The State of Drawing

It is often said that “drawing is seeing,” and the definition is derived from the act of pulling an image into
existence. Hence, “drawing” has been seen as series of marks dragged across a piece of paper, as visualised
through the hand-eye coordination of the creative artist. But in contemporary terms, such a definition is
incomplete. Drawing is also the exploration and positing of new ways of seeing things that are conceived
in the mind’s eye of the artist, and gestate until ‘birthed’ in the field of the observer. The immediacy of
drawing’s ability to define, and the dichotomy of creative ‘artist’ versus creative ‘process’, generates the
spirit of what makes the subject of drawing so interesting. Contemporary drawing shows that the artist is
both the orchestrator and instrument of drawing’s desire to reveal itself.1 Like pulling water from a well,
the artist draws the work from the depths of a rationale, and then frames the practice in both context and
intention, as art. Methods of mark-making are as varied as can be imagined, and in this trope lies the
exceptionally wide field of the definition of drawing that is currently in use.

In the face of digital technologies which bypass intellectual investment to produce vast oceans of
objective simulacrum, contemporary drawing has also seen an appreciation in recognition due to its
apparent meditative depth, gestural immediacy, bravery and intellectual honesty by way of contrast to the
aforementioned proliferation of digital media.

Modes of contemporary drawing cover realism, abstraction, modernism and post-modernism. The state of
drawing today is not governed by specific themes, but rather the idea that the choices that artists contend
with over surface, mark-making, space, composition, scale, materials, and intentionality, are essential to
the delivery of the visual quality and meaning of the drawing, or are themselves the image and meaning.2
From the intensely gestural, to the cool intellectual contrivances that entrust the making of marks to the
wind and tide, it seems like anything goes in drawing today.

The making of the ‘mark’ may always be seen as the defining act of drawing, but the over-arching concern
for artists and critics today is intentionality. Rational foundation and germinal conceptualisation may
be seen as the gestational antecedents in the birthing of the work. In the end, it is the conceptual set-up
that counts, and the motive is paramount, as all methods that bring the artist to their mark are acceptable
as vehicles for expression. In fact, as long as artists choose to rationalise their practice as drawing3 the
definition may stand, as rules for such definition are virtually non existent. Thus contemporary definitions
of drawing are extraordinarily wide, in a field that is open for play and exploration. Technique for its own
sake is considered an anachronism by enlightened observers who may champion drawings stripped of
artifice in pursuit of a more transcendent “real” found in expressive conceptual ideas.4 “Few would want to
comment about why a drawing was outrageously bad – you chuckle knowing it was meant to be like that”,
says James Faure Walker5 in his view that the evolution of drawing has led us to new vistas where anything
goes, but the seriousness of creative exposition remains sacrosanct, no matter what the medium.

Many pundits describe drawing as an act of seeing, and that it owes its virtue to the ability to counter the
overwhelming conspiracy of gadgets that blind our senses, and numb our objective perception.6 I admit
to harbouring this view myself, but the notion needs to be expanded to include the “seeing” of abstract
connections with the mind’s eye. This kind of seeing is an altogether different kind of observation. The
unmanifest possibilities of pure creativity, through intellectualised mark-making, along with processes that
bear no relation to traditional atelier or life drawing practice, are still very much to be considered ‘drawing’
and can be argued for, despite their detachment from more traditional definitions. This kind of seeing still
‘draws’ the unmanifest into the manifest, as hitherto occluded concepts are drawn into the light, through
artistic visualisation. Regardless of the process and practice, drawing is the result of intimate expression of
intent by the artist, brought forth and celebrated as an act of “drawing” in contemporary theory.

At the turn of the millennium, there has been an accelerated elevation of the importance of drawing in
contemporary art. Drawing has been traditionally discounted as the poor cousin of painting, but the
directness and the apparent honesty of mark making has seen a trend in appreciation in recent years,
owing to the sheer creative possibilities open to the acceleration of its resuscitated trope.7 Maybe this is a
direct response to the ubiquity of image-making made so readily available by digital technology?

There is something painstaking and direct in the act of drawing, even when the process is entirely indirect.
I’m alluding to the intensive investment of intellectual intention that draws the ‘drawing’ into existence.
With the materiality of pen and paper, there are no second chances. Erasing a mark will generally result in
a residual artefact that lingers on the surface of the work. Such plotting in the work history—a ‘scarring’
if you will—suffuses character, and literally marks the work as essentially unique, in ways that digital
work can never invest. It’s far too easy to erase, cover, recant and reproduce digital images. The lack of
painstaking investment and bravery on the part of the artist will naturally divest the precious, and herald
the bland, when it comes to digital art.

