An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays by leading artists and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analysing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Writing on Drawing is a forward-looking text that provokes enquiry and shared understanding of contemporary drawing research and practice. An essential resource for artists, scientists, designers and engineers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline.
An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays by leading artists and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analysing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Writing on Drawing is a forward-looking text that provokes enquiry and shared understanding of contemporary drawing research and practice. An essential resource for artists, scientists, designers and engineers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline.
Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research
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Overview
An increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays by leading artists and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analysing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Writing on Drawing is a forward-looking text that provokes enquiry and shared understanding of contemporary drawing research and practice. An essential resource for artists, scientists, designers and engineers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841502540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/10/2008 |
| Series: | Readings in Art and Design Education |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 194 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Steve Garner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University. Research interests include the use of representations in design (particularly sketching), usability in product design, and computer supported collaborative designing. He is Director of the international Drawing Research Network.
Steve Garner is a senior lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University and director of the International Drawing Research Network.
Read an Excerpt
Writing on Drawing
Essays on Drawing Practice and Research
By Steve Garner
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2008 NSEADAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-254-0
CHAPTER 1
Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research
Steve Garner
For a while now, I've been thinking about drawing research. I think about it when I'm drawing and I think about it when I'm researching. And there's the rub. What are the characteristics of drawing research that distinguish it from the broad phenomena of drawing and research? If there is to exist a drawing research community, what activities do we engage in that distinguish us from those engaged in the many manifestations of drawing and other types of creative practice? Do we claim a distinct knowledge base, is it an issue of approach or method or do we think about drawing differently? What types of outputs might a drawing researcher generate; drawings, writings, both, something else? This chapter takes the form of an enquiry. It offers many questions and few answers but in doing so it seeks to begin a consolidation of a foundation for drawing research. It acknowledges that drawing research is a very young, some might say immature, discipline. It would be too ambitious for one chapter to seek to bring any maturity to the discipline but it does appeal for the drawing research community to look up into the middle distance to identify what might be done through our work and our discussions to bring about a maturity. One group of related questions that inspired this piece concern the desirability or otherwise of an agenda for drawing research, and of what such an agenda might consist. This has not proved straightforward to address. It's clear that people who make drawings, or those with an interest in the drawing outputs and processes of others, have their own personal motivations. Some of these say they have no need for a broader articulation of a drawing agenda. Perhaps they are suspicious of anything that might work to suppress their personal creativity, insight or uniqueness. But is an agenda merely a crutch for those who cannot formulate their own research enquiry? I offer an alternative perspective. The definition of possible agenda items has, for me, become an important objective but perhaps even more important, as preparation, is the stimulation of a critical discourse that embraces the notion of an agenda for drawing research. So this chapter is concerned as much with critical discourse as an agenda. However, I do offer some thoughts on a possible agenda. One that is flexible rather than prescriptive, one that facilitates dialogue and constructive comparisons across diverse activities, an agenda that might assist the construction of a shared knowledge base of, for example, issues, principles, priorities and working methods of drawing research.
Drawing and research
When I first became interested in drawing research, as a postgraduate student in the early 1980s, I rather naively identified two communities. I saw drawing makers – artists, designers, scientists and many others – who made drawings for a variety of reasons. I also identified a group of people who studied these outputs – perhaps so as to distil their functionality and to incorporate this into curricula for schools or colleges of art (as they invariably were in those days). The publications of the time on drawing seemed to reinforce this basic categorisation; the many 'how to' books offering step-by-step guidance on developing drawing skills were clearly (to me anyway) outputs of the drawing makers and while the outputs of the drawing study-ers were more diverse including exhibition catalogues, books and papers on, for example, art therapy, anthropology and studies of children's drawing, they were clearly (again, in my mind) not written by drawing makers. In 1982 I came across a book by William Kirby Lockard who set out to explain 'why' designers draw as well as 'how' they draw. Immediately I became aware of an entirely different paradigm for drawing research within which thinking about drawing and thinking through drawing exhibited relationships that I hadn't previously considered. Once thinking had taken centre stage, a raft of earlier publications dealing with relationships between perception, conception and representation made more sense including Rawson's seminal text simply titled Drawing, Arnheim's Visual Thinking and going back to Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing.
