I sent this to someone who wanted to read an excerpt of my drawing book.I edited it some more and as always amazed at how infinite the editing process is.
In our perceptual experience value is first level, lines
second. Historically this is the case from the end of the universal use of
chiaroscuro in 19thc Salon paintings to the primacy of lines in the Cubism and
Abstraction of the 20thc. However, the transition from the Renaissance to the
Baroque went in the opposite direction And in art education this sequence from
the Renaissance to the Baroque defines the method that is followed in
constructing a drawing: construct the drawing first with linear measurement and
insert value into that structure. Value in minute increments provides the
veneer or the surface of the world that we call Reality. Courses that used to
be advertised on matchbook covers and your standard drawing class at the
college level, all start with measurement. This is not to say that it does not
work but by skipping over the level one of perception it ignores two truths:#1
the hierarchical relation of value to linear structure and #2 the notion that
an object is part of a whole visual field. It isolates the figure from the
ground in which it is embedded and jettisons a priori the role of light in the
uncovering of the world.
Moreover, the use of line as measurement in classical
drawing is very different from that derived from perception and the art of the
20thc. It imposes a top down order from rigid laws concerning the construction
of the human figure and the use of systems of perspective. They both trap the
visual world in a sort of intellectual vise.
Moreover, my method works. I have observed again and again
students, who never internalized the rigid process of your typical beginning
drawing class, get a fresh start studying my method. It becomes a sort of
cognitive therapy where the linking of the way we see to drawing results in a
drawing style that is natural and provides a base that can be built on.
At higher cognitive levels we interpret the values as
recognizable things. In mid to late 19th c French landscape
painting, chiaroscuro was used not only to give enough detail to make a world
of recognizable objects but described the social classes by the styles they
wore and locations of the objects in the landscape. I recall seeing in a show
at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1996 that interspersed salon paintings
with Impressionist paintings done contemporaneously. In order to add even more
specificity to the represented scene, one artist wrote the provenance of the
boats on their sterns in a seascape. There is no doubt on the artist’s part that
this representation is only a representation and not reality. The Impressionist
artists of the the late 19thc became conscious of the a priori structures that
made the world real, and cured art of the lazy notion that what is painted is
in fact reality. We create reality from the a priori structures of the eye. In
fact drawing and painting in the 20thc, undergoes what I would call the Humpty
Dumpty affect. Whereas in the classical period all the analysis of the visual
world supports a finished product that looks like the world we move in, in the
20thc the underlying systems for shaping the world, once separated out and used
by themselves, lead to the reductionist trope toward abstraction that defines
our century. ” All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty
together again.” Lines end up constrained in Mondrian’s verticals and horizontals or are
liberated as gesture in Kline and Joan Mitchell. Value ends up in Rothko’s
numinous masses. Color perception ends up first in Matisse’s color patterns and
finally in color field painting, or just the color panels of Ellsworth Kelly.
Occasionally one finds a movement that takes an abstract language and moves it
toward verisimilitude as in the work of the Macchaioli of Italy in the early
20thc, who used the pointillism of Seurat combined with the volumetrics of
Caravaggio to create some heavily realistic work. Much of Picasso’s work never
uses the surface of realism but except for the cubism done with Braque assumes
a viewer placed in front of the scene depicted. In the hands of other artists
his discoveries suffer what philosophers call reification: it is assumed that
the language is reality. Like the Machiolli, that approach has a leaden quality
to it.
Jason Travers, as a student at AIB, did the last drawing. It is followed by a drawing by Twombly. Jason’s drawing shows the lines beginning to break away from the original value drawing and interacting with each other self-referentially. In the Twombly drawing the lines are free to "do their own thing.
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| Value drawing done with charcoal |
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| Lines added at value shifts |
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| Values erased and lines enhanced |
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| Jason Travers drawing moving from value to linear approach |
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| Cy Tombly drawing with liberated lines |
