Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Readings in Art and Design Education) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841502006 ISBN 13: 9781841502007

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Increased public and academic interest in drawing and sketching, both traditional and digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, Writing on Drawing presents a collection of essays that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analyzing the latest work on creativity, education, and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together contributions by leading artists and researchers, this volume offers consolidation, discussion, and guidance for a previously fragmented discipline. Available for the first time in paperback, it will be an essential resource for artists, scientists, designers, and engineers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Garner is a senior lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University and director of the International Drawing Research Network.

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Writing on Drawing

Essays on Drawing Practice and Research

By Steve Garner

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2008 NSEAD
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-200-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Preface, 
Foreword – Re: Positioning Drawing Anita Taylor, 
Introduction Steve Garner, 
Chapter 1 Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research Steve Garner, 
Chapter 2 Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing Deanna Petherbridge, 
Chapter 3 Drawing Connections Richard Talbot, 
Chapter 4 Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Usefulness Ernst van Alphen, 
Chapter 5 Pride, Prejudice and the Pencil James Faure Walker, 
Chapter 6 Reappraising Young Children's Mark-making and Drawing Angela Anning, 
Chapter 7 New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes Towards an Appreciation of Ideational Drawing Terry Rosenberg, 
Chapter 8 Embedded Drawing Angela Eames, 
Chapter 9 Recording: And Questions of Accuracy Stephen Farthing, 
Chapter 10 Drawing: Towards an Intelligence of Seeing Howard Riley, 
Chapter 11 Digital Drawing, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Journalism Anna Ursyn, 
Notes on Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research

Steve Garner

For a while now, I've been thinking about drawing research. I think about it when I'm drawing and I think about it when I'm researching. And there's the rub. What are the characteristics of drawing research that distinguish it from the broad phenomena of drawing and research? If there is to exist a drawing research community, what activities do we engage in that distinguish us from those engaged in the many manifestations of drawing and other types of creative practice? Do we claim a distinct knowledge base, is it an issue of approach or method or do we think about drawing differently? What types of outputs might a drawing researcher generate; drawings, writings, both, something else? This chapter takes the form of an enquiry. It offers many questions and few answers but in doing so it seeks to begin a consolidation of a foundation for drawing research. It acknowledges that drawing research is a very young, some might say immature, discipline. It would be too ambitious for one chapter to seek to bring any maturity to the discipline but it does appeal for the drawing research community to look up into the middle distance to identify what might be done through our work and our discussions to bring about a maturity. One group of related questions that inspired this piece concern the desirability or otherwise of an agenda for drawing research, and of what such an agenda might consist. This has not proved straightforward to address. It's clear that people who make drawings, or those with an interest in the drawing outputs and processes of others, have their own personal motivations. Some of these say they have no need for a broader articulation of a drawing agenda. Perhaps they are suspicious of anything that might work to suppress their personal creativity, insight or uniqueness. But is an agenda merely a crutch for those who cannot formulate their own research enquiry? I offer an alternative perspective. The definition of possible agenda items has, for me, become an important objective but perhaps even more important, as preparation, is the stimulation of a critical discourse that embraces the notion of an agenda for drawing research. So this chapter is concerned as much with critical discourse as an agenda. However, I do offer some thoughts on a possible agenda. One that is flexible rather than prescriptive, one that facilitates dialogue and constructive comparisons across diverse activities, an agenda that might assist the construction of a shared knowledge base of, for example, issues, principles, priorities and working methods of drawing research.

Drawing and research

When I first became interested in drawing research, as a postgraduate student in the early 1980s, I rather naively identified two communities. I saw drawing makers – artists, designers, scientists and many others – who made drawings for a variety of reasons. I also identified a group of people who studied these outputs – perhaps so as to distil their functionality and to incorporate this into curricula for schools or colleges of art (as they invariably were in those days). The publications of the time on drawing seemed to reinforce this basic categorisation; the many 'how to' books offering step-by-step guidance on developing drawing skills were clearly (to me anyway) outputs of the drawing makers and while the outputs of the drawing study-ers were more diverse including exhibition catalogues, books and papers on, for example, art therapy, anthropology and studies of children's drawing, they were clearly (again, in my mind) not written by drawing makers. In 1982 I came across a book by William Kirby Lockard who set out to explain 'why' designers draw as well as 'how' they draw. Immediately I became aware of an entirely different paradigm for drawing research within which thinking about drawing and thinking through drawing exhibited relationships that I hadn't previously considered. Once thinking had taken centre stage, a raft of earlier publications dealing with relationships between perception, conception and representation made more sense including Rawson's seminal text simply titled Drawing, Arnheim's Visual Thinking and going back to Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing.

Today a more extensive drawing research community exists but we still wrestle with the relationship between drawing and research. In the twenty-first century we find ourselves building drawing research on a foundation of understanding laid down over several centuries by painters, architects, critics, natural scientists, social scientists, historians and social reformers amongst many others. In 1989 David Thistlewood noted the 'extraordinary diversity of research activities in the field of drawing which have been taking place mainly (though not only) in Europe, North America and Australia over several decades'. But what use are we making of our accumulating research culture? Does it inform our new contributions? Very few people, if any, working more that fifty years ago would have thought to refer to their work as 'drawing research'. They may have said they were drawing; they may have said they were researching; they might even have said, as Leonardo did, that they were searching through drawing, but the term 'drawing research' is relatively new. Is drawing also drawing research? Well the simple, but not particularly helpful, answer is yes and no. Some drawing activity is intended to be research, other drawing activity is not. Expression and enquiry are often closely bound together in the creative process – particularly in drawing – and it is not always possible to tell from the outputs whether a drawing was made as research or not. The use of drawing to explore ideas is well accepted. Artists and designers make and modify drawings as part of their creative process. Often these are intended as fleeting representations of possible futures before the time-consuming and costly tasks of converting a selected idea/sketch into a tangible artefact – a painting, an item of jewellery, a building – is begun. Scientists too model futures through their diagrammatic representations. What they have in common is the way drawing supports a personal dialogue of enquiry and conjecture whilst offering the opportunity for others...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841502006
• ISBN 13: 9781841502007
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Herausgeber: Garner Steve
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar