Drawing : Drawing in or with Paper

Embossed surface of toilet roll paper

Some of the papers we use in everyday life are decorated as they are made, their surfaces embossed as part of the moulding process and others are embossed after they are made by having shapes pressed into their surfaces. What is interesting about these ways of marking paper is that because of surface indentations we become more aware of the importance of the angle of direction of light sources. A light falling directly in front of the image may not reveal anything, but a light source from an acute angle can reveal every textural difference. Therefore this type of drawing makes you much more aware of the complex interrelationship between light source, drawing and observer. Just to take the photograph of the humble toilet roll above, I had to move the object around and try several locations, as well as shift my own viewpoint a few times before deciding on an angle that I thought demonstrated my point well enough.

If you make your own paper you will have I'm sure realised the potential to weave wire into your mesh, so that a 'watermark' can be made. This simply thins the paper that sits over the wire when it is as a thin pulp collected over the mesh and is often seen at its best when you hold the paper up to the light.

Folding or scoring paper will give you a wide range of marks depending on how you make the fold, for instance you can make a former by taping down two sheets of card with a narrow gap between them and scoring a line along this gap with a traditional bookbinder's bone folder. This gives you a line that on one side of the paper rises up like a small wall and on the other side opens out like a tiny empty canal. Every implement used to score paper will create a different mark, and the different ways that a fold can be worked on, such as by applying different amounts of pressure or working on the back of the paper with smoothing implements, again create different line types.

Paper scoring tools

You can also sand your paper down, each movement of a sheet of sandpaper creating thousands of tiny marks, all of which can be seen if you get the light hitting the paper at the right angle or beat your paper with a hammer or other heavy tool, such as those hammers used in the silver manufacturing industry, that are used to build up beautiful textures as a silver sheet is formed. They can do the same job on thick watercolour paper, crushing the surface as it is hit, whilst at the same time building a repetitive textured surface as you overlap your hammering marks.

Silver hammers normally used for giving textures to hammered sheets of silver

However in the printing industry the most common way of creating surface difference by using the properties of shadow is to emboss paper. This at its most basic means applying a cut out shape to the paper under great pressure. The surface of the paper is in effect crushed by the weight applied.

The video above is interesting because it shows how someone can use a combination of new and old technology to create what they want. The tools made by the artist in this case are quite specialised and if you do want to create work in this area sometimes you do have to refine your working methods in order to get the best out of the process.

You can also draw with specialist tools made for other purposes such as using pricking wheels made for sewing through leather, such as the one above. But the most common way of making surface textures of this sort is by using an ordinary needle. This technique can be used to create basic lines and simple drawings or the most complex images, it just depends on the amount of time you want to spend and the invention that you can put to the process.

The artist Fu Xiaotong uses pins to create her massive drawings on handmade paper.

Fu Xiaotong at work

In an earlier post I looked at the drawings of Frances Richardson and she has at times commented about the relationship between drawing and sculpture and in this case I believe the relationship is very close.

So why use these techniques? There are several issues that fine art students could consider here. The first one is the 'objectness' of the papers that you use. By making the image an integral part of the paper, you can begin to separate the idea of the image, from the idea of the object. No longer do you have an idea/image/design placed on top of the paper, the paper traditionally operating as a background or support. In this case, because the image is embedded within the field of its making, it is itself now part of the object. This was part of the point Frances Richardson was making when she referred to her drawings as 'thin sculpture'. If we go back to some of the issues raised when we were looking at framing drawings, we had to explore the differences in presentation between drawings that were 'illusions' of things and drawings that were exploring the 'objectness' of flat things made of paper. Working in this way can open the debate out further. For instance compare paper folding with making embossed paper illusions such as this one below.

Embossed paper used as shallow relief

Another theoretical area that can be explored using these ideas is that of Greenberg's media specificity. If you follow the implications of his writings, paper is itself a medium and therefore its specificity is to do with what it is capable of as a medium. So instead of looking at how it can be used to carry representations of other things, such as the image above, it should be treated as something that has its own possibilities, therefore as an artist you should engage with this process of revealing possibility and in doing so you will also discover your own language.

I am personally very interested in the relationship this type of work has with revealing light as the most important factor in seeing anything. You can make your audience much more active as they have to move around to see this type of work to its best effect and more importantly you can get your audience to focus on how a light source is effecting perception.

There is a 'stripped down' feel to the aesthetics involved in this type of work. As colour is eliminated and all additional materials such as drawing or painterly substances are also eliminated, you can also touch upon notions of purity and truth to materials.

Miso: New York Moon

The artist Miso in her work 'New York Moon', took maps of the New York city grid and laid them over images of the valleys and craters of the moon and then combined the images by pin pricking through both into a sheet of paper below. In this instance she is finding a new use for a very old technique of transferring drawings using pricked papers.

An old print that has been pricked in order to transfer the image

This technique goes back to the Renaissance, when painters would use holes pricked in large 'cartoon' drawings to transfer their images onto wet plaster ready for fresco painting. They used to pounce these cartoons with crushed powder or charcoal, thus leaving faint dotted lines on the wet plaster as guides within which they would paint.

All of these techniques depend of course on the types of paper you are using.

Drawing

Tuesday 16 April 2019

Drawing in or with Paper

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