Books and Articles

21.4.19

Guardian Online News article.

‘Make your Mark: the enduring joy of drawing’, Laura Cumming, Art Critic. Sunday 21 April

I was delighted to come across this timely article in the Guardian about drawing today by the Art Critic for the Guardian Newspaper. Cummings talks about how she believes that in the 1990’s the notion and practice of drawing largely fell out of favour, particularly at Art colleges and in the art world in general:

‘Conceptual art, performance art, installation, video, film and digital art: they all made drawing (supposedly) redundant.’

She links this with a comment attributed to be from Picasso, who apparently said that it took him:

‘…a lifetime to draw like a child’

This child-like drawing aim is the antithesis of drawing as a ‘taught’ skill, thereby also effectively dismissing, for himself, the much revered style of many drawings created by artists of the Renaissance period… Michaelangelo, Rafael and Da Vinci, for example. Picasso’s comments also seem to undermine ideas about the importance of drawing as an observational, learning, enquiry and discovery tool in a scientific context. Perhaps his notion of drawing might relate more to instinct and feelings.

She references more than 47 different artists for their drawing abilities in this article and has many live links in it, which were interesting to follow in their own right.  The artists create a wide variety of drawing styles, from conventional to more abstract. It was lovely to be introduced to the names of artists I have never heard of, spanning the last 400 years or so. I have made note of these so that I have the option of following up on some of them in more depth at later stages.

One particular artist link I briefly followed was for Kathe Kollwitz who was initially a painter, but later returned to drawing as her oeuvre. The monochrome aspect of the drawing media she chose adds weight and extra dimensions to the power and impact of her drawings, which focus primarily on working class women in the early twentieth century.   

Cummings finishes the article by simply, and refreshingly states that drawing is:

‘…the freest and first of all the art forms’.

Whatever our own personal understanding of ‘drawing’ is, and the value of it to ourselves, will no doubt be explored in more depth on this drawing course. The journey continues…

References:

Cumming, L. (21 April, 2019), “Make your Mark: the enduring joy of drawing”, [online] Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/21/make-your-mark-enduring-appeal-of-drawing-draw-art-fair-london-saatchi-laura-cumming? [Accessed 21 Apr.2019]

15.5.2019

SAA ‘Paint’ Magazine May 2019

One article that I found particularly interesting, and I learned from was ‘Figuring It Out’ by Paul Vousden . It was about ‘tips and tricks on how to paint people in perspective’.

Vousden talked about how, when you are standing and viewing people who are also standing, then their heads remain at roughly your eye level, however far away they are or appear to be. The same is true if you are sitting and looking at other people sitting. Their heads remain on your eye level.

However, if you are sitting and looking at people who are standing, they appear to get smaller as they get further away from us. The difference in this case is that the figures’ head appears to move down and their feet also move up, within converging perspective.

Reference:

Vousden, Paul (May 2019), ‘Figuring It Out’, p24-25, SAA Paint Magazine