THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

(Jeff_L) #1

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 83


michelle Fava

cognitive activity was most clearly observable in
artist AR. It was observable via the types of ver-
balisation that were possible during different phases
through the drawing.
Initially AR objected to the verbalisation task
on the grounds that it affected her drawing. That is,
she would draw differently while trying to verbal-
ise. She explained that in her practice of drawing
female nudes, she would hold conversations with
her models, occupying her mind with matters other
than the drawing. She felt that this gave her mark-
making a spontaneous quality that was lost when
the verbalisation task was attempted. Interestingly,


she was able to chat while drawing, but not verbal-
ise the process.
However, there were exceptions to this rule. AR
described how there would be moments during the
drawing in which she would be unable to chat, and
she had to ask her model for a moment of quiet, so
that she could look at the drawing. During these
moments she would be re-assessing the drawing
and making a decision about how to proceed. These
evaluative moments were easy for AR to verbalise,
and we tried a new approach in which she would
only verbalise what came naturally, and would not
feel obliged to talk continually.
This new approach revealed pauses in drawing
accompanied by evaluative judgement and deci-
sion making, interspersed with longer, quiet peri-
ods of continuous drawing, during which she rarely
paused.
Two polarities can be identified in this behav-
iour: chatting and verbalising, evaluating and not
evaluating. The relationship seemed to be that ver-
balising was not possible during the continuous
drawing (not evaluating) and chatting was not pos-
sible during the evaluating, and vice versa (figure 5).
At first, this did not seem consistent with the
behaviour of the other artists in the study.
However, this is likely to be due to differences
in the drawing processes rather than to differences
in the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The other
artists’ evaluative strategies took place much more
frequently, and were interspersed throughout the

Figure 6. Sample of timeline showing timing of AC’s drawing behaviours

Figure 7. Sample of timeline showing timing of AR drawing behaviours^4.

Figure 5. The relationship between verbalising and
evaluating in AR’s drawing process. At first, this did
not seem consistent with the behaviour of the other
artists in the study.
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