2readings

To Draw is to be Human

1.drawing can even be used as a global visual language when verbal communication fails.

2.drawing is part of our interrelation to our physical environment, recording in and on it, the presence of the human.

3.Drawing is part of what it means to be human-indeed

4.The first is the conceptual, theoretical discourse of drawing, in which line, as an abstract mark , 1 and its relation to the ground enjoy a symbolic potency that dates back to the mediums primitive origins .

5.In a sense , drawing is nothing more than that , and in its eternal incompletion always re-enacts imperfection and incompletion .

6.Then there is the other , elaborately cultured aspect of drawing , not based upon a theoretical or philosophical understanding of what drawing is per se but on the areas of human experience that drawing has come to be associated with : intimacy , informality ,authenticity ( or at least with authentic inauthenticity )，immediacy , subjectivity , history , memory , narrative .

7.Drawing is a feeling , an attitude that is betrayed in its handling as much as in the materials used.

8．Recent theoretical writing about drawing tends to concentrate on the conceptual and process-oriented nature of the medium and hence ignores a very prevalent narrative-led , associative , and subjective tendency in contemporary drawing . It is necessary , however , to explore beyond the primal ontological qualities of drawing in order to look at other reasons for drawing’s recent ascendancy . Described crudely , contemporary art currently follows two main trajectories : the post -Conceptual and the neo-romantic . Crucially , it is within the field of drawing that the inherent tensions and contradictions of these two directions are intriguingly played out .

Drawing has a primal and elemental character : it enjoys a mythic status as the earliest and most immediate form of image making .

The primal qualities of drawing are also conjured through the simplicity and purity of the blank sheet of paper , while the act of drawing itself betokens honesty and transparency-all the marks and tracks , whether deliberate or not .

Drawing is improvisatory and always in motion , in the sense that it can proceed ad infinitum without closure or completion , continually part of a process that is never-ending.

While painting completely obscures its ground creating the illusion that the ground is not there at all, drawing enjoys a very different relationship to its background .

a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing . The graphic line confers an identity on its background .

In defining the difference between painting and drawing , according to Benjamin's logic , the watercolor stands squarely between the two.

drawing exists at another level within the human psyche-it is a locus for signs by which we map the physical world , but it is itself the pre-eminent sign of being .Therefore , drawing is not a window on the world ,but a device for understanding our place within the universe .

Drawing has an innate poignancy about it . The writer Michael Newman points out that.

As Newman puts it , " Drawing , with each stroke , re-enacts desire and loss . Its peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea it prefigures .”

Richard serra says" Anything you can project as expressive in terms of drawing-ideas , metaphors , emotions , language structures results from the act of doing ? 14 Artists who were keen to challenge the material and substantive qualities of the art work prized this tautologous or solipsistic quality of drawing , its eternal incompletion , or the fact that it so perfectly enacted / recorded the actions of the artist.

Soi Lewitt's drawings from the 1960s show mathematical precision in execution , demonstrating his notion cf the idea as machine to make art . but at the same time his compositions are done by hand .

Critic Bernice Rose describes the goal of Conceptual art as the ambition to return to the roots of experience , to create the primary experience of symbolization uncontaminated by the attitudes attached to traditional visual odes , whether representational or abstract "

In 1966 Mel Bochner organized an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in New York called " Working Drawings and other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.

Working Drawings . "is often credited as being the first exhibition of Conceptual art , a fact that places drawing at the center of this deconstruction of both the art object and exhibition practice itself . But the show also marks the moment that drawing took on the form of the paper ready-made( Judds bill , for example ) . It also represents the moment when technology ( the photocopier ) allowed drawing an easy way to lose its authenticity as a work of art.

Orozco wants us to see the world differently as a result of encountering his art . Drawins's proximity to thought is ever present in its meaning : as art critic Jean Fisherpoints out , " the act of drawing makes possible the magi -cal identity between thought and action , because to draw is the quickest medium and can therefore protect the intensity of thought .

The connection between drawing and thought becomes explicit : suggestive of the intangible . the mutable , the hesitant , the fleeting qualities of both.

As the sculptor Henry Moore put it , " Drawing is a means of finding your way about things , and a way of experiencing , more quickly than sculpture allows , certain tryouts and attempts.

Perhaps specifically due to drawing's critical and theoretical invisibility in the 1980 , and therefore its continued lowly status , it made the perfect arena for artists to explore hitherto repressed notions of authenticity and expression , narrative , the unruly , and the irrational.

As part of this return , narrative and associations with the literary have been powerful engines for there turn of drawing .

The current return of drawing has strong links with a resurgence of Romanticism within contemporary art practice .

Drawing , through its loose association with personal unfettered expression , ls the medium through which the past has often spoken most clearly and directly .

Artists have created various alter egos to act as fictional authors or as alibis to avoid accusations or as naivete in their expressive and narrative-based drawin8s , an act driven by the continued disparagement of narrative within art as an anti-modernist device .

Drawing provides the locus and means for this reconnection with aspects of culture that were often repressed under high Modernism .

In conclusion , drawing offers us the most extraordinary range of possibilities : it is a map of time recording the actions of the maker. It is as Michael Newman writes, a record of " lived temporality “23 and in the sense that a drawing is by essence always incomplete . A line always suggests a continuation ad infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity . A drawing enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. Its very nature is unstable , balanced equally between pure abstraction and representation ; its virtue is its fluidity . A drawing can be highly controlled and delicate , an act of homage , redolent of personal memory .history or desire , or it can be automatic , responding to irrational elements or chance encounters of materials,moving again from being an instrument of the divine to something outside of the human As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy observes in her endnotes to Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook , " The dot , extended into a graphic curve, cannot come to rest on the last page of the Sketchbook.It urges on to further explorations , both in space and spirit " 2 Drawing chimes with the needs of the moment allowing us to dream an endless dream.

The article connects painting with people, and tells the concept and basis of painting, as well as its relationship with background, human psychology, time and space. It contains many artists' ideas and views on painting. These artist related comments will be a good learning and writing resource. And feel the uniqueness of painting from various angles. It also shows many artists' practices and attempts in painting. Let people feel the history of painting and the possibility of creation is so rich. Painting meets the needs of the times, satisfies people's desires and promotes the progress of the times.

Part2 Research

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