Drawing has always been a large undivulged hobby of mine my entire life. I have doodled and sketched secretly, without instruction, on notebooks, sketch paper, napkins. I have sketched more than I have watched Tv or done homework. I love drawing and always will, i hope. This class has only intensified my liking of it. The time it took to draw some of these drawing were expansive and encompassing, and thus a little exhausting, but in the end, I am grateful for the push. I would always draw when I wanted, quitting as soon as I lost interest, but now I have a greater appreciation for finishing works to a certain extent.

I have always been a visual person. In school, I would learn most form hand on activity and the conceptualization of the various diagrams that described neuronal synapses to historical trends of silver accumulation. Rather than a list of directions, I preferred a map. Naturally over writing, I always chose drawing. And even beyond this class, I plan to utilize what I know about art and my experience in it in my future plans of marketing and teaching.

The fiction drawing I enjoyed drawing the most. In addition to the challenge of capturing a particular focus and its entire environment into a large sheet of paper, I loved having that power to transform such reality into a playful fiction. It was some what exhilarating.

Chris

Onlookers and the Light of Day

While working on the last three drawings, I found a new reason to enjoy drawing. Before doing the assignment, I had never really sat outdoors and drawn for any substantial period of time (i.e. more than an hour or so). My experiences with drawing before this class mostly consisted of drawing in the classroom or in my house. I had never really drawn out in public before.

Working on these drawing over many days and often for hours at a time, I got to experience my subject under a broad range of lightings. It is nice to see how a scene interacts with light and how it changes as the sun sets. Depending on the lighting the Nasher, Perkins and the Crowell clock tower could look completely different. I felt like Monet must have when he obsessed over his Thames series.

When drawing the Nasher, several people stopped on their way to or from the museum to look at my drawing. I especially enjoyed when a group of little kids gathered around me and asked me how I learned to draw. Drawing Perkins offered a similar experience, as a few people stopped to watch me draw. One man even took several photographs of me. Yet this last assignment, because of my choice of location (sitting in the grass right next to the sidewalk on the main west campus quad) was by far the most “public “ of my setups. Over the course of the roughly seven days I spent sitting out working on the picture (spaced over three weeks), I must have received around 50 comments from people walking by. At first I found it awkward drawing on such a main drag, but it proved to be rewarding.

The interactions I had with these people – some students and others adults – ranged from a simple thumbs-up to inquiries about purchasing my work. Some comments seemed to come from fellow artists. For example, one older man talked to me about a drawing he had once made in Europe. However, I really appreciated the positive feedback from people who didn’t identify themselves as artists. It was so nice to see athletes, members of the dining staff, professors etc., appreciating art. Some even told me that they had seen me working the week before and really liked how the drawing was coming along. Some of my friends told me they never new I was an artist before. I drew with headphones on, but whenever I noticed somebody stopping to watch me draw, I would take them off in case he wanted to talk.

It was very refreshing to be able to share my art with people in such an active way. Over the summer I spent a lot of time cooped up in my attic painting and getting ready for a show I had in August. Although the show gave me a chance to receive feedback and share my artwork, it was much different than having people actually watch me draw. Of course sometimes I prefer to draw in private. Yet now that I’ve had this positive experience I’ll definitely consider going outside to draw more often. Sometimes I find it unfortunate being a visual artist, as we don’t often have opportunities to “perform” and get immediate responses. I think I’ve found a good compromise.

Reflection and (Unrelated!) Thoughts About Drawing

The following paragraphs are disconnected, separate thoughts and should be read as though they were separate entries/blog posts.

While I drew and colored extensively as a small child, ever since I taught myself how to paint in 4^th grade, I have primarily focused on this form of art. For me, the appeal of painting was that I could blend colors and create realistic gradients in a way that is far more difficult to draw. Also, when I really began painting, I was primarily producing art on useful objects as gifts for other people. As such, wooden boxes and picture frames lent themselves to being painted. In high school, while I did take a variety of courses including the 3-term pre-req studio course, drawing, printmaking, and a 3D seminar; I spent the most time (3 semesters) in various levels of painting courses. During my senior year, I was often incredibly impressed by the work of my peers who had chosen to focus on drawing and since then, I have felt the need to develop my own ability to draw. I believe that taking this class has sharpened and refined my not only my drawing skills but also my overarching capability as an artist.

As he reviewed my work at the beginning of the term, professor Fick asked if I was a painter as he felt I had a “painterly” style. As he has mentioned my style a few times during the term, I have wondered how my approach to drawing has made my style painterly. Is it the various techniques that I tend to use to apply and blend the medium? Are my drawings “looser” or less focused on clean, geometric lines? For such large-scale drawings, I prefer to use charcoal because it produces a much greater range of values. Subtle changes in shading that can be produced with graphite are better suited for small, detailed work, in my opinion. Also, given the relative size of a graphite stick or pencil, it is rather impractical to cover large areas that need dark values especially compared to using a stick of pressed charcoal. I prefer to spend time and effort working on focal points of my drawing rather than working in endless crosshatching to get a dark area (especially when it is a background or rather unimportant element). Charcoal is also much easier to blend to create subtle shading and gradients without harsh lines that graphite can leave behind. I believe that my preference of charcoal with regard to blending, shading, and the ability to cover large areas, has quite a bit to do with the fact that I also paint. When I searched “drawing” and scanned the Wikipedia page, I read through the list of mediums/instruments: “graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils,crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals”. Reading through just this list makes one start to wonder: where is the line between drawing and painting? Oil pastels can easily be smeared and blended on the page in the same way that paint could. Why are inked brushes considered a drawing instrument rather than a painting instrument? If there are encaustