On drawing

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

On  drawing in general

We can situate the origin of drawing in the process of human development and the early graphic activities related to neuromotor and perceptive developments of the species, activties and forms of behaviour at the source, among other modalities, of the various graphical forms of communication which "culminate", so to speak, historically in writing.

Thus considered, drawing, that is, the graphic act, its procedures and results, is an  important element of human intellectual and emotional life; it is both the source and the product of developments of perception, of manual ability, of symbolization, and of the interrelated capacities of cognition and expression in social life.
This characterization is relevant for the understanding of drawing as an artistic discipline in our time, as the cultural context today, marked by technological development, transforms the disciplines, pressing their boundaries as it modifies our means of knowledge, communication and expression, relating and transforming in depth the "means of production" in general, and consequently our material and symbolic ways of life.

On drawing as art

Drawing is both form and discipline. The autonomous discipline (that is, drawing considered and appreciated by itself) is based on the form which is also an "infrastructural" element of several other disciplines such as painting, design, architecture, etc. In the comparison and distinction between, for example, drawing and painting, it has  been said that drawing is what remains of painting when color is removed. An operation that emphasizes the ideal nature or ideal element characteristic of drawing - a more abstract element by contrast to the essential, unmediated sensuality of painting - and also discloses  drawing as an initial moment, level or basic element of the visual creation of forms in the arts of spatial representation , including the arts of space-time experience such as dance, film, among others.

Point → Line → Plane → Figure, the primary generative elements of spatial analysis and representation appear in drawing as "concrete abstractions" and characterize its  essential functions of mediation in the process of mapping space-time relations, in processes of  identification and projection, in the construction of  the experience of self and of the world.

If we remove the element of color from painting, what remains is the delimitation of forms by the essential, "primitive" contrast between light and shadow. In this way, drawing can be considered as the elementary or primary way of graphical organization of the relations between lights and darks generating the forms and the rhythms of  spatial representation.

As an autonomous or artistic form, drawing is also a "last" or final form, both synthetic and dynamic, that is, based on a relative economy of means, self-sufficient and, at the same time, implying a space of future developments as a generative form (the same consideration applies to the use of color in the drawing). Drawing is concomitantly and essentially, both complete and incomplete form and process, the embodiment of an essential tension between being and becoming. As  synthesis and, at the same time, as the overcoming of form by form, drawing is art itself.


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