The Brooklyn Rail

What is drawing? It seems so obvious until I notice that it applies to personal sketches, completed artworks, diagrams, watercolors, and some softwares. It is a fundamental practice, but dismissed in the historical hierarchy of the arts as the simplest form, and so low value. It’s deeply personal, but a professional necessity. It’s linear or gestural. Rule-bound or tender. Reproducible or singular. Official or intimate. Dry or fluid. Two-dimensional or dynamic. It moves across paper, wall, computer screen, in pencil, ink, pixel, monochrome, or full of color.

Drawing’s material developments shift from rock and natural inks, like blood, to the incredible technological development of papyrus, wax tablets, and paper in second century China. Tools to write and draw evolve together: silver points, the fountain pen, the graphite pen. Early graphic tablets and software weren’t designed for eyes to be fixed on the tip of the stylus, but on the computer screen, where the artist could see what the lines appear in real time. In 1977, Daniel J. Sandin and Thomas Defanti created the Sayre data glove to capture hand movements, translated into digital signals. That glove rendered possible simulation softwares for drawing in virtual reality. The confines of gravity disappeared with Gravity Sketch and 3D modeling so artists could work with hard and heavy materials.

The word “drawing” comes from the Germanic “dragan” or “tragan,” meaning “to carry, bear, bring, to wear, to own, to suffer, endure,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED); perhaps that’s why the action of drawing can feel like the “pulling, traction, attraction, extraction” of an idea and form into a picture, onto a surface. The OED proceeds to identify various applications of the term, appearing in J. Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement (1530) as “Drawyng of an ymage, portraicture.” That human focus would take a while to change.

Historically, artists in training spent years copying different types of strokes, then drawings, then parts of the body, before ever moving to full figures. They learned anatomy and proportion. They practiced the stringencies of perspective through making perpendicular and intersecting lines, angles and curves (over and over again, as anyone who has ever suffered through single point—let alone two- or three-point—perspective knows too well). They drew from casts to learn modeling and shadow. The sight-size method involved plumb lines, mirrors, and levels to analyze and check the drawing’s accuracy; it was considered a scientific approach to train eye and mind for rendering the observed world. Only then would apprentices have the skills necessary to work from the live figure or develop their own composition for a painting.

Line work and the amorphous tendencies of color made them distinct albeit complementary studies. Joshua Reynolds claimed at the Royal Academy in 1769 that “Painting comprises both drawing and colouring,” because an aptitude with mixing paints required knowledge of color combinations. Drawing served other arts, predominantly painting, although even some types of that medium were considered drawings: “We can readily understand how paintings in water colours came to be called simply ‘drawings’” (in a book by T. J. Gullick & J. Timbs, titled Painting Popularity). This confused things, so monochrome was the rule again—as James Smith wrote in 1815 for Panorama of Science and Art: “Drawing, strictly speaking, includes only the art of forming the resemblance of objects by means of outlines; but it is usual to call those performances drawings, where only a single colour, as Indian ink, is employed to produce shades.”

The graphic orientation of drawing meant even photography, previously dubbed heliography by Joseph Niépce, indicated sun writing or drawing, since the Greek γραφή (graphê) meant both activities. But, more on that medium next month.

The medium, however, isn’t the only message. As Carla Gannis once said to me, “artistic intervention can remodel entrenched tropes into new perspectives.” Camille Pissarro encouraged his son Lucien to bring eye and hand together through drawing: “it is essential to have known forms in the eye and in the hand. It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” This persistent practice shifts drawing from a way of doing to a way of thinking.

How does visualizing in 2D contribute to producing 3D or even 4D? Nancy Baker Cahill had a ready answer in our interview a few years ago:

When I draw I am always concerned with light in space—how I imagine it illuminating a form, where and how it refracts, what it reveals, what it obscures. All of these considerations and impulses are only amplified when I’m creating in the third and fourth dimensions. Ever since I began playing with abstraction in my drawings in 2010, I felt I was extracting forms from a void, teasing them into daylight.

