FINE ARTS SPECIAL
Art
Drawing the line
Bryan Robertson believes that drawing remains one of the most potent forms of art There were marks on the walls of caves before there were words. Drawings appeared long before we could write sen- tences, much less paragraphs, or compose any sort of continuous literary narrative. As a basic human instinct, the urge to make a defining mark on a flat surface, to repre- sent something in outline, to express an idea or depict an event by a mark, a sign, a hieroglyph, a symbol, a pictogram, an image, is as ancient as humankind.
When we write with a pen or pencil, we are drawing words. And, of course, we `draw the line' or draw parallels, or conclu- sions. Uneducated in special cultures and with only the vaguest visual sensibilities, which of us hasn't marvelled at a column of Japanese or Chinese or Arabic calligraphy where the beautiful drawing embraces whole phrases, moods, events and actions? But drawing isn't confined to communica- tion or to records or to decoration. Cezanne's pencil drawings of tree branches with apparently broken, fragmented out- lines — dissolved by light — told us some- thing that we hadn't grasped before about natural phenomena. When these drawings first appeared, critics thought them incom- petent.
The potent and atavistic impulse behind all graphic art should be remembered when drawings covering the civilisations of East and West are consigned to the bloodless areas of connoisseurship. These are of course the only areas of appreciation and study that most of us are able to move around and enjoy. Thank Heaven for the conservation and preservation of drawings in the public collections with their elegantly labelled boxes and portfolios and, these days, acid-free mounting boards. The Drawing department of a great museum is not the section visited by the biggest crowds of people. There is something daunting about a gallery filled with small drawings, framed and glazed, hung in a row however spaciously and elegantly, however amplified by helpful information. We are all used to the Big Picture, in art as in cine- ma and advertising, to walking into a gallery and seeing two or three huge can- vasses on one wall that you can survey, up to a point, from a lordly distance. Drawings require close individual attention — and time. Happily, the intimacy of drawings still retains its allure: special shows of drawings give great pleasure. Anyone can learn to draw. 'If you can hold a pencil, you can draw,' as Henry Moore said amiably but firmly in my pres- ence once to Phillip King, the sculptor, who was backing away from a scheme to make some prints in honour of Mark Rothko by saying that he didn't draw. Only a few of us appear in each century with the genius of a Diirer or a Delacroix but the ability to draw is in all of us, given time, patience, application and proper instruction in a drawing-class.
Among students and young artists, draw- ing as an act of probity and discovery (and self-discovery, involuntarily), as well as a technical feat of record, is gaining ground again. For the past 20 years or more, draw- ing as a creative activity in its own right has been largely discounted by a majority of students painting directly onto canvas or board, without the intermediary stage of a preparatory drawing which might muffle or falsify or inhibit the most direct expression of a visual idea.
For years now, we have sometimes loved Constable's sketches more than his finished works. We value late Turner in ways and for reasons that his contemporaries did not. From late Monet, concerned with the transient effects of light in nature, through to Pollock, intent upon the immediacy of the thrown or drawn line in pigment on canvas, the preliminary sketch has been subsumed within the final statement, just as the successive stages towards the ultimate painting were painted over in early Auer- bach.
Students don't feel any need to make preparatory drawings or sketches for paint- ing; and painting itself, with or without the support of drawing, suffered a near-eclipse through most of the Seventies when social- ly or politically inspired performance art was all the rage, and there was a vague reaction against old, technical skills and tradition triggered off by the student protests in Paris in 1968 and the Hornsey School of Art sit-ins. Other students have explored video art, conceptual art or instal- lation work without feeling any need for drawing or interest in its disciplines, which has seemed to belong to another age and relate to quite different needs. And if you or I were 18 or 19 years old at art school, and read all the column inches in the arts pages devoted to installation pieces involv- ing an actress sleeping day after day in a glass case, or a plastic head filled with blood, the traditional life class, where you work in silence at drawing for hours on end, might not seem a very alluring or sig- nificant destination.
But as an observer with considerable sympathy for quite a lot of recent art, I'm glad to find that increasing numbers of young artists are beginning to be concerned with drawing again: English drawing has always had strength and distinction and I don't believe in any long-term rejection of this primary element of art. The disciplines of the life class are essential in making it possible eventually for a young artist to draw with a brush on his canvas with as much control as in handling a pencil or pen.
How can you make an eloquent and pre- cise mark on paper or canvas to register the prompting of your sub-conscious imagi- nation, as in some aspects of abstract expressionism and its present-day develop- ments, if you can't draw or control your pencil or brush with absolute fluency and authority? Tobey and Mondrian could draw like angels; so could Matisse; Picasso could move freely with pencil or brush from drawing to painting to etching or lithography with absolute ease and made some of the greatest drawings of the centu- ry. It all depends upon the nature of your gift, of course — your kind of expressive- ness — but drawing is fundamental to any kind of visual expression. For a designer in any field, drawing is an equally crucial and basic extension of personal, individual lan- guage, no matter how sophisticated your technology in feeding specifications for a teacup or a vacuum cleaner on to a com- puter.
The good news this autumn is that the Royal College of Art has appointed Dean- na Petherbridge as their new Professor of Drawing. This unusually gifted artist has been making some of the strongest and most imaginative drawings, and her schol- arship in the history of art and architecture is impeccable. Petherbridge has a lively and well-informed eye on current practices and pursuits among young artists. She knows the art world and has travelled extensively at an official and private level in search of material and for educational purposes. Petherbridge has designed with great effect two works for the stage for the Royal Bal- let, both for Ashley Page's choreography, and she has made some strong murals. Her work is figurative but fantastic, with sharply abstract qualities, and mainly concerned with architecture. Some earlier work in diptych and triptych form explored themes drawn from war and battles with fantastic inventions. A year or two ago, an innova- tory exhibition of old master and modern drawings The Primacy of Drawing, selected by Petherbridge to show alignments and formal continuities, travelled around museums in the country, circulated by the South Bank Board. Imaginative and eru- dite, she has humour to temper her ideal- ism: students can't fail to be stirred by her presence. At the Royal College of Art, drawing would seem to be in the ascendant again.
Previous page
