At school I remember drawing had a certain kudos and usefulness. It could dazzle the hooligans and divert the intellectuals. It could be used as a weapon to mock, a tool to explain, a means to affirm tribal belonging, an aphrodisiac.
GLASS KITCHEN Year 1 project: involves direct observational study and imagined visualisation. Instead of dealing with the surface imagine that your kitchen is constructed completely from glass. All doors are see-through, walls and everything in the cupboards is transparent. Look from a number of angles: straight on, low or high viewpoint, from under or on top of a kitchen table or work surface. Use preliminary studies to explore and select a position with compositional potential. For example draw the contents with cupboard doors open, then closed and try to record the objects from memory. Now investigate the contents and structure of your cupboards using a series of small studies employing a range of media.
For this drawing your selection and application of media is crucial. Think about how you can deal with subtle ideas of surface and layering of marks. How will you reveal depth, show things in front of one another? What about reflection and refraction? Drawing, recording information and rubbing it back or removing it will leave a trace that may work in the overall context of the image. Are you going to work in layers using different types of paper? different tones of paper? tracing paper, cut edges, glue, clear tape, white on white, multiple tinted layers or actual physical layers using mixed-media? The choice is yours. Consider the focus of your drawing, will it deal with form and structure, shape and pattern, image and surface, mood and atmosphere? How can you exploit the intrinsic qualities of your chosen media? This project encourages revision and re-working as an integral part of the drawing process. It reveals a procedure for looking, observing and thinking in visual layers.
SKETCHBOOKS Gathering visual research in sketchbooks is a crucial stage of informing idea development. Sketchbooks should be individual and demonstrate a personal appetite and motivation to explore through direct observation or secondary methods.
HABITAT Year 1 project: Over four days draw a large, changing, constructed environment. As the structure alters, reduce or add content, recording a series of interrelated layers. At times it may be appropriate to selectively obliterate parts of the image, before moving on. Be brave, knowing that you can always return to where you were. As the image progresses be more selective, identifying areas you wish to change as well as sections to be preserved.
CRAIG HARPER Gray’s Painting Graduate I explored drawing extensively during my painting degree at Gray’s of School Art. I began to favour drawing over painting, as the processes involved in drawing were more direct and spontaneous. The pace of drawing was appealing. It can progress very rapidly, often as quick as you can think and yield surprising results. My initial interest was creating drawings in blank books, filling them from cover to cover with absurd narrative drawings, each page densely laden with naive mark-making. In recent years however I have adapted to focus more on the image and less on intense mark-making. I currently create drawings that have an inclination towards storytelling, using sequencing and storyboarding. Sequenced drawings offer a wider scope to communicate an overall idea. The combined drawings all contribute to an overall narrative, as opposed to encapsulating it within one image. The movement from one picture to the next let’s me play with rhythm, timing and pace. An over-arching theme that has always been present in my drawings is nature. I am interested in our disharmony with the natural world and depict it as a force that my characters struggle against.
FIGURE DRAWING Keith Grant - Course Leader Painting What we are looking for when a student applies to Gray’s is potential, and one of the ways in which we assess that potential is to look for evidence of Drawing. We feel that this is a crucial attribute for a new student because as they progress through the 1st and 2nd years of the course they will employ Drawing in everything that they undertake and in a variety of ways.
Visual thinking Students begin to use drawing as a means of gathering primary research and again when they are starting to develop their ideas. Drawing at this stage of the course is being used as a tool, a tool that can help them to get the ideas and stories that are in their heads, out of their head, and onto paper. Through using drawing in this way ideas are explored and considered, modified and improved with the result being that a range of options are created as opposed to having just the one. From the Life Drawing class, where the emphasis is on objective study, to the application of a more subjective, or imaginative, form of Drawing within their studio practice, options are essential. We want our students to develop and become more confident, informed, practitioners with the ideas that they explore and the options that they create through drawing giving them a solid foundation, a grounding, that they can utilise as they move through the 3rd and into the 4th year of the course.
