From perception to concept: Why draw?

A Francis Alys storyboard

Those of you undertaking modules within the Fine Art course at LCA and doing these within the drawing strand, may well have asked questions as to why there is such a thing as a drawing strand, especially when so much work done within this area would be hard to define as drawing. People are making films, installations, doing performance, constructing sculpture, making prints and paintings, as well as of course sometimes making drawings.

So why a drawing strand?

Drawing is a way of thinking about the world, and all our thinking begins with an act of perception. Drawing, I would argue, is therefore a special tool that operates not just at the threshold of the journey from perception to concept, but is a tool that continuously reshapes itself to be able to carry and create new thoughts as they morph from what you are aware of, to what you can think about.

Awareness of the world comes from experience, our knowing of this comes initially through the perceptions we receive. However we are always shaping and looking for patterns in these experiences to help form our world view. When you make a drawing by looking at the world, the activity in many ways mirrors what happens when we perceive things. We edit, we select and we take from these perceptions what we need in order to get on with our lives.

As we think more about the world we need shapes for these thoughts, containers that can carry them and drawing has given us a whole range of these containers, each one tailor made and honed into shape, sometimes by thousands of years of use. We tend to think of verbal language as being the key thinking tool that defines us as human beings, but the advantage of a visual language is that it is less prone to the rise of linguistic barriers. I think it is no accident that so many artists are fascinated by the image of the Tower of Babel, a visual image that sums up a fundamental problem with verbal languages.

I’ve been thinking about the issues surrounding what it is to think through drawing over many years. When I left school I worked as a technical draftsman at a local steel works for a while and then after leaving art college as an industrial interior designer, both these occupations although not fine art based, relied heavily on drawing as a way to communicate. The machine components I was drawing were visualised as technical drawings first and then machined, the interiors I designed were in two stages, the first as client visualisations, usually done in perspective and then again as technical drawings so that building teams could follow all the necessary instructions exactly. Drawing was in both these cases, drawing as ‘disegno’. A visualisation of a possibility. 
So how was this similar and yet different to Fine Art drawing? Perception in this case is complex. First of all there is a meeting with a client, a client that would have their own perception of the issues involved. I would then take measurements, talk to as many people as possible involved, from people who would have to work in the area, to senior management, spend time watching activities to see what actually happens in the space, begin technical research, floor loadings, aisle widths, turning circles of any vehicles such as fork lift trucks used in the space, architectural specs etc. and would then look to explore how a particular problem I had been given could be solved within the restraints of both health and safety requirements and technical constraints. This was about problem solving and as drawings were done a dialogue was built between the client and myself, the drawings operating initially as a way of highlighting issues and opening out the communication channels between us. For instance the client might have an idea that was not technically feasible, a drawing can demonstrate this much easier than simply saying it wont work. Sometimes the drawing might be a scribbled plan or view just to get a basic idea across and at another time it might be detailed showing under-floor joists alongside calculations as to what these mean in terms of possible weights of machinery that the client wants located. My perception of the problem would therefore develop and change as I gained more knowledge.

As a fine art student I was taught to think about drawing in a very different way and at the time it felt as if my previous work had no connection to what I was doing in the art college. Drawing was introduced as both a recording of visual perception and as an object in its own right. My first day in an art college in the late 1960s was designed as an experience to get rid of old habits. We were all asked to make a display of drawings done during the summer and these were heavily criticised by the staff, who pointed out how we were all trying to make shaded renderings of things and that the drawings done had no value as images in their own right, as well as them having no conceptual direction. This was at the time very difficult to understand and people who had spent hours trying to perfect their images found it hard to let go of their facility, especially as it was this very facility that had been part of their decision to apply for art college in the first place.

Drawing we were taught had several stories to tell, one about recording perceptions and another about the materials used and another about the experience of a drawing’s making. It was as if we had always been telling lies and now we were asked to speak some sort of truth. A truth to materials, a truth to the role of the body in a drawing’s making and a truth to the way we actively looked. These were hard truths to learn.

What I didn’t realise at the time was how these ideas had been arrived at as a product of Modernism; how the foundation course I was on had developed a certain way of teaching and how this style of teaching had spread, until it was standardised by exam frameworks. Five years on from this experience I would find myself teaching in a similar institution, but this time it was an institution that had been part of the laying down of the rules and many of the staff there had been party to the development of the model. I learnt a lot from the people I found there. They were passionate about the abstract dynamics of form and I learnt both how to much more accurately control a visual language and how to use an associated verbal language which was used to help students recognise what they were looking at. 


