter.
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Drawing thinking: Illustration as pedagogy
Authors: Jason Hirons and Mel BrownAbstractThe idea of Illustration Pedagogy initially came out of Transformative Learning Theory – a learning theory that incites students to challenge their own assumptions – and utilizes ideas of drawing & writing, making & thinking in the learning journeys of our students from the first day that they arrive on the course. This project explores the way, as lecturers, we can approach the design and delivery of taught modules in ways that develop the skills of student illustrators, their knowledge and understanding through critical writing practices which combine drawing and illustration. The projects discussed here are across levels 4, 5 and 6 on the undergraduate BA (Hons) Illustration degree at Plymouth College of Art. Creative education by necessity requires a creative approach to pedagogy, and we have developed the Illustration Pedagogy project using the tools and contexts of illustration itself in the teaching and learning on the programme.
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The grey space in the middle: Using drawing to meet the object half way
Authors: Martin Morris and Paddy MolloyAbstractThrough the concept defined by David Bowie as the 'grey space in the middle', a theoretical space through which the meaning and worth of a piece of art is defined, this text looks at how Martin Morris and Paddy Molloy teach and develop processes towards drawing on the Illustration Animation BA (Hons) course, part of the Design School at Kingston School of Art (KSA), Kingston University. Their pedagogic process is examined through a set of six images made by three different students (covering life drawing, copying, memory drawing and Virtual Reality [VR]) alongside the respective students' responses to their work and their experience of drawing the images. Through the mental and physical space between observer and object in which new ideas are generated and filtered through the myriad of internal and external processes involved with drawing, Morris and Molloy analyse and investigate this 'grey space' with the aim to quantify the interaction and outcomes that occur between viewer (student/tutor) and object (drawing) and furthermore consider insights gleamed from the process and questions raised. By sharing these observations this paper seeks to demonstrate that the interaction that happens in this theoretical space between viewer and object, which is the malleable mental and physical space between, can be considered as fundamental to both the development of visual communication and how we come to read works of art. This can be applied to the teaching of drawing enabling students to gain insight, ask questions, inform their understanding of draughtsmanship and discover their individual voice.
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