In their 3rd year students are encouraged to develop a much more personal visual language and Drawing often begins to play a different role in relation to their studio practice. While students will continue to inform their work through idea development and working studies, Drawing can also be applied in a more direct and ambitious way. Drawing is a broad church and it is not uncommon for students in one way or another to make it their main form of expression throughout their 4th year. Indeed, It is not unusual for a students Degree show to be made up entirely of a group of finished Drawings.
Here at Gray’s we aim to support each and every student in whatever direction their practice takes them and you can be fairly sure that whichever path they do decide to follow, that you will find drawing is at the core.
Andrew Cranston - Lecturer Painting Notes on Drawing Advice for 1st year students: wherever you are, whatever you are doing ask yourself inwardly this question “Is there a drawing in this?”. Drawing is an activity that connects us to a present, to a now. We make marks as if to say this is me, here, now. We are marking time and space. And yet when making a drawing, various ancestors come to mind, perhaps to primal origins to those cave-dwellers that fixed shadows cast on walls, and to drawings made between then and now, Breughel, Rembrandt, Degas, and so on. It is a whispering down the ages, (what Umberto Eco punningly calls an echo) and here at Gray’s there is this same passing on of touch, feel and sensibility. In part at least we teach what we were taught, and so in this way artist/teachers such as James Cowie or Sylvia Wishart are still in this building. It has been said that the people who often cope the best with serious illness are those who care deeply and passionately about something, and at the same time don’t care at all. That is not taking it too seriously. Something similar happens with making art. Is there anything more debilitating to an artist than trying to produce a masterpiece? Life drawing is often a much misunderstood activity. It is less to do with a tradition of the nude, and more to do with the act and discipline of looking itself. Looking and seeing.
Drawing directly from life leads to awareness and this is the artist’s greatest asset. At school I remember drawing had a certain kudos and usefulness. It could dazzle the hooligans and divert the intellectuals. It could be used as a weapon to mock, a tool to explain, a means to affirm tribal belonging, an aphrodisiac. A sense of play in the most elemental sense is crucial when drawing. What use is a toy to a child if it is so precious it doesn’t allow him or her to play? So in making a drawing you must allow yourself to play, to risk, to possibly lose it all.
With Drawing dogs come to mind. The way a dog circles the spot before lying down, enacting some instinct from the wilds, or when they are peeing and marking their territory. This staking out of space, the mapping tendency runs deep. The writer George Perec talked of inhabiting the page as real and imaginative space and we might think of a piece of paper as a space condensed, a world in and of itself. Drawing is used on bank notes to symbolize national identity and/or celebrate human achievement, in court to visualise a defendant, by plumbers to explain the level of water in relation to the outflow pipe on a water tank, by film-makers to sell an idea, by children before they can write, by surgeons to clarify operation procedures. Advice for 1st year students: Never draw something that looks like nothing.
Nelson Diplexcito - Lecturer Painting Notes on Drawing The drawing in a painting is often associated wrongly with being present only in the early stages of the development of pictorial composition and painterly construction. It is important that drawing remains continuous and is evidenced throughout the process of making paintings. It is only through this that a painting remains, active, alert, decisive and essential. To not employ drawing in the making of paintings may lead to a visual tension being lost and being replaced by a form of expeditious filling-in. Directness and vitality that was present at the onset will be replaced by a form of careless looking, which at best will provide a form that is average and middling to at worst a painting that is no longer about seeing. To draw from observation is to arrest a moment that without your intervention would remain unseen.
Drawing should never be seen as a form of arrangement or a movement towards a condition of harmonisation. It is misleading to talk about drawing in this way. For me the most effective drawings are those that present visual tension. Pictorial tension can take many forms, some of which you will already know; figure ground conflict, linear difference, tonal opposition, conflict, difference and opposition. It is important for drawings to possess these tensions as they create a form of visual energy that fires the working life of a drawing or painting. That is perhaps one of the reasons why a painting, drawing or an etching made four hundred years ago still remains charged and has the capacity to move and affect us today. Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, Design and its associated practices are governed in the most effective cases by basic visual principles. What exists at the core of these visual principles is drawing. In time you may chose to work against them but it is important that you know how they work.
