Drawing -- The Process

by Jo Davies (Editor), Leo Duff (Editor)

Overview

Drawing - The Process is a collection of papers, theories and interviews based on the conference and exhibition of the same name held at Kingston University in 2003.

Much debate and research is currently undertaken in this area and it is the intention of the book to galvanize this, while providing a vehicle for deep enquiry. The publication will firstly comprise a collection of refereed papers representing a breadth of activity and research around the issues of drawing within the broad context of art and design activity. The second dimension of the book will be an examination of the drawing processes of high profile practitioners.

The publication will encompass the best contemporary investigation of a subject pivotal to art and design activity, and should be recognized as a fundamental text for students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841509075
Publisher:	Intellect Books
Publication date:	03/01/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	145
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jo Davies is an illustrator and author of works for children. Working generally as a freelance illustrator since 1985, and included in exhibitions nationally and internationally, she is editor in chief of The Journal published by the Association of Illustrators, and is Head of Illustration at Exeter School of Art and Design (the University of Plymouth). Leo Duff is an illustrator and exhibitor of freelance illustration work. She is Head of MA in Drawing as Process at the University of Kingston, and a researcher primarily in drawing based subjects. She is a member of the council of the Association of Illustrators and is involved in the Loughborough drawing research project.

Read an Excerpt

Drawing: The Process

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By Jo Davies, Leo Duff

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-907-5

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CHAPTER 1

Only Fire Forges Iron:

The Architectual Drawings of Michelangelo

PATRICK LYNCH

Patrick Lynch is principal of Patrick Lynch architects and he teaches at Kingston University and The Architectural Association. He studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge and L'Ecole d'Architecture de Lyon.

'Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro' (Only fire forges iron/to match the beauty shaped within the mind) Michelangelo, Sonnet 62'

The architectural drawings of Michelangelo depict spaces and parts of buildings, often staircases and archways or desks, and on the same sheet of paper he also drew fragments of human figures, arms, legs, torsos, heads, etc. I believe that this suggests his concern for the actual lived experience of human situations and reveals the primary importance of corporeality and perception in his work. Michelangelo was less concerned with making buildings look like human bodies, and with the implied relationship this had in the Renaissance with divine geometry and cosmology. I contend that his drawing practice reveals his concerns for the relationships between the material presence of phenomena and the articulation of ideas and forms which he considered to be latent within places, situations and things.

Michelangelo criticized the contemporary practice of replicating building designs regardless of their situation. The emphasis Alberti placed upon design drawings relegated construction to the carrying out of the architect's instructions, and drawings were used to establish geometrical certainty and perfection. Michelangelo believed that 'where the plan is entirely changed in form, it is not only permissible but necessary in consequence entirely to change the adornments and likewise their corresponding portions; the means are unrestricted (and may be chosen) at will (or: as adornments require)'. In emphasizing choice, Michelangelo recovers the process of design from imitation and interpretation of the classical canon, and instead celebrates human attributes such as intuition and perception as essential to creativity.

The relationship of Michelangelo's 'architectural theory' to his working methods leads James Ackerman to study his drawings and models and to conclude that he made a fundamental critique of architectural composition undertaken in drawing lines instead of volumes and mass. 'From the start', Ackerman, suggests, 'he dealt with qualities rather than quantities. In choosing ink washes and chalk rather than pen, he evoked the quality of stone, and the most tentative sketches are likely to contain indications of light and shadow; the observer is there before the building is designed. This determination to locate himself inside a space which he was imagining was a direct critique of the early Renaissance theories of architecture which emphasized ideal mathematical proportions based upon a perfect image of a human body, rather than the experience our bodies offer us in movement in space. '... Michelangelo directed (criticism) against the contemporary system of figural proportion. It emphasized the unit and failed to take into account the effect of the character of forms brought about by movement in architecture, the movement of the observer through and around buildings and by environmental conditions, especially, light. It could produce a paper architecture more successful on the drawing board than in three dimensions.'

The theories of Alberti, Sangallo, di Georgio, Dürer, et al. were concerned with drawings which elicit a cosmic order, seen as inherent in the geometry of the human body. 'When fifteenth century writers spoke of deriving architectural forms from the human body,' Ackerman claims that, 'they did not think of the body as a living organism, but as a microcosm of the universe, a form created in God's image, and created with the same perfect harmony that determines the movement of the spheres or musical consonances. Michelangelo criticized Dürer's proportional system as theoretical 'to the detriment of life', Pérez-Gomez claims in The Perspective Hinge. He quotes Michelangelo's critique: 'He (Dürer) treats only of the measure and kind of bodies, to which a certain rule cannot be given, forming the figures as stiff as stakes; and what matters more, he says not one word concerning human acts and gestures.' Such a shift in focus from intellectual to sensible integrity completes a turn outwards from the enclosed world of the medieval textual space of the Hortus Conclusus and scholastic cloister garden; outwards to an open realm of civil architecture in which corporeal experience and secular city life are championed over religious and metaphorical spaces. Spaces became seen not as the representation of another ideal – such as an image of the garden of paradise – but rather, Ackerman suggests: 'the goal of the architect is no longer to produce an abstract harmony, but rather a sequence of purely visual (as opposed to intellectual) experiences of spatial volumes.'