Serious drawing is a serious business, despite the apparent ease and much vaunted immediacy of simply
putting “marks on paper”. The works of Hayley Tompkins8 present as minimalist fetish pieces, owing
their impact to their very lack of impact, with lines so feint and whimsical that they strain credulity in
their elevation as serious works. But then, this is the point. The challenge of acceptance is precisely why
they are acceptable. In the challenge lies the art. It is wrong to assume the minimal line placed on a page
by an accomplished artist has not been achieved with the proverbial ‘Ten thousand hours’ of practice.
Good drawing still requires talent. The talent might be the talent of generating fury, perplexity or sublime
transport. Leo Duff says, “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”.9

In the West, we encourage imagination in drawing with little reference to skill or academic correctness,
and this is in sharp contrast to the prevalent approach in China, where students are still required to perfect
their life drawing skills before they can consider compositional creativity. The debate rages, but it can be
argued that advanced conceptual drawing utterly divested of correct technique may fire the imagination
more completely, and draw to light more succinctly, deeper revelations about the human condition.

Patrick Lynch says, “Drawing simultaneously records and reveals the correspondence between speaking
and doing, making and imagining, things and ideas, imagination and time, materiality and the immaterial:
“Only Fire Forges Iron” ”,10 suggesting that the depth of sentient experience is expressed more fully when
the skill of the artist has undergone the sanctification of practice towards an abstract idea of perfection.
Making reference to the genius of Michelangelo, Lynch suggests that the famed artist was more interested
in the esoteric quality of his intentionality than the quantifiable aspects of correct anatomy, and he (Lynch)
says, “how we do something enables what we do to occur”.11 This creative motivation was in contrast to the
empirical approach of Leonardo da Vinci at the time of the renaissance. In short, Michelangelo was more
interested in expressing ideas of perfection rather than producing dead facsimiles of empirical perfection.
This is an interesting departure point to consider. Western ideas about creativity are in the eye of the
beholder, not in the objective representation of a perfectly drafted still life, or anatomical figure.

This premise, taken to its logical extent in the present, means the idea in the process rules supreme, as
Emma Cocker suggests, “No longer concerned with giving material representation to what has been
already conceptualised or is known to exist, the (oblique) aim of such a practice might be to produce
germinal conditions wherein something unexpected or unanticipated might arise. This is not to conceive
of drawing as a preliminary or preparatory sketch that — like the hypothesis — creates the premise for
something else to follow or flesh out, but rather as the very site wherein something unknown or unplanned
for might occur”.12 In other words, contemporary drawing owes its power, in part, to the unpredictability
of creative exploration and formal research through process of drawing, rather than drawing offering so
little as mere representation.

With such a devil-may-care exploratory spirit, there exists a double bind introduced by the rigours of
academic research when it comes to artists justifying their practice in long-hand proposals before the
work has been made. This is frustrating for artists, in that empirical statements about creativity cannot
be easily made before the work itself has been created. The journey is the destination for such research,
summoning a refusal to be predetermined, and in resisting the pressures to be premeditated, the act of
making becomes meditative.13 Patricia Caine speaks of the artist being forced apart from the process
through methodological investigation, as the work is “assessed by outside agents and the practitioner as
subject is given a limited and objectified role, rather than being an integral part of the investigation”.14 This
conundrum is further expressed by the perplexing answer that many artists cry within a research context,
“I won’t know until I’ve done it”.15

Artists may employ many techniques to arrive at the new. Peter Sharp speaks of “rupture”, alluding to the
purposeful disconnection between the artist and the field of view to generate the final visualisation that
challenges the banal strictures of everyday vision. Traditionally, this rupture is encouraged in students
through studio practices designed to ‘loosen’ technique. Such practices may include the use of multiple
pencils to generate an intentionally imperfect line while revealing the beauty of the accidental. Random
juxtapositions and washes of colour help to generate interest through intentionally accidental possibility.
Drawing with the wrong hand, or viewing the composition indirectly through a mirror to upset the
casually bland perspective of the naked eye and its rutted faculties are classic techniques used to achieve
this effect. Creativity of the subconscious can be accessed indirectly, through such methods, as chance
becomes an integral part of the drawing process. Looking for an alternative to the European passage
through the Australian landscape, Sharp uses a method of rupture to separate himself from hackneyed
Eurocentricities, to find a distinctly Australian response to the landscape that is authentically native
in a contemporary context—without subsuming Aboriginal motifs16— a feat worthy of recognition.
Eschewing the horizon, Sharp creates codified abstractions that speak of objects found in his field of view
and magnified to the point of reinvention. His landscapes are microcosms of the macroenvironment, and
celebrations of objectified subjects that he experiences in the landscape, to then successfully express the
‘spirit of place’ through his drawing.

