For all the youngsters in the audience, this was one surface young artists had to draw on before the advent of computer drawing programs. (See previous post) The only failing of this method is that when you lift up the little piece of plastic, you erase your drawing.
As you might note, the image is very linear. The subject was too!
When I first began to draw, I thought it consisted of something called “eye-hand coordination.” And I suppose it does. But as I have spent many years now exploring drawing in all kinds of forms and studying the drawings of master draughtsmen, I realize that drawing is really an expression of ideas. At its essence it is all idea — almost pure idea.
If you can imagine something you can draw it. Of course, everything depends upon the character of that imagining. A rich pictorial imagination is involved in imagining things even as you are looking at them. Imagination is a crucial component of seeing.
With the advent of the computer, drawing is something that you can make with a different tool than a pencil — or the other older tools usually associated with drawing.
But the idea is still the active thing. In this case the lines were enclosing things: a house, some trees, a dog. A world composed entirely of lines.
There’s lots of ways of beginning. I follow no rules when I paint. One can draw with a brush. You can put things down in whatever order you notice them. You probably can’t even tell what is being depicted here. Yet, I love a painting at this stage — when all its beauty is in its pure forms and dragged paint. I’ll have to let you have a peek at it when it’s done.
“A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble myself to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I immediately understand the sentiment which emerges from it, for it is in the lines, the composition, the colour. The title will only serve to confirm my impression.” — Henri Matisse, 1908, “Notes of a Painter” [Matisse on Art, ed. Jack D. Flamm, p. 38]
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