It Is All Drawing

Because of Inktober as well as a daily commitment to my other blog of digital works, thoughts about drawing have occupied me lately. Drawing is an ancient hominid pursuit, likely dating to before there was our species H. sapiens, that it ought to be considered fundamental to intellect. We drew before we wrote, one suspects, and probably even before we spoke to one another. Drawing is of course also fundamental to making art. Even abstract art owes something to drawing. There have been very few sculptors, painters, illustrators or graphic artists who did not draw.

In my own practice, drawing is still foundational. For many years most of my drawing was in monochromatic graphite. Painting has occupied me for decades though, and drawing seemed peripheral to the rest of my output. I sketched and doodled and scribbled but didn't draw seriously in the way that artists of the past were taught. As time has passed, though, drawing for its own sake has continued to be a habit of mine, and so has exploring various drawing mediums. Digital drawing has been my latest investigation but over the years I've drawn with charcoal, sauce, pastel, ink (both pen and brush), as well as pixels and pencil. Given the range of mediums I've used for drawing, I thought it would be interesting to post a few, each done in a different medium--charcoal, pencil, ink, and pixels.

Portrait of Norman, after Rockwell, charcoal on paper

Charcoal is dirty fun. Unless you wear gloves (I don't) you're bound to get black ground into the pads of your fingers and hands. Regardless of the mess, charcoal provides opportunities for graded and blending, so that shapes and surfaces can be better represented. Sometimes charcoal drawings are still done for their own sake and stand alone as individual works of art. But for the most part charcoal drawing is used for study--figure drawing classes for example, or working out light and dark in an upcoming painting. I did this charcoal portrait of Norman Rockwell some years ago while experimenting. It's based on one of his Saturday Evening Post works, Rockwell Visits a Country Editor, which includes his self portrait.

Doorway, Salisbury House, ink on board, 6x9

Besides charcoal, my work in the past has included a great deal of pen an ink. Many of these works were done to investigate pen and ink itself rather than as studies for other works. As such, my ink drawings depict a variety of subjects. For example, the pen and brush drawing to the left was done for experience in the application of ink with a small paintbrush as well as a flexible nib pen. The subject is a polyglot reconstruction of a number of historical European houses that were disassembled, shipped here, and put together as a huge stone mansion in Des Moines known as Salisbury House. For artists looking for interesting subject matter the building (now a museum) provides many opportunities. I've yet to do a painting there, alas.

An occasional graphite drawing stands on its own as an individual work, as does the drawing (right) of a Siamese mama cat moving one of her kittens to a new abode. I did this one some years back to study cat anatomy. The reference was a similar feline pair but the stairs were an invention. The drawing began as a study but as it progressed seemed worthy of retention.

This post would not be complete without at least one digital drawing. This one is a view of a golf course in winter, prompted by a quick view I had of the place almost a year ago. The bare trees on the opposite side of the fairway provided an interesting, tangled backdrop for two leafless trunk forms and four small evergreens. This particular drawing was done from memory, using Sketchbook and a Wacom tablet, so it actually exists only as a series of 1 and 0 entries in a computer file. Technology is amazing.