Drawing -- The Process

Drawing:

The Process

Edited by

Jo Davies

and

Leo Duff

First Published in 2005 by

Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in USA in 2005 by

Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 972133786, USA

Copyright ©2005 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon – Toucan

Copy Editor: Wendi Momen

With special thanks to Peter Till for use of cover illustration.

The CD ROM Drawing -The Process, containing edited works and associated texts of the fifty artist-designers who took part in this exhibition, is available from:

Leo Duff, Drawing Research, Kingston University, Knights Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2UD

[email protected]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Electrionic ISBN 1-84150-907-8 / ISBN 1-84150-076-3

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.

Contents

Introduction

Leo Duff

Only Fire Forges Iron: The Architectural Drawings of Michelangelo

Patrick Lynch

Old Manuals and New Pencils

James Faure Walker

‘A Journey of Drawing: an Illustration of a Fable’

John Vernon Lord

Visual Dialogue: Drawing Out ‘The Big Picture’ to Communicate Strategy and Vision in Organisations

Julian Burton

The Beginnings of Drawing in England

Kevin Flynn

Electroliquid Aggregation and the Imaginative Disruption of Convention

Russell Lowe

What Shall I Draw? Just a Few Words

Phil Sawdon

Towards a Life Machine

Stuart Mealing

In Discussion with Zandra Rhodes

Leo Duff

Algorithmic Drawings

Hans Dehlinger

Drawing a Blank

Peter Davis

A Dialogue with Joanna Quinn

Ian Massey

Drawing – My Process

George Hardie

Introduction:

Drawing – The Process

LEO DUFF

When we think of drawing now do we think of it differently from those living and working in, say, 1910, 1940 or 1980? Yes we do. At least those of us practitioners using drawing as part of our working process do, regardless of the discipline in which we work. We use drawing as assistant to thinking and problem-solving, not only as an aid to seeing more clearly nor as a means to perfecting realism. It is interesting to see in Tate Modern the inclusion of working drawings, as in the recent Bridget Riley and Edward Hopper exhibitions, for example. The fascination with drawing from the artist’s or designer’s point of view is the inconclusive way in which it works within, yet moves our practice forward. Drawing helps to solve problems, to think and to develop the end result. This may be the combination and juxtaposition of colours for the composition of a painting, design for a mass-produced jug or textile, visualisation for a children’s book or a description of how to do something.

Laypeople enjoy examining working drawings associated with recognisable works of art as they feel they can be ‘in on’ the magical and secret world that is the mind of the artist. Recent advertising campaigns for cars, computers and sportswear have included reference, with much artistic licence, to the lengths a designer goes to create the most desirable products for us to buy. This allows insight into the sophisticated process leading to the purchase we are about to make.

All drawing is a serious business. How naïve to think that the simple and minimal line placed on a page by Picasso, or the slick Leicester Square caricature of a tourist, were achieved without the backing of hours, days, weeks of ‘practice’. If drawing is something we can learn, then why do girls around the age of ten and boys at about fourteen give it up as something they feel they cannot do? No matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a drawing is, the knowledge that it can always go a step further is perhaps the crux of the continued and rapidly expanding debate about drawing and its place in art, design, media and communication practice. In China it is common, in fact essential, that young art students perfect figure drawing before moving onto the next stage of creativity, basic design and compositional exercises. Using imagination or drawing without academic purpose is far from being on the agenda at the beginning of their studies. Here, in the western world, we encourage imaginative originality in drawing with little reference to skill or academic correctness. Two very different approaches of thinking and of drawing.

The aesthetic qualities of drawing are as difficult to pin down as the ‘perfect’ drawing is. Equally elusive are the aesthetic qualities of drawing as part and parcel of the creative process as witnessed in the sketchbooks, working drawings, plans and diagrams of practitioners in any discipline. Frequently drawing alludes to a world neither yet discovered nor understood, typified by the blackboard drawings of Rudolph Steiner or the mathematics of Professor Roger Penrose. In this way drawing can tantalise our curiosity, feed our imagination and offer new ideas to our own work.

As a catalyst for change, the process of drawing provides constant challenges and routes to solutions. The essays written for this book cover a broad variety of approaches to drawing. The intention is to provide more viewpoints on, and insights into, how, and why, we draw. The intention is not to present answers – but studies on the process of drawing. These include references to oceanography, graffiti, illustration, product, textile and fashion design, architecture, illustration, animation and calligraphy. Under discussion is a range of media and practice allowing us new breathing space, clear of any concept of there existing a finite way to draw, or to think about drawing.

Leo Duff

Only Fire Forges Iron:

The Architectual Drawings of Michelangelo

PATRICK LYNCH

Patrick Lynch is principal of Patrick Lynch architects and he teaches at Kingston University and The Architectural Association. He studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge and L’Ecole d’Architecture de Lyon.

‘Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro’

(Only fire forges iron/to match the beauty shaped within the mind)

Michelangelo, Sonnet 62’¹

The architectural drawings of Michelangelo depict spaces and parts of buildings, often staircases and archways or desks, and on the same sheet of paper he also drew fragments of human figures, arms, legs, torsos, heads, etc. I believe that this suggests his concern for the actual lived experience of human situations and reveals the primary importance of corporeality and perception in his work. Michelangelo was less concerned with making buildings look like human bodies, and with the implied relationship this had in the Renaissance with divine geometry and cosmology. I contend that his drawing practice reveals his concerns for the relationships between the material presence of phenomena and the articulation of ideas and forms which he considered to be latent within places, situations and things.