DESIGN DRAWING & VISUALISATION It is important you experiment with media and processes, take risks. Do not be worried about ‘mistakes’, think of reassessment and revision as a natural, important aspect in the process of making drawings.
DRAWING TOOLS Random mark-making, less control 3D design project: Students make three drawings tools simple or complex in their nature using low-tech materials e.g. sections of dowel, used tooth brushes, scouring pads etc. Each double-ended tool provides an opportunity to create a unique range of line, surfaces and mark-making. The distance between the end of the tool and the closeness of your grip varies the level of control and accuracy of execution. This encourages working on a larger scale, less inhibition and demands the student responds to and uses these marks to solve the visualisation. This promotes a freer, quicker approach and removes the potential for detailed revision. The examples illustrated show exploration of random, stacked three-dimensional forms using paint and ink to build-up the image and structure. A series of immediate drawn responses can be achieved in a short time scale. In addition students are instructed to draw with their non-dominant hand to further reduce the level of control, often these drawings provide lighter, sensitive marks and considerable potential for development in conjunction with tighter more formal drawn marks.
FASHION DRAWING & VISUALISATION Charlie Hackett - Lecturer Fashion & Textiles Drawing is focused around using drawing as a gateway to designing. Life drawing is extremely valuable to the development of fashion ideas and garment construction. Students are able to use the model to understand silhouette and sculptural concepts through building constructions around the figure through 360 degrees. The process of drawing allows them to push their ideas to the extreme and understand how the body moves in relation to how the garment is worn and constructed. Visualising materiality within drawing allows the students to explain their fashion concepts to a client.
CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE Michael Agnew - Course Leader CAP The daily practice of drawing is at the heart of the creative process for every contemporary art practitioner, tutors and students alike at Gray’s, either in terms of researching and exploring development procedures to underpin contexts and ideas, or indeed for executing finished outcomes in their own right. Drawing can be speculative and unknown in the beginning; leading to enhanced knowledge acquisition and understanding of ones own practice and visual language. Drawing sometimes concerns rehearsal and familiarisation with the unknown or abstract, and can be a useful tool to describe tension and narrative in aspects of audience comprehension and perception.
Drawing has a primacy of expression and it’s potency never diminishes either as a process of discovery, communication or as resolved statements. Drawing offers a unique insight into complex thinking or philosophies of artists/students and can nourish methodologies for problem solving, illustrate initial concepts and indeed sometimes drawing is just playful. Drawing offers an inexhaustible scope as an essential tool to describe personal politics or subject matter. Drawing affords the opportunity for broadcasting ideas, values and concepts, forms of visual story telling through mapping or storyboards. Quite often it involves simply working out problems with 2D pictorial compositions or rehearsing 3D solutions on paper, so to speak.
TAKO TAAL Contemporary Art Practice – Honours Year Student Sometime ago I was speaking to someone in the corridor at Gray’s. At a point during our exchange they moved across to the wall, raised their hand and traced a diagram with their finger. It was a simple gesture. And yet, the image that it conjured, seemed to hover before me long after the motion was complete. It was a perfect drawing, articulate, and tender. It is an image that stays with me. I could take you to the spot where the drawing occurred but it is no longer there. I can tell you about it. I could even retrace the movement with my own hand, and perhaps you would also experience the same mirage like feeling – drawing you in.
Do you know what I mean? Do you see what I see? To be honest, I don’t draw that much anymore. I have become more interested in representing what is not there, observing in other ways: I’m trying to understand what drawing can be.
Draw upon and drawn in. Conversations are drawings that only you can carry. Yours for you to share and in your own voice to redraw at anytime. We adapt our speech to our audience. The same cannot be said of a drawing, it is one image for all. In a drawing there will always be a boundary, an edge. The page or material will at some point inevitably stop. With speech there are no such limits, we are limited only by notional social etiquette. Conjuring images, representing time and place: Trying to show you how I see or how I felt this moment, is drawing and this will go on until we are interrupted.
We are passionate about Drawing@Gray’s School of Art
www.graysartschoolaberdeen.com Gray’s School of Art, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen, AB10 7QD, Scotland, UK All artwork by Gray’s School of Art students Photography by Fiona Stephen
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