Her comment highlights the handling of light and space, those ephemeral but crucial elements that an education in drawing helps us see, rather than merely individualizing the objects in the picture.

We associate drawing with mark-making, but what happens if it isn’t exclusively a thing, an output, a final product? The mention of drawing generates a discourse, a way of invoking particular qualities, meaningful histories, material expectations. It can enforce a set of values, or break through the lineage of assumptions to unfold surprising suggestions.

Though we think of so many arts in an expanded field, Hans Dickel noted the same for this humble practice when he published Drawing in the Expanded Field (1960). The back jacket describes how “postmodern drawing is able to respond adequately, polymorphically, and contemporaneously to the visual cultures of media civilization.” He starts with the idea of drawings as works on paper, and identifies them as “lighter” than other artforms: their immediate proximity to the artistic concept allowed insights for artist and viewer unavailable when entrapped by, in his day, a dogmatic art discourse. Something about drawing reveled in and revealed the affective conditions of media in a manner that other practices foreclosed with their adamant narratives.

Attending the recent Patricia Orden Memorial Symposium about works on paper reminded me that introductory drawing classes often use newsprint tablets. That’s not just a surface but a medium indicative of mass media and mass reproduction. At the Whitney Biennial, Jasmin Sian’s works have all the delicacy of lace but are cut from deli, fast food, and doughnut-bag paper.

We are living in a moment concerned with defining media and art practices. Our ecological condition makes us pay more attention to materiality. Drawing seems to be able to do all that and yet have fun with it. Many have appreciated the whimsy apparent in drawings and illustrations, despite coinciding serious concerns, at both the Whitney Biennial (consider the work of Emilie Louise Gossiaux or Taína H. Cruz) and the New Museum’s New Humans: Memories of the Future (many, but particularly Goshka Macuga’s Before the Beginning and After the End: Transhumanism made with the aid of a robot developed by Patrick Tresset).

Drawing manages to be so many things, but maybe it’s also a mindset of discovery. Duncan Green wrote a lovely blog post for Oxfam, “Back to the Old Drawing Board: the power of humour in social change,” where he described the object significance of drawing, but then encouraged us to let it go: “Instead of simply naming an issue on a whiteboard or slide, scribble a shapeless blob and label it. Instantly it becomes a thing. A thing with heft. A concrete reality, instead of an ethereal abstraction to be read and forgotten. Then, dare to laugh.”

Green describes a rather horrific historical moment that led to a New Yorker cartoon and a now popular expression. It appeared in March 1941, less than a year after two United States Army bombers from Mitchel Field locked wings in the air over Bellerose, Queens and crashed to the ground on June 17, 1940. The USA’s flailing attempts to achieve former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hopes to be the “arsenal of democracy” (a phrase worth keeping in mind), were mocked by Adolf Hitler’s sidekick Hermann Göring when he said Americans are only apt to build “refrigerators and razor blades.” With World War II raging beyond the US shores, the cartoon suggests many possible interpretations. It depicts a military airplane that has crashed and is on fire in the background. Military personnel and rescue workers are rushing toward the wreckage. In contrast, an engineer, carrying a roll of blueprints, is walking casually away from the scene with the caption: “Well, back to the old drawing board.”

The now common phrase indicates a plan or idea has been unsuccessful and the need of a new one. I am not espousing an engineering worldview, especially given its accounting in Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People (highly recommend!) about working at one of those appalling global, yet globally indifferent, social media companies. We must care for the crashes and catastrophes in our midst. But perhaps in addition, while recognizing the many problems with hegemonic systems, we might consider going back to the drawing board, too. Whether with pencil or padlet, eye or ink, we might, however, draw the space and light that keeps drawing, and us, buoyant enough to persist. The drawing board is always there, and everywhere, if your eye is moved to see it.