Ackerman continues to infer that Michelangelo's drawings of mass, rather than indicating correctness of line, can be related directly to his compositional technique. Also, that matter and form are bound together through his working method – that drawing enabled him to think in a new way: 'It is this accent on the eye rather than on the mind that gives precedence to voids over planes.' Ackerman continues to state his case: Michelangelo's drawings 'did not commit him to working in line and plane: shading and indication of projection and recession gave them sculptural mass'.

The modelling of light as a means of orienting one's movement through space is best achieved and revised through model making. Typically, Renaissance architectural competitions were judged by viewing 1:20 models of facades as well as fragments of the building drawn at full scale. The only drawings which existed for fabrication of buildings before the Renaissance were the Modano; 1:1 scale patterns of attic column bases or capitals. The Modani slowly evolved from stage sets into Modello, architectural models, and often full-scale mock-ups of buildings, which enabled architects such as Michelangelo to 'study three-dimensional effects'. Models enable scale to be judged as well as enforce the relationship between materiality and form. They also allow aesthetic decisions to be made, which relate solely to perception. For example, the intellectual matters of expression of structural logic may appear well in an orthographic drawing but be in fact detrimental to the actual quality of our experience of a building. Ackerman believes that Michelangelo used sketches and model-making 'because he thought of the observer being in motion and hesitated to visualize buildings from a fixed point ... this approach, being sculptural, inevitably was reinforced by a special sensitivity to materials and to the effect of light'. He viewed sculpture also as the art of making ideas, form, visible in matter. Michelangelo in particular distrusted the ways in which architectural drawings can mislead us and rather his own drawings are less objects for scrutiny than sites of his own concentration and 'drawing out' of his ideas. Alberto Pérez-Gomez claims that Michelangelo was suspicious of perspective, he 'resisted making architecture through geometrical projections as he could conceive the human body only in motion'. Conventional orthographic architectural drawings can be compared to anatomical sections, which cut through matter to reveal connections. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci depict an objective view of still objects. Michelangelo wished to infuse his cadavers with life and arranged their limbs in order to express the structure of human gestures. He sought, rather than a medical theory, to improve his capacity to depict the living body in movement. This attention to the gestures we make is closely related to the manner in which his spaces allow for and celebrate passage and movement through doorways, up staircases and across the ground. His drawings of spaces also show people doing certain things there, and this is what enables us to read in his working methods the innate relationship between thinking and doing, and drawing and seeing.

The drawings of Michelangelo's architectural projects which survive are made with chalk and pen and ink and often have figures superimposed over views of spaces. This leads me to propose that he was thinking about how the human figure perceives space and also how it appears in a space, whilst he was designing. For example, the façade drawings for the Porte Pia in Rome depict not only the material of the elevation, but also show a part of a leg striding out of the picture plane, through the gateway, towards the viewer. Michelangelo's twin concerns for scale and movement are embedded in this moment of creativity. Similarly, the design of the library for the Medici library at San Lorenzo in Florence (also exhibited in Casa Buonarroti there), transpose life size sketches of column profiles, actual views of staircases, sectional anatomical cuts through the building, fragments of limbs in movement with particular events unfurling in time. Michelangelo also drew faces in profile upon the profiles of columns, reflecting the importance of the figure in Humanist architecture as well as the emerging interest in the body as a model for meaning and communication of character. The massiveness of the stone, its thickness and weight is drawn as a shadow, a dense profile, the space surrounding it alive with the movement of limbs. In a crude structural analysis, the Pietra Serena stone columns of the library vestibule are recessed, rather than proud or disengaged from the walls, in order to bear the weight of the beams submerged beneath the ceiling surface above. They are bearing a load and this is expressed in the coiled spring of the brackets, which sit below the implied ground datum of the library floor height frieze. The stairway is set in a space of compression; it is small, very tall, with light only entering from above. The columns bear weight downwards and we make a corresponding movement upwards toward the light, away from the chthonic realm of matter and weight. The implication of a hierarchy suggests Michelangelo's Neo-Platonism as well as his religious piety. The library and its enlightening books are set above the darkness of the mundane life of the city. The staircase articulates this movement as a psychological shift also; we are led inexorably upwards, the architect drawing us towards the drama of the spatial and literary elucidation of the library.

A drawing of the reading booths not only shows a figure seated, reading, but also, drawn on the same paper we see a hand turning a page. The space a body takes up is cast as the form of the architecture; architecture the presence of human absence, a residue of movement, the setting for life.