Some artists take this rupture to the extreme by allowing chance to rule supreme in their drawing process.
Ultan Coyle contrives drawing apparatuses made of floating plastic boxes with pens suspended by strings
over paper to produce drawings generated over time, by wind and tide.17 Tim Knowles attaches ink pens
to boughs of trees and sets up and easel to allow the wind to draw a different kind of landscape picture18.
These works are a product of the landscape, and arise as documents of the physical properties of the
landscape, an entirely different way of evoking the spirit of nature by removing the hand of the artist
altogether. Artists can employ nature to make marks with the use of gravity, propulsion, surface tension,
and fire19 to name a few. Limited only by the imagination, this discourse between possibility and reality
made manifest in contemporary drawing leaves the doors wide open for Nature to enter the process.
The acceptable possibilities in mark-making have opened wide because of a fundamental shift in outlook
in the twentieth century. Artists have always drawn on nature to depict the inner and outer world, and
this way of seeing art is remains relevant. However, some artists began to draw on popular culture in the
20th century. The break from tradition opened up the possibilities in previously unheard of ways. The act
of mark making was thrown wide open by the likes of Warhol, Raushenberg and Lichtenstein. Natural
marks are left to chance, just as the marks created by Pollock or Cage are consciously placed beyond
human control. Such practices remain wild, provisioned by the chaos of nature, they possess a freshness
and otherness that defies the human hand. The hand that nevertheless releases them to become manifest
through unbridled visualisation.20

In addition to the open-minded acceptance of newer kinds of mark making, there now exist many more
ways of making marks. Machines have become ubiquitous tools, but it is roundly understood that it is
never the machine, but the artists who ultimately program the machines to produce their mark. For
no matter how many new ways we might contrive to make marks on paper, it is always the artist who
makes the conscious choice to embrace a process that will lead to the end result. It is the intentionality
that provides the catalyst for the creation of the work, and it is the intentionality that provides the
personalistion of the work, making the art unique, and forever an expression of the artist’s will.

Since contemporary drawing has expanded the scope of what drawing means, it is no longer sequestered
in stuffy definitions of ancient museums, but neither is it obliged to be mixed with other forms of visual
expression in order to compete with these allegedly more spectacular visual forms21.

Drawing has expanded from the page onto the wall, into the room and beyond. The definition of line has
been redefined as material—string, wire, plastic tape, semen, sound, you name it—all figure in drawing
creation, and demonstrate that the limitations of pen and paper (and drawing itself) no longer apply in
the way they once did. Possibilities are limited only by the artist’s ability to twist and reinvent the purpose
of the form in service of expression, driving the expectation of pundits by voluble creation. The question
of difference continues to be justified by this creative bonanza. Volker Adolphs says that despite mutual
appropriation and overlapping with other art forms, traditional classifications remain useful, “For drawing
there is the line; for painting, colour; for sculpture, space and volume; for film and video, movement and
sound”.22 German artist Jorinde Voight, experiments with cartographic mapping of sound waves plotted
on paper as points, joined by lines to capture analogue topographic visualisations of her “movements” in
the air.23 This in turn has been re-generated as sound with a literally resounding effect by composers Patric
Catani and Chris Imler, who set up a sound field with speakers strategically placed in points in space
plotted to recreate Voight’s drawings. The results are physical sound waves that reconstitute the original
sound through the transmission of sound flexions ‘drawn’ by the composers from Voight’s drawing. The
effect closes an intricate feedback loop of resonating sound-come-line-come-sound originally visualised in
Voight’s delicate drawings then intentionally redrawn as a four-dimensional experience of space and time
through sound.

Some observers are critical of the experimental nature currently defined as drawing and embraced by
pundits, preferring the safety of traditional perspective (and perspectives). But the fundamental truth
of drawing is that all representational perspectives are in merely re-presentations of objects, and not the
actual object. The truth of drawing is that there is no truth. Thus drawing has really always employed
‘trickery’ to arrest the imagination, and has always used experimental technology and mathematics to
produce new materials in order to generate tacit representational perspectives.24 James Faure Walker
believes that “However we make drawings now, my guess is that [the old masters] would have expected us
to take advantage of the extra knowledge we have—of the scale of the universe, of DNA, of new materials,
travel and technologies. Like the modernists who followed on, they could be both medievalists and keen
scientists”. He goes on to say the hallmark of drawing in the contemporary sense, is a real determination
to explore and expose how things work. He says “What is also striking is the continuity that existed
between thinking and doing, between theory and practice, and between the amateur and the professional.
We don’t count on today’s expert commentators being able to flesh out their observations with their own
illustrations”.25 Art making and art appreciation are in this sense, a collaboration between the artists who
define the cosmos and the commentators who see the vision through the conduit of the artist.

