Drawing is the key to good painting and nearly all great painters throughout history have been great draftsmen. We know that draftsmanship was important to the Old Masters, but we might be persuaded that drawing is not important to artists who work abstractly. I make the case that no matter how you paint, drawing is the key to good work.
You might say that Pollock simply dripped paint onto a canvas, but if you look at his early work, you will see that he was classically trained in the fine arts and that means lots of drawing from life. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton who was himself and excellent draftsman and painter.
DeKooning was an exquisite draftsman and his early drawings are as precise as jewels.
Here is a drawing of my paternal grandmother I made in preparation for her portrait in oil on canvas. I made the drawing from life in pencil and then added pen and ink. By drawing the subject as precisely as possible, I gain and understanding of the features and personality of the subject. By studying the subject, I am better prepared to work in color on a canvas, because I know where things go so to speak.
You may say why do I need to be good a drawing to paint abstractly or do and abstract sculpture or throw a pot? Well, the answer is simply eye-hand coordination. Drawing trains the hand and the eye to work together so that when you want to make a mark in a certain way, you can do it. Once you have mastered drawing, you may then go on to do anything you want with confidence as you will have exquisite control of your brush, chisel, pencil or whatever you are using.
I use drawing as a way of exploring and studying. I made this ink and watercolor copy of a Japanese print when I was a student. At the time, I was fascinated by the way in which the Japanese rendered space. My way of understanding that was to draw and draw and draw. I'll leave space in Japanese pictures for another time, but I hope that I am making my point about the importance of drawing.
Drawing becomes critically important if you are making representative paintings be they figures, landscapes or architecture, because things have to appear as we see them and they must be in their proper places within the picture.
Here is one more example that will illustrate my point about objects being in their proper places. I drew this self portrait in pen and ink one night as I sat in my favorite easy chair. I placed a mirror against a chair so that I would be looking down at it . In this picture, I am sitting in the chair and there is a wall behind me and all of these things exist in a believable relationship to each other. You can see that I am not sitting on top of the chair, but rather down in it. I occupy a space just as the chair and the room do.
One of the most common things children do when drawing and painting is to make an object in the middle of the paper with nothing else around it. Well, I say that objects do not exist in a vacuum. We do not exist in a vacuum. In the picture above, you can see that I have drawn myself in a defined space and it looks natural. Were I to simply draw my figure on a blank page, no matter how well I drew it, it would still appear strange, because there would be no space around me.
It is this rendering of space and form that makes drawing so important and it is the skill of drawing that makes the artist. Most of us like Salvador Dali, but take another look at his melting clocks picture and you will see that he was a master draftsman.
I welcome your comments on this subject. Stay tuned for other topics. Patrick, AKA Potlick
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