THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

(Jeff_L) #1

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 23


stephen Farthing

So a village can be reduced to a circle and “X”
can represent the position of anything we deem sig-
nificant.
After these founding discoveries came a series of
landmark inventions, each gradually shaping draw-
ing into what we recognize it as today, these include:
Writing, Geometry, the Invention of Paper, Perspec-
tive, Pencils and Erasers then the Cameras Obscura
and Lucida, then Photography, CAD systems, GPS
and finally, Digital Imaging.


The kingdom
Drawing is one of four species within a kingdom
that is concerned with recording, communication
and discovery, the others are Writing, Mathematics
and Musical Notation.


The classes
The species Drawing has two distinct and dif-
ferent lines of descent: the Conceptual and the Pic-
torial. The Pictorial and Conceptual have parallel
histories that have, at times, cross fertilized.
An example of a Conceptual drawing might be
a cluster of dots drawn onto a window pane with a
fibre tipped pen, that mark the position of the stars
as they were in last night’s sky. An example of the Pic-
torial is a line drawn with the same pen around the
edge of your own image on the surface of a mirror.
Although by using these specific examples I may
seem to be suggesting that the difference between
the two types of drawing resides in the difference
between a sheet of glass and a mirror, what actually
makes them different is neither their subject matter
nor the materials they are made with, what makes
them so different is how we “read” them.
Pictorial Drawings rely on our ability to recog-
nize things by their outlines.
Conceptual Drawings rely on a more complex
translation process that is dependant on our ability
to read and make sense of abstractions.
The reading of both begins with us intuitively
placing a given drawing into one or other of the
two classes, then continues with us either seeing the
need for an associated narrative, “key” or “legend”
that will inform our reading, or with us forging
ahead and relying on the drawing’s ability to offer
up its narrative to us, as we read.
The real distinction between the two classes
rests however, not simply on how we read them, but
on us recognising where their respective narratives
are physically located.


The conceptual
Conceptual drawings don’t have a built in narra-
tive. Their narrative is either located in the margin
or somewhere beyond.
An example of a conceptual drawing with a
“beyond,” probably lost forever, narrative is the free-
hand, geometric, linear cluster that was scratched
some 77,000 years ago into the ochre rock of the
Blombos Caves in South Africa. With three equally
spaced horizontals forming a warp and a series of
more or less equal length lines arranged as inverted
“V’s” establishing a weft, the drawing has a lay-
ered woven appearance. Other than our ability to
describe its appearance, everything else about this
drawing is a mystery. We have, for example, no way
of knowing if the drawing had a speculative, didac-
tic, descriptive or defining function, or if indeed its
author considered it meaningful or meaningless.
Seventy five thousand years after the Blombos
drawing, a Greek mathematician resident in Egypt
constructed a conceptual drawing whose accom-
panying narrative survived as text in a book. The
drawing is an annotated line drawing, with a three-
dimensional component that is activated in real
time, by sunlight, to produce within the drawing
a kinetic tonal component. Ptolomy arrived at his
sundial through a mix of mathematics and practical
experiments, then set out its “narrative,” the techni-
cal explanation of how it worked in a book he called
the Analemma.
About one thousand years later, the French
composer Baude Cordier made a far less pure,
more hybrid series of drawings that span the space
between the Conceptual and Pictorial. Bound into
what is now known as the “Codex Chantillyi”, his
musical scores emerge today as early examples of
the kind of free thinking musical notation that
we refer to as “eye music.” Working with the stan-
dard musical notation of the day, Cordier drew a
love song into a heart shaped stave, then a canonic
round into a circular stave. By investing the music
with a pictorial dimension he didn’t simply inspire
his choristers to think beyond the words and notes
to love and cycles, but in doing so he created a cross
fertilization between the Pictorial and Conceptual
classes of drawing.
More recently, in 1840, Emily Babcock, a young
member of the Shaker Community in New Leba-
non, New York made a drawing she called The Nar-
row Path to Zion ii. The drawing or “Gift”, (as in Gift
from God), as drawings were called within Shaker
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