Drawing: Thoughts and Definitions

Artists are attracted to drawing because it offers an exciting channel for the imagination. Humans have a long history of making marks on the world, an impulse that began in prehistoric time and continues to the present.

Different kinds of Drawing 1.Those that investigate, study, and question the real world - visible, tangible world. 2.Those that record objects and events. 3.Those that communicate ideas. 4.Those that are transcriptions from memory - a a way of collecting and keeping impressions and ideas, a way of making visible the world of our imagination.

Latin American folk artist Luis Cruz Azaceta

Informational drawing. Objective drawing includes informational drawing. It could be diagrammatic, architectural, and mechanical drawings. This is a proposal for packaging the Whitney Museum, He combines Photography, collage, and drawing to present an accurate visual of the museum if it were wrapped.

Andrew Wyeth Christina’s World

Subjective and objective drawing In it’s broadest division drawing can be classified as either subjective or objective. Subjective drawing emphasizes the artist’s emotions. Objective drawing, on the other hand, the information conveyed is more important than the artist’s feelings.

Keith Haring work involves schematized drawing that employ direct simple drawing to carry sophisticated and and subjective expression. It evokes many questions. Is he commenting on the culture, are the figures holding up the TV, is it a comment about the bland world of TV?

Pictorial Recording The medical illustrator objectively records an image with photographic accuracy. For some artists photographic techniques lead to subjective effects. The artists concerned with duplicating what the camera sees is called photorealism. In Chuck Close’s portrait it is photorealist, but he is concerned with surface texture and with Revealing the what he calls “the personality of my hand.”

Another example of Pictorial recording can be seen in Claudio Bravo’s pastel drawing titled Pamela. This likeness is the result of intense observation of Details and faithful recording of her appearance.

Subjective Drawing Alice Neel is more interested the psyche Of her sitters than in a direct transcription Of visual reality. Although she works from direct observation, she says she is more Interested in “what people look like Underneath how they look.” A drawing may be slightly personal or highly personal; there are many degrees of subjectivity as there are artists.

Another major determinant n a work of art is the subject to be drawn. Once the subject is chosen, the artist must determine how it is to be treated. Landscape, still life, and figure are broad categories of subject sources. In The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson he makes a proposal to an existing landscape The spiral is an ancient form symbolic of continuity. The site for the work, Utah, is a place that the Indians Believed to be the hub, or navel, of the world.

Neil Welliver’s Cedar Water Pool is a straightforward manner and is a contemporary treatment of a traditional theme. The composition is complex, filled with visual information and carefully scrutinized in detail

The contemporary artist’s Roy Lichetenstein and Ben Schonzeit present their subject frontally, centralized and balanced within the frame. Schonzeit image is 6 by 4 feet and done in a highly photorealistic style. Lichtenstein on the other hand presents his glass in a stylized, abstract manner. The manner in which an artist chooses to depict a subject can be extremely simple or highly complex.

This image by Lichtenstein is taken from a stylized image and altred beyond recognition. He is actually mirroring the style of another artist named Piet Mondrian who did some thing similar in the 1930”s

Piet Mondrian: Oeuvre The 20th century is distinguished in art history for one invention above all: abstraction. The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian ( ) was a pioneer in this development. His reputation rests on about 250 abstract paintings dating from 1917 to 1944, a modest number for over 25 years of work. Each painting was worked and reworked, built layer by layer toward an equilibrium of form, color, and surface. Mondrian named his style "neoplasticism." That is how he translated his own Dutch phrase nieuwe beelding, which also means "new form" or "new image." The style was based, he explained, on an absolute harmony of straight lines and pure colors underlying the visible world.