In rejecting the means of representation of earlier Humanist architects, Michelangelo formulated a modern aesthetic sensitivity to the act of creativity as a spontaneous and memorial whole to which nothing has to be added 'to make it better ... Unity consists in act'. The act of drawing revealed the power of the mind to see in matter the immanence of forms, the presence and emergence of ideas. Michelangelo expressed this Neo-Platonic passivity simultaneously with a celebration of the compulsion to imagine forms within things: 'No block of marble but it does not hide/ the concept living in the artist's mind-/ pursuing it inside that form, he'll guide/ his hand to shape what reason has defined.' As an anti-theory, or call to the creative contingency of human responses to situations, Michelangelo's comments upon architectural composition expose the academic reproduction of prototypes to the modern critique of originality, autonomy and individual virtuosity on the one hand, and the potency of place, action and situation on the other. His drawings are records of action and thought. Extemporary performances of imagination and skill combine a material sensibility with care for the appearance of things inherent in the ways things come into being. Michelangelos' drawings suggest that how we do something enables what we do to occur. Drawing simultaneously records and reveals the correspondence between speaking and doing, making and imagining, things and ideas, imagination and time, materiality and the immaterial: "Only Fire Forges Iron."

CHAPTER 2

Old Manuals and New Pencils

JAMES FAURE WALKER

James Faure Walker is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University (AHRB Fellowship). He is also a tutor on the interdisciplinary M.A., Drawing as Process.

He studied at St Martins and the Royal College of Art, London. Recent one-person exhibitions include the Whitworth, Manchester; the Mariani Gallery, Colorado; the Colville Place Gallery; Galerie der Gegenwart, Wiesbaden. He has been integrating computer graphics with painting since 1988, exhibiting widely overseas through ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Computerkunst, Digital Salon, (see www.dam.org/faure-walker). In 1998 he won the 'Golden Plotter' prize in Gladbeck, Germany. Group shows include the Hayward Annual, Serpentine Summer Show, John Moores, Artists in National Parks, the Post Modern Print at the V&A. In 2001 he curated 'Silent Motion' at the Stanley Picker Gallery, featuring Muybridge alongside contemporary digital works. (www.kingston.ac.uk/picker/silentmotion).

He was a founder of Artscribe magazine (1976) and editor for 8 years. His writings have also appeared in Wired, Studio International, Modern Painters, Mute, Computer Generated Imaging, Art Review, 100 Reviews Backwards, and in catalogues for the Tate, Barbican, Siggraph, and Computerkunst.

The Intolerant Eye

'Oh, so they could draw,' exclaimed two visitors with some relief when they reached the room of drawings at the Tate Modern's Picasso and Matisse exhibition last summer. After an initial smirk, I hesitated. I wasn't sure they were right. For some days before, and on the tube en route to the exhibition, I had been reading Ruskin's 'Elements of Drawing' of 1857 – a treasured first edition I picked up as a student. Being absorbed in Ruskin's strictures against the slapdash, wary of contaminating my taste by looking at bad art (Claude is 'base' and Salvator Rosa 'evil'), I found myself looking aghast at these thick and clumsy lines – imprecise, untruthful, coarse, lazy, rushed, approximate. 'All great art is delicate,' he declares. A good line 'should be like a well-managed horse'. This was not the right primer for the show.

These days we are unlikely to be quite that opinionated about drawing. Few would want to explain why a drawing was outrageously bad – you chuckle knowing that it is meant to be like that. The most impressive drawing show that I have seen in recent years was the Polke exhibition at MOMA in 1999, and if I think of it as 'creative' it is because of its fearless, searching energy – from a scrawl in a private sketchbook to a vast Spiderman fantasy. I wonder what Matisse would have made of it. Would he have sensed an underlying competence, a discipline? Or a degenerate, diseased mind?

For generations of nervous art students the key to getting onto a good course was the portfolio of drawings. The interview panel would leaf through these in silence. If they weren't up to scratch no amount of smart talk would get you through. It wasn't just about ability or perseverance or 'being able to draw' – that could mean quite different things to different people. Drawing was the touchstone, outside of fashion, beyond argument, the foundation of art. Whole cultures were categorised by their use of line and form, some pure and classic, some degenerate, confused. According to Ruskin, half the National Gallery was well below par and would do the student serious educational damage: we should look at Rembrandt and Michelangelo in moderation in case we picked up bad habits. It may now sound nutty to dismiss whole periods of art history and drawing, but perhaps we are no better. We have become art tourists, afraid to make any noise that might cause embarrassment. We are there to appreciate, to consume uncritically. We look, but not too hard.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Drawing: The Process by Jo Davies, Leo Duff. Copyright © 2005 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction Leo Duff,
Only Fire Forges Iron: The Architectural Drawings of Michelangelo Patrick Lynch,
Old Manuals and New Pencils James Faure Walker,
'A Journey of Drawing: an Illustration of a Fable' John Vernon Lord,
Visual Dialogue: Drawing Out 'The Big Picture' to Communicate Strategy and Vision in Organisations Julian Burton,
The Beginnings of Drawing in England Kevin Flynn,
Electroliquid Aggregation and the Imaginative Disruption of Convention Russell Lowe,
What Shall I Draw? Just a Few Words Phil Sawdon,
Towards a Life Machine Stuart Mealing,
In Discussion with Zandra Rhodes Leo Duff,
Algorithmic Drawings Hans Dehlinger,
Drawing a Blank Peter Davis,
A Dialogue with Joanna Quinn Ian Massey,
Drawing – My Process George Hardie,