Objectives

The history of media used to create art is the history of various technologies employed by artists. These technologies have helped artists both to achieve the ends they desire more readily and to discover new modes of creation and expression. A medium is both the specific material, and the process through which a given work of art is made. Chapter 10 is the first chapter exploring the media of art, and appropriately, it's about Drawing.

We think of drawing as a transient medium—we draw sketches on paper and often quickly throw them away and start over. Until the end of the 15th century, a drawing was understood to simply be a sketch, usually not dated, signed or preserved. But when artist/historians such as Georgio Vasari began to collect these sketches, drawing came into its own. Drawings were recognized as the embodiment of the artist’s personality and creative genius.

After reading this chapter you should:

1. have an understanding of the following terms and techniques related to drawing including:
   • binder
   • cartoon
   • Conté crayon
   • fixative
   • hatching
   • heightening
   • medium
   • metalpoint (or silverpoint)
   • parchment
   • pigment
   • silverpoint
   • sketch
   • stylus

2. know the two categories under which most drawing media fall: dry media, which includes metalpoint, chalk, charcoal, graphite, and pastel; and liquid media, which includes pen and ink, oil paint, brush wash, watercolor and acrylic.

3. recognize that there are some more innovative approaches to "drawing" than those mentioned above.

4. know some history of the media, from papyrus and vellums, through contemporary papers and synthetic materials.

5. see how the WORKS IN PROGRESS artists Raphael and Beverly Buchanan, though working in very different ways, both approach drawing and image making through a very deliberate process.

6. understand that the spontaneity of drawing invites experiment. Matisse "sketched" out figures from paper using scissors, Walter de Maria draws on the surface of the desert using a bull dozer.

7. recognize that increasingly, drawing is being accomplished by electronic means, especially with the aid of computers. This opens up an immediate array of potential effects that the artist can easily manipulate and rearrange at will.

Ultimately, drawing plays a fundamental role in almost all the other media that will be covered in the text. In The Critical Process, the question asked is, "Can a sketch have more expression or "life" than the final painting for which it was a study?" The prominence of quick, expressive lines which often form the basis of sketches would seem to make the answer "yes." Printmakers, painters, sculptors all employ drawings, or use their mediums as a form of drawing. In this sense, drawing informs all of the arts, it is simply something all artists do.

Copyright © 1995 - 2010 Pearson Education . All rights reserved. Pearson Prentice Hall is an imprint of Pearson . Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | Permissions