A telling point is made by John Vernon Lord who says, “In the same way that good grammar alone
will never necessarily write a good story, an illustrator has to go beyond draftsmanship to make a good
picture”.26 In the end, the successful drawing will generate and maintain a delicate balance between
esoteric expression and cognitive assurance. A think/feel dichotomy arises in a balanced union between
these tensive forces that provide the spectacle of creative wizardry unlimited by convention but rooted in
an intentional rationale, that can be mapped and thus appreciated as art in the eye of the observer.

The most striking thing about the current state of drawing that can be extrapolated from the experiments
that abound beyond the boundaries of the page, is in that these fresh perspectives are in addition to the
classic celebrations of the beautiful line, beautifully drawn. Contemporary drawing has become celebrated
for its ability to cultivate and revel in complexity.27 This is in sharp contrast to the mind-numbing
simulacra prevalent in every aspect of our cluttered sensory fields. Digital technology, which provides the
proliferation of sensory noise, is the perfect ‘stage’ for the quiet complexity of drawing to contrast against.

Contemporary drawing invites the viewer to meditate, and look beyond the surface to discover hidden
visions of occluded meaning brought to light by the artist. These didactic qualities produce the most
fundamental virtues of art, which are to enlighten the viewer with counterpoints of cerebral mediation
between the known (microcosm) and the unknown (macrocosm). Gnostics say that salvation comes like
a thief in the night, and I will posit that contemporary drawing creeps up and captures the imagination
with visual perspectives offered to the viewer by the artist. An esoteric view may reveal that contemporary
drawing provides a syzygy between object and subject, artist and viewer, that forms an infinite loop of
cognitive communion. Expanding beyond narrow definition, drawing reveals something of the infinite
possibility of humankind, its ability to see beyond the real into the meta-real inside us all.

Footnotes
1 E Cocker, ‘The Restless Line’, Hyperdrawing Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, P Sawdon & R Marshall (eds), Taurus & Co, London 2012, xiii
2 M Davidson, Contemporary Drawing Key concepts and Techniques, Watson-Guptill Pubications New York 2011, p. 8.
3 R Marshall & P Sawdon, ‘Hyperdrawing—the Position’, Hyperdrawing Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, op. cit., ix.
4 J F Walker, ‘Old manuals and New Pencils’, Drawing – the Process, L Duff & J Davies (eds) Intellect Bristol 2005, p. 18.
5 ibid, p 16
6 F. Franck, The Zen of Seeing, Seeing/Drawing as Meditation. Vintage Books, Random House, New York 1973 p. 3.
7 C Rattemeyer. ‘Drawing Today’, Vitamin D2, New Perspectives in Drawing, C Garret (ed), Phaidon Press Limited London New York 2013, p. 8
8 H Tompkins, Vitamin D New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon Press Limited London New York 2005, p. 310
9 L Duff , ‘Introduction’, Drawing – the Process, op. cit. p2
10 P Lynch, ‘Only Fire Forges Iron. The Architectural drawings of Michelangelo’, Drawing – the Process, op. cit. p. 9
11 ibid, p. 9
12 E Cocker, op. cit. xiii
13 ibid.
14 P Caine, Drawing, The Enacting Evolution of the Practitioner, Intellect Bristol Chicago 2010, p. 37
15 ibid, p. 44
16 A Frost, ‘Just Enough’, Peter Sharp, Will to Form. Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre Gymea 2012, p. 18
17 U Coyle, Hyperdrawing Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, op. cit., p. 25
18 T Knowles, ibid, p. 53
19 M Davidson, op. cit., p. 73
20 ibid.
21 V Adolphs, ‘With the Line’, Linie Line Linea Catalogue, V Morris & S Quigley (eds) Intitut fur Auslandbeziehungen e.V. Stuttgart 2010, p. 11
22 ibid.
23 A Cannon, ‘Collective Movement Infinite Ribbon’, Matrix/Leminscate: C Lethert & J Voight, Kerber Verlag Bielfeld/Leipzig 2009 p. 3
24 M Davidson. op. cit., p. 40
25 J F Walker, op. cit., p. 24
26 J V Lord ‘The Journey Of Drawing an Illustration Fable’, Drawing the Process, op. cit. P 30
27 C Krummel ‘Drawing – a Medium Art’ Linie Line Linea, op. cit. P 21.

Bibliography
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