However, perhaps because of my previous experiences I always thought this particular approach to what drawing could do was limited and although it helped open out the possibilities for formal expression, other forms of drawing were ignored or not given the prominence they could have had. It also meant that certain types of ideas were prioritised, something that I was fascinated by because of my earlier immersion in Wittgenstein's philosophy. By teaching a certain set of formal approaches to thinking about visual language, the staff were in effect limiting what could be thought, (the limits of my language are the limits of my thought). What was needed was a recognition of drawing as a primary thinking tool, and this required examples over a much wider range of human activities. When I thought about my experience in industry I realised that it was research and talking to other people that lay at the centre of the process, and this seemed much more about the human condition. Even if now when working I try to solve my own problems rather than trying to solve someone else's, in many ways it isn't just my problem. I have realised that it is only in dialogue with others that the full complexity of an issue can be fleshed out. I have by now built into my working process times to talk to others, time to research around the subject and space to allow these other events, people, whatever seems appropriate to have some sort of influence on what I'm doing. As I get older the distinctions between what a designer is asked to do and what a Fine Artist does, seem to be less and less important. I'm now more interested in how effective the communication is.

Frank Ching

The drawing above by Frank Ching is a very basic perspective, but it gives a clear indication of the space and how a rising platform cuts into it. Frank Ching has a very good blog here. 

It's a working drawing, but it also exhibits several of the traits that one would expect from a drawing purely designed to work aesthetically. The line quality reflects the searching hand/eye, there is a quiet understatement to the drawing, its stability ensured by the staggered verticals that anchor the image. It's a drawing about space and how an individual is positioned in relation to that space.

Compare this with a drawing by Giacometti. This is also about space and how an individual is positioned in relation to it. Both draftsmen are thinking and working towards an understanding of something, but one is labeled an architect and the other an artist.

Giacometti

What is particularly wonderful about drawing is that it is a physical thinking tool. We are in effect using the world to help us think. We move elements around into new configurations and as we do we see new possibilities. Playing with the drawing material reveals possibilities for both abstraction and visualisation. A mark can be used to count with and to represent visual similarity. Direction indicators easily become symbols in a basic map, footprints can stand for the animal that made them and the ability of charcoal to be smeared over a rock might allow you to make something that looks like a bison or a cave lion. Representations and symbols, both probably arriving together. 


This ability to slip seamlessly from abstraction into representation and embed both into signification allows drawing to be used to conceptually plan and to emotionally represent. A film maker will use story boards as a very cheap way to visualise a future film, an architect uses technical drawing to present possibilities for new buildings, cartographers develop maps to help us visualise where we are, medical illustrators clarify the relationship between the various body organs, when photography fails to do so and children use drawing to communicate their particular world view. As artists we are like children who also have technical skills; we can use drawing to plan, map, technically illustrate, storyboard, capture our gestures or communicate our emotional experiences; sometimes as separate focused initiatives and at other times we can develop hybrids of these uses, combining maps with gesture or technical illustration with emotive mark making. 

Storyboard for Hitchcock's 'Marnie'

Storyboards help film makers think through how to sequence a shoot and think about camera angles and composition. They are an essential communication tool and allow the director to work closely with the camera operator. Several contemporary fine artists now work in film and they have to deal with similar issues.

Robert Smithson was considering making a film of his Spiral Jetty and of course he had to think this through using storyboard techniques. The storyboard by Francis Alys that heads up this post, is I think typical of the sort of drawings that many contemporary artists do. Alys also does drawings for his huge performance pieces and animations.

Drawing for 'When faith moves mountains'

'When faith moves mountains'

Francis Alys

Francis Alys: Drawing for animation

I've mentioned before that I make a lot of ceramics, and know that without my ability to use drawing to visualise ideas, my work would be so much poorer. 

Sketchbook pages

It's the end of the academic year and shows open on Friday, and those of you in the drawing strand will have a summer to think about how to prepare yourself for next year. Hopefully you will continue to think about your practice and how you can use drawing to help visualise the next steps. Whether you are thinking about performance, making objects, constructing images, refining working processes, collecting information, researching the context for practice or making observational records, there will be a way of using drawing to help clarify and focus your ideas.

See also:

Why do we draw?

Drawing it all together
More on drawing as ‘disegno’.