Michelangelo criticized the contemporary practice of replicating building designs regardless of their situation. The emphasis Alberti placed upon design drawings relegated construction to the carrying out of the architect’s instructions, and drawings were used to establish geometrical certainty and perfection. Michelangelo believed that ‘where the plan is entirely changed in form, it is not only permissible but necessary in consequence entirely to change the adornments and likewise their corresponding portions; the means are unrestricted (and may be chosen) at will (or: as adornments require)’.² In emphasizing choice, Michelangelo recovers the process of design from imitation and interpretation of the classical canon, and instead celebrates human attributes such as intuition and perception as essential to creativity.

The relationship of Michelangelo’s ‘architectural theory’ to his working methods leads James Ackerman to study his drawings and models and to conclude that he made a fundamental critique of architectural composition undertaken in drawing lines instead of volumes and mass. ‘From the start’, Ackerman, suggests, ‘he dealt with qualities rather than quantities. In choosing ink washes and chalk rather than pen, he evoked the quality of stone, and the most tentative sketches are likely to contain indications of light and shadow; the observer is there before the building is designed³. This determination to locate himself inside a space which he was imagining was a direct critique of the early Renaissance theories of architecture which emphasized ideal mathematical proportions based upon a perfect image of a human body, rather than the experience our bodies offer us in movement in space⁴. ‘… Michelangelo directed (criticism) against the contemporary system of figural proportion. It emphasized the unit and failed to take into account the effect of the character of forms brought about by movement in architecture, the movement of the observer through and around buildings and by environmental conditions, especially, light. It could produce a paper architecture more successful on the drawing board than in three dimensions.’

The theories of Alberti, Sangallo, di Georgio, Dürer, et al.⁵ were concerned with drawings which elicit a cosmic order, seen as inherent in the geometry of the human body. ‘When fifteenth century writers spoke of deriving architectural forms from the human body,’ Ackerman claims that, ‘they did not think of the body as a living organism, but as a microcosm of the universe, a form created in God’s image, and created with the same perfect harmony that determines the movement of the spheres or musical consonances.⁶ Michelangelo criticized Dürer’s proportional system as theoretical ‘to the detriment of life’, Pérez-Gomez claims in The Perspective Hinge. He quotes Michelangelo’s critique: ‘He (Dürer) treats only of the measure and kind of bodies, to which a certain rule cannot be given, forming the figures as stiff as stakes; and what matters more, he says not one word concerning human acts and gestures.’⁷ Such a shift in focus from intellectual to sensible integrity completes a turn outwards from the enclosed world of the medieval textual space of the Hortus Conclusus and scholastic cloister garden; outwards to an open realm of civil architecture in which corporeal experience and secular city life are championed over religious and metaphorical spaces.⁷ Spaces became seen not as the representation of another ideal – such as an image of the garden of paradise – but rather, Ackerman suggests: ‘the goal of the architect is no longer to produce an abstract harmony, but rather a sequence of purely visual (as opposed to intellectual) experiences of spatial volumes.’⁸

Ackerman continues to infer that Michelangelo’s drawings of mass, rather than indicating correctness of line, can be related directly to his compositional technique. Also, that matter and form are bound together through his working method – that drawing enabled him to think in a new way: ‘It is this accent on the eye rather than on the mind that gives precedence to voids over planes.’⁹ Ackerman continues to state his case: Michelangelo’s drawings ‘did not commit him to working in line and plane: shading and indication of projection and recession gave them sculptural mass’.¹⁰

The modelling of light as a means of orienting one’s movement through space is best achieved and revised through model making. Typically, Renaissance architectural competitions were judged by viewing 1:20 models of facades as well as fragments of the building drawn at full scale.¹¹ The only drawings which existed for fabrication of buildings before the Renaissance were the Modano; 1:1 scale patterns of attic column bases or capitals.¹² The Modani slowly evolved from stage sets into Modello, architectural models, and often full-scale mock-ups of buildings, which enabled architects such as Michelangelo to ‘study three-dimensional effects’. Models enable scale to be judged as well as enforce the relationship between materiality and form. They also allow aesthetic decisions to be made, which relate solely to perception. For example, the intellectual matters of expression of structural logic may appear well in an orthographic drawing but be in fact detrimental to the actual quality of our experience of a building. Ackerman believes that Michelangelo used sketches and model-making ‘because he thought of the observer being in motion and hesitated to visualize buildings from a fixed point… this approach, being sculptural, inevitably was reinforced by a special sensitivity to materials and to the effect of light’.¹³ He viewed sculpture also as the art of making ideas, form, visible in matter.¹⁴ Michelangelo in particular distrusted the ways in which architectural drawings can mislead us and rather his own drawings are less objects for scrutiny than sites of his own concentration and ‘drawing out’ of his ideas. Alberto Pérez-Gomez claims that Michelangelo was suspicious of perspective, he ‘resisted making architecture through geometrical projections as he could conceive the human body only in motion’.¹⁵ Conventional orthographic architectural drawings can be compared to anatomical sections, which cut through matter to reveal connections. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci depict an objective view of still objects.¹⁶ Michelangelo wished to infuse his cadavers with life and arranged their limbs in order to express the structure of human gestures. He sought, rather than a medical theory, to improve his capacity to depict the living body in movement.¹⁷ This attention to the gestures we make is closely related to the manner in which