Today a more extensive drawing research community exists but we still wrestle with the relationship between drawing and research. In the twenty-first century we find ourselves building drawing research on a foundation of understanding laid down over several centuries by painters, architects, critics, natural scientists, social scientists, historians and social reformers amongst many others. In 1989 David Thistlewood noted the 'extraordinary diversity of research activities in the field of drawing which have been taking place mainly (though not only) in Europe, North America and Australia over several decades'. But what use are we making of our accumulating research culture? Does it inform our new contributions? Very few people, if any, working more that fifty years ago would have thought to refer to their work as 'drawing research'. They may have said they were drawing; they may have said they were researching; they might even have said, as Leonardo did, that they were searching through drawing, but the term 'drawing research' is relatively new. Is drawing also drawing research? Well the simple, but not particularly helpful, answer is yes and no. Some drawing activity is intended to be research, other drawing activity is not. Expression and enquiry are often closely bound together in the creative process – particularly in drawing – and it is not always possible to tell from the outputs whether a drawing was made as research or not. The use of drawing to explore ideas is well accepted. Artists and designers make and modify drawings as part of their creative process. Often these are intended as fleeting representations of possible futures before the time-consuming and costly tasks of converting a selected idea/sketch into a tangible artefact – a painting, an item of jewellery, a building – is begun. Scientists too model futures through their diagrammatic representations. What they have in common is the way drawing supports a personal dialogue of enquiry and conjecture whilst offering the opportunity for others to engage with ideas through the representation. In this sense drawing is clearly part of a research process.
A small sidestep to a recent thread of discussion on the email forum of the Drawing Research Network might be useful here. This particular thread concerned the role and nature of life drawing in universities and schools of art. Early in the discussion Margaret Mayhew made reference to a recent PhD thesis by Karen Wallis. This PhD took the form of an investigation into the transformational and interpretative processes between looking at a naked body, the construction of a representation and its observation by others. As Mayhew summed up, this was research into 'what it is that is obscured or left out in the process of viewing the nude painting (or drawing) as another person – exploring drawing as a means of tracing that act of spectatorship and recognition'. Mayhew goes on to comment:
It has really inspired me to keep thinking of ways in which life drawing can be practiced as a critical and reflective form of investigating ourselves and the way we encounter the world around us and other human beings – rather than a fixed recitation of rigid conventions that foreclose any possibility of challenge or surprise.
So drawing research not only informs practice it can inspire it too. The questions and challenges articulated by others can stimulate the critical and reflective capacity that is seen as essential to practice.
Perhaps it is unsatisfactory to represent drawing research by reference to a written PhD thesis – or even a written comment on an internet conference. The danger lies in consolidating the belief that to be drawing research a drawing activity or drawing output has to be converted into, or accompanied by, some form of verbal or written explanation. Drawing research presents a powerful opportunity to demonstrate the ability to generate new knowledge about the visual and to communicate this through visual imagery – to challenge, as John Berger did three decades ago the assumption of supremacy of the written word in visual research (and I say this deliberately in a collection of written essays). As a community we reveal our priorities and values in the way we represent our findings. Yes, there will always be a place for the book or conference paper but there might also be other rigorous, innovative, perhaps non-verbal ways of disseminating drawing research and we have a duty to explore these. We need to better embrace imagery in our drawing thinking – in what some artists and designers might call 'problem finding' and 'problem solving', although what form drawing research problems might have and how they might be 'solved' is open to debate.
As drawing researchers in the twenty-first century we find ourselves part of a broad and diverse community whose focus is our visual culture. It's understandable that many drawing researchers are directly involved in the culture of making and teaching art and design – perhaps as fine artists, sculptors, graphic designers or architects – but there are others outside of this ring. In Working Images, an interesting collection of essays by various visual anthropologists published in 2004, the role of drawing in their research emerges clearly. Afonso, for example, highlights situations where anthropologists make drawings as part of their data gathering in the field in New Guinea and Africa. Drawing is presented as offering anthropologists a 'catalyst for observation, a path to reflexivity and a key to promote social interaction with local informants'. She illustrates her point with a quotation from Manuel João Ramos, an artist and anthropological researcher:
When I travel alone, I cherish the feeling that time can be joyfully wasted. The act of drawing is a self-referential form of spending time. On the other hand, making drawings is a rather benign way of observing social behaviour; both local people and fellow travellers tend to react to my drawings in mixed ways where curiosity, availability and suspicion overlap. By drawing I provoke modes of interaction that humanise me in other people's eyes.
Some artists have adopted this anthropological approach to engage people in creating and modifying sketches, thus involving them in the process of constructing discourse and assisting the process of interpreting memory regarding, for example, social changes. Unlike the situation described earlier where drawing is used to support personal and internal creative thinking, here drawing is a tool for unlocking and externalising the understanding of others.
Establishing a critical discourse
The drawing research community is beginning to display some indicators of domain maturity; there are international drawing conferences, journals, professors of drawing, and PhD students. There are links between this community and other, more established research domains. But the drawing research community also displays characteristics of immaturity. In some ways it resembles design research a few decades ago in the disparate nature of its knowledge, the lack of common reference points, and the variable quality of analysis and articulation. As Sebastian Macmillan pointed out in his review of the 2005 symposium of the Design Research Society:
We have all the components of a maturing academic domain (but) on the other hand we find ourselves reiterating the fundamentals: explaining what research is, having to justify it, and engaging at a very elementary level in the endless dispute whether design practice is a research activity.
