Outpost 070524
Studio representations from the Life Class, negotiations around the physical body through drawing.
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The difficult question?
What is drawing?
What is the nature of the drawn line?
The first condition that precedes them all, the blankness of a surface, and the motions, now commencing of a point tracing, marking lines across its spaces into further spaces.
Of all the Arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the smallest, the gap between meaning and non meaning, between repeatability and singularity.
What exactly is a mark, and how does it, might it distinguish itself from say a trace?
Drawing because of its status as becoming (blot becoming mark-mark becoming line-line becoming contour-contour becoming image-image becoming sign) the direction of this movement being always reversible, posits a continuum of sense, from one sense of 'sense' to the other, yet it seems impossible to observe, or to catch hold of.
The precise moment or experience of that 'flip-over' from pre-sign differentiated, but not yet diacritically caught in an opposition to signification, image, and meaning. It happens in a blink, when the eye is closed insofar as something is given to us that we cannot experience, it is something like death, or a trauma, or a transport from one place to another without our knowing how we got there.
What would be the distinctive mode or modes of the manifestation of drawing.
The problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly towards line-contour-figure or image. To allow it to hesitate on the edge, to show what it hides.
The blind-spot marks that point in the field of vision that we cannot see. If to look at something means to impose a distance and to objectify it, the blind-spot would be the 'place' in the visible from which we cannot detach ourselves and which we cannot objectify, it marks our attachment or our adhesion to the world.
Drawing, shows what it hides.
Jackie Pigeaud argues that the sense and the practice of the contour is doubled.
The contour is the joining of the traits to make the line and the contour is doubled by being finished by a second contour that does away with the imperfections of the first. In this sense of the creative act, the artist shows what he hides and furthermore he hides the transitions and joints that make this showing possible, a collapse of the distinction between mark and line as they become contour, image, representations.
Michael Newman.
The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.
The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Acts.
Thinking Through Drawing.
Lines of Enquiry. 2006
Drawing as thinking as opposed to drawing as aesthetics.
It is the seemingly paradoxical nature underlying all drawing, simultaneously a form of recording and invention, situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view, perspective or analysis. Each drawing is first of all a 'working sketch', the individual work forms part of a much wider and longer project and is an instance within that exploration.
Drawing/Project.
Both words drawing and project are both spatially and temporally orientated, project implies a throwing forward, a casting into the future towards some yet to be realised destination, drawing variously as an extruding, a gathering and a pulling closer.
Drawing allows you to both evolve, describe, communicate all at the same time, it holds together many disparate factors, potentials, all of which may influence an outcome.
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