Introduction to Drawing - Week 5
Last Monday, we sadly had to postpone the last of the ‘Introduction to Drawing’ workshops, with Adult Learning Shetland.
This session was focused on the huge changes in drawing in more modern times.
Since roughly the beginning of the 1900's, art has been liberated from almost every one of its past traditions, and conventions have been challenged. In response to various changes in society, modern art has been playful, controversial, has sought to confuse, fracture or expand our views of reality.
Many traditional drawing techniques were de-constructed or subverted by artists in the 20th century and definitions of ‘drawing’ were re-defined. For example:
Post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat used shaded contë crayon on textured paper to create drawings which seem to shimmer and shift on the page. The forms and figures in his work are in constant flux - they’re not fixed in line with certainty. Drawing had broken free of line being the principle way to show form.
Edgar Degas studied subjects such as racecourse scenes and dancers, and was a master of capturing movement and modern life using dynamic shapes and lines. His drawings also teach us about how forms can relate to the edges of a drawing in interesting ways, and how creative use of cropping can give different dynamics effects. Artists were now free in drawing to use unusual and sometimes challenging compositions.
Inspired by Japanese use of space, Van Gogh used perspective in fascinating ways. He ‘flattened’ some receding lines, which sometimes resulted in distortion or elongation of elements, often with the effect of psychological intensity - viewing Van Gogh’s work often feels like we’re looking into his mind. Artists in Western-Europe now no longer had to draw in strict perspective, a convention that had been in place since the Renaissance.
Symbolist drawings by, for example, Odilon Redon included imagined and strange figures, or lyrical and ambiguous forms and patterns – reminiscent of visual reality but given extra symbolic meaning, like the experience of dreaming. Their work would later influence Surrealist artists. Drawing now also sought to explore what was ‘beyond reality’, beyond the purely visual.
Cubism was a revolutionary new style which transformed everyday objects, landscapes, and people into geometric shapes. This fragmentation of the visual world meant that objects seemed to unfold into each other and into their surroundings. Cubists had broken free of the geometricized structure of perspective, which had been a mainstay in art since the Renaissance.
Cubists also embraced non-traditional media. Mass produced and not-specialist artist materials such as newspaper cuttings and found papers found their way into Cubist collage-drawings.
The Surrealists are known for their ‘drawing games’ - drawing methods which could release subconscious imagery, dreamlike forms and figures, and the strange and sublime. Their methods often allowed the element of chance to influence the evolution of drawings, generating a strangeness which made the viewer look at reality differently. Their simple and accessible (but very experimental) drawing games, which playfully subverted reality, also challenged the elitism of traditional academic drawing. The Surrealists also sought to explore opposing parts of human experience: the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious.
Contemporary artists have now even further extended elements of chance in their work to question authorship, and whether a drawing has to always be ‘a product of the artist’s hand’. The materiality of drawing itself has even been rebelled against – artists now often make ‘drawings’ which have no fixed material outcome at all, but are simply a process, an act, an idea or a performance. Because of artists who have worked with drawing in more conceptual ways, today our basic definition of drawing as ‘use of line to make a picture’ can be interpreted and experimented with in any number of interesting new ways.
Here are just a few drawing activities to explore how drawing traditions have been de-constructed and challenged.
DRAWING SOUND - Close your eyes and try to draw the sounds of the room. Imagine how louder sharper sounds or softer quieter sounds might be suggested by different kinds of marks (right).
MAKING CHANCE - Take a piece of scrap paper and scrunch it up. You now have a kind of paper sculpture with lots of by-chance creases and patterns. Draw your paper sculpture, imagining how the peaks and valleys could be a mountainous landscape (below)
ISLAND DRAWINGS - Trace a section from a map – lines and shapes of lochs, islands, rivers and hill contours. Turn your traced shapes and lines into an imaginative drawing, perhaps a creature, a figure or a landscape (see first image, above).
