Drawing handout no. 1 Fall 2015 Art 20 and Art 22 College of Alameda Instructor: Drew Burgess
The following eight ideas are paraphrased from Philip Rawson’s book Seeing Through Drawing.
Drawing can begin with very simple materials
Children explore the world and create symbols
Children draw to order their world, they do not copy,and they project out to the surface
Drawing gives clues to how the child feels
Drawing combines feelings along with relationships and basic concepts
The world as a whole----being able to ‘see’ the world as a whole may be in part our having learned to see the whole that should be there
Drawing projects inner images and the artists’ deep involvement with those images
Drawings are like maps conveying from different points of view what we call reality
I like the ideas above. When I think back to my enjoyment of drawing it was from many starting points. The surface of a piece of paper itself seemed full of imaginative possibility. Imagination was also looking at things and not drawing, just seeing and wondering. Materials come into play as wonderful instruments with varied properties of expression, from hard lines to soft passages of tone. I think that drawing needs space----the kind of space that allows for a suspension of time--creative time.
These are some of my thoughts..
Seeing….seeing involves being present with where you are. One needs to slow down, to breathe and be conscious of space.
Touch…drawing is a tactile art. We feel drawings in a physical way, as we draw and as we look at drawing. For example, some strokes have a ‘scratchiness’ to them and the viewer feels that quality.
Beauty…our drawings can be what they are, beautiful or not. The subject may be about something quite horrible (Picasso’s Guernicacomes to mind). Artists are people who create beauty from the circumstances of life----a drawing can be beautiful because an artist produces it.
Love…when people speak of the arts they speak of love. This does not mean you need to feel this way, or even think about it. Artists invest a full degree of themselves with passion and it is very much like love because one is so vulnerable----love brings vulnerability right along with it.
Truth… To draw is to connect oneself to a stream of direct expression. Artists speak of ideas such as ‘truth to materials’. Authenticity is something artists value.