Drawing research today exhibits tendencies towards isolation, introspection and repetition as well as development, progression and a growing sense of community. One of the key indicators of a domain's maturity is its ability to sustain a critical discourse and partly this relies on the existence of a suitable infrastructure. As a relatively new domain we don't have a critical mass of participants, we don't have the range of journals nor the number of conferences, in short we don't possess the infrastructure for attracting and supporting a community. That's not to say that individuals or local groups are not making significant contributions. It's just that these individuals and groups rarely operate as a worldwide community. Potential contributors to a critical discourse are not being exposed to each other at a level and with a frequency that they could be. This was one of the aims of the Drawing Research Network (www.drawing.org.uk) when it was established in 2002 and its email discussion forum supplied under the JISC mail system now supports an international dialogue between hundreds of drawing researchers. Whilst there is discussion on the forum we are really only taking our first steps to scope out a critical discourse and establishing the framework for such a discourse has not proved easy. Perhaps we need to have some form of meta-discussion as a preparation for the discussion – a critical discourse about our critical discourse! Some drawing researchers question the value of it, particularly its value to drawing practice, as this contributor states:
Critical discourse is as valid an activity as any other, but it is not clear it is a requirement for artists (except to get funding). Is it not the case that theorising has become just another thing that art students are taught to do, in the same way that once they were all taught observational drawing? A few will excel at the theoretical game, as a few did at traditional drawing; most will wonder what the point of it is. Critical discourse is just another fashion in art – artists don't have to get involved with it anymore than they need to use oil paint to be 'real' artists.
Other contributors have pointed out the value of building our own understandings on the foundations laid by others. More importantly there appears to be opportunities for critical discourse to embrace drawing practice as this note in reply to the one above suggests:
My point is that the artist should not understand first but, by exploring, come to understanding. Not restrict himself to a process merely because it is traditional or regarded as proper, but push for a clearer experience of what drawing/painting/art is by finding for himself the extent of his/its possibilities.
The inherent tensions in a critical discourse between artistic practice and intellectual analysis (in this case in a thread of discussion on life drawing) were concisely summed up by Alan McGowan a day after the above postings:
I think there are two points here. Firstly that the experience of the art education journey in historical terms (from workshops, academies, ateliers, colleges/polytechnics and into universities) is not a comfortable one and many people feel that much has been lost on the way. It is very possible that the priorities and values of universities are not consistent with those of artists (who for instance may be, possibly must be, intimately engaged with sensual and emotional considerations rather than rational ones). This 'ill-fit' can reveal itself in many disgruntled issues ranging from funding, research status and 'over-intellectualisation' to room provision and life drawing facilities.
I agree that we suffer from a lack of intellectual discourse both in terms of our academic standing and (more crucially from my point of view) in the depth of understanding of our field which it would give to students and practitioners. Put simply my experience of life drawing is that it is perceived in a shallow way. It's complexities and potentials lie 'hidden' below the surface; while this is the case students lack the inspiration to pursue it to a deeper level; it loses it's drive and the form itself is in danger. Even the vocabulary associated with drawing is being eclipsed. I can take a group of students who have supposedly been studying life drawing for two years and confidently predict that most will not be familiar with terms like negative space, gesture, contour, centre of gravity, contrapposto or have a good grasp of tonal values. These terms though practical are not opposed to intellectual rigour but in my view welded to it in the process of picture-making.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Writing on Drawing by Steve Garner. Copyright © 2008 NSEAD. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Preface,
Foreword – Re: Positioning Drawing Anita Taylor,
Introduction Steve Garner,
Chapter 1 Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research Steve Garner,
Chapter 2 Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing Deanna Petherbridge,
Chapter 3 Drawing Connections Richard Talbot,
Chapter 4 Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Usefulness Ernst van Alphen,
Chapter 5 Pride, Prejudice and the Pencil James Faure Walker,
Chapter 6 Reappraising Young Children's Mark-making and Drawing Angela Anning,
Chapter 7 New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes Towards an Appreciation of Ideational Drawing Terry Rosenberg,
Chapter 8 Embedded Drawing Angela Eames,
Chapter 9 Recording: And Questions of Accuracy Stephen Farthing,
Chapter 10 Drawing: Towards an Intelligence of Seeing Howard Riley,
Chapter 11 Digital Drawing, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Journalism Anna Ursyn,
Notes on Contributors,
Index,