Umbra: Shadow Drawings

" On the origin of drawing in a shadow

The story of the origin of drawing, as told by Pliny, the Elder (2), states that the fixing of the contours of the shadow of a human profile on a wall, a portrait made by a Corinthian maid to serve as remembrance of her departing loved one, was the beginning of the figurative arts of the ancients. A fugitive form is made into a fixed pattern, as an aide-mémoire of the heart, both the sign of and the “replenishment”, that is, the negation of an absence. This kind of duality of the sign, at the same time “full” and “void”, revealing a dialectics of presence and absence, is inscribed in all drawings, whether imaginative, “realistic” or representational, and non-representational as well, a division or classification that loses much of its final character when we focus on the essentially “reductive” aspects of drawing, its confinement on the two-dimensional field and the relative paucity or simplicity of means (material and ideal) employed. Which are, on the other hand, precisely the conditions of drawing’s flexibility and of its synthetic powers."

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima - UMBRA : Shadow Drawings
read the complete essay here