Taking drawing seriously

Those of you having to work on COP3 or simply just thinking about developing a proposal for it at the end of the year should start following and or joining the Drawing Research Network. click

By keeping in touch with the network you can check what is going on in the drawing world and discover artists that can support your case study selections or help you with position statements. For instance the DRN showcase at the moment includes drawings by Silvia Simões which are on exhibition at the Galeria Fernando Santos in Oporto. You probably don’t have the time and money to pop over but the drawings are very interesting. Drawing predominantly in black and white, the artist uses materials such as graphite and oil pastel as well as collage and objects to evoke elements of nature that affect both the conscious and unconscious mind. Simões tries to evoke the remnants of memory that survive after a journey. There is a conscious avoidance of working from photographs, instead drawings are made from faint impressions and then worked into until they are like landscapes or natural forms themselves. Some of you may find echoes of your own working processes in Simões’ work. If so you may have found an artist that would make a good case study.

Silvia Simões

The other place you ought to visit on a regular basis is Tracy. Click Tracy is the name that is given to an electronic journal and virtual gallery dedicated to the presentation of drawing and the discussion of drawing practice.

For instance one of Tracy’s research themes is Phenomonology and I’m very aware that some of you are interested in writing positioning statements around the idea of the trace.  Phenomonologists are very interested in how physical experiences are manifested in action and how physical events can be recorded, hence their interest in ‘traces’ of physical actions. This area of research introduces itself with a few quotes all of which could be used in a COP3 statement, e.g. “through the act of drawing we are not only left a trace of the physical act but a trace of the thinking process”

The rising interest in drawing was itself the subject of a paper, see 'The rise of drawing'.

The references below are simply cut and pasted from their research site, going to the experts usually makes life so much easier, but for someone interested in the idea of drawing being a process that leaves traces of certain types of actions, the references below would make a great start to a literature search.  Actually if you look at this list it would be a very good start for any of you thinking about how to write about drawing, the ones I have put into bold in particular are key texts for drawing students.

BAILEY, G.H. 1982, Drawing and the drawing activity: a phenomenological investigation, Thesis (PhD), University of London.

DEWEY, J. 1934, Art as Experience, London: Penguin Books Ltd. 


FARTHING, S. 2005, Dirtying the Paper Delicately, in: University of the Arts, Inaugural Lecture, London, April 26th 2005. 


MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 1964, 1908-1961, The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 


MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 1993, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, in JOHNSON, G. & SMITH, M. ed. 1993, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. pp.76-120. 


MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 2002 (reprinted), The Phenomenology of Perception, London, New York: Routledge. 


MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 2004 (reprinted), The World of Perception, Oxford, New York: Routledge. 


NEWMAN, A. & DE ZEGHER, C. 2003, Conversation. In DE ZEGHER, C. ed. The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Selected from the Tate Collection. London. New York: Tate Publishing & The Drawing Center. 67-81, 165-173, 231-237.

ROSAND, D. 2002, Drawing Acts – studies in graphic expression and representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 


TAYLOR, A. 2008, Re: Positioning Drawing, in GARNER, S. 2008, Writing on Drawing, essays on Drawing Practice and Research, Bristol, Chicago: Intellect Books. pp. 9-12.