Drawing — Introduction

Con­sid­ered to func­tion among the most inti­mate, per­sonal of all arts draw­ing is often defined in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Draw­ing appears to be an act of mark mak­ing, a prod­uct of that act, a vehi­cle for visual expres­sion, a skill of see­ing things as they are (copy­ing real­ity), extract­ing an essence from a drawn object, cre­at­ing fic­tion (eg. draw­ing from imag­i­na­tion) and many more.

What dif­fers draw­ing from other means of expres­sion (espe­cially from paint­ing) are mate­ri­als and tech­niques used but also the func­tion and purpose.

When it’s quite pop­u­lar among artists, design­ers, archi­tects to make prepara­tory sketches in a “trial and error” approach lead­ing usu­ally towards a fin­ished piece; its much less recog­nised to pro­duce eg. a paint­ing as a purely intro­duc­tory mate­r­ial made towards a drawn piece (I mean a draw­ing as a fin­ished art­work).
The his­tory of art is par­tially “respon­si­ble” for that. While art col­leges widely recog­nised draw­ing as a “foun­da­tion of art” and a very use­ful excer­cise in eye/hand train­ing, the prod­ucts them­selves remained often unsigned and were never under­stood as equal to paint­ings, sculp­tures or prints.

Today’s posi­tion of draw­ing is even worse. Dis­cov­ery of pho­tog­ra­phy, cin­e­matog­ra­phy, mass-media and more recently multi-media made a paper-pencil based art a sort of an old-fashioned, hob­by­is­tic inter­est use­ful for kids, some artists (“some” because there’s quite a num­ber of pro­fes­sion­als deal­ing with draw­ing only mar­gin­ally) and peo­ple who just don’t have a cam­era or com­puter around the cor­ner (and they’re in a need of recording/processing some­thing visu­ally).
There are art col­leges (my col­lege is one of them) where draw­ing as an inde­pen­dent sub­ject doesn’t exist, no com­pul­sory classes are func­tion­ing and stu­dents who fin­ish their degree are at con­sid­er­ably var­i­ous lev­els in terms of drawing.

One may ask — why to bother at all (as we, in the 21^st cen­tury, have sophis­ti­cated elec­tronic tools and processes for image mak­ing, record­ing etc)? Lets take a mod­ern cityscape — Isn’t a photo of it (obvi­ously in colour and enhanced on the Pho­to­shop) or dig­i­tally manip­u­lated design (again fab­u­lously colour­ful and “busy”) a more accu­rate account, than a B&W mod­est sketch?

In our times — we like an option of “an instant life” (think about instant cof­fee — quick, more or less the same each time, requir­ing no skill or knowl­edge to make it, an imi­ta­tion of a “real” cof­fee); we’re stuffed with images which are just per­fect (think about the National Geo­graphic breath­tak­ing pho­tos); we have no under­stand­ing and/or expe­ri­ence of a slow, some­times labo­ri­ous and non-efficient crafts­man­ship (like eg. goldsmith’s or shoemaker’s crafts­man­ship).
That all com­bines towards a model-modern-man (an aver­age man) who doesn’t even con­sider him­self draw­ing (writ­ing) not because he thinks he’s got no tal­ent (that’s more “advanced” think­ing) or that draw­ing is “for artists” (writ­ing for writ­ers). He doesn’t even con­sider him­self draw­ing (writ­ing) because he’s got no need for trans­lat­ing real­ity that sur­rounds him into a mean­ing­ful and insight­ful set of lines on a sheet of paper (an insight­ful set of sentences).

We draw what we want to famil­iarise and to under­stand (that’s the main pur­pose of chil­dren’ draw­ings). Reject­ing draw­ing doesn’t mean that we under­stood every­thing, but more that we chose another mode of func­tion­ing in our world — that of sim­pli­fied, defen­sive, focused on sym­bols, stereo­types and mass-images rather than on real sub­jects with their real nature.
This is a point when draw­ing starts to shift towards its deep­est mean­ing. Draw­ing as a visual voice of a par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of an individual’s life.
Phi­los­o­phy of being con­stantly con­scious, insight­ful, skill­ful enough and ready for mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions and trans­la­tions of objects, set­tings, sit­u­a­tions and phe­nom­ena.
This kind of draw­ing is a life-long chal­lenge, under­stood more in terms of extract­ing (or look­ing for, research­ing) senses rather than sim­ply as a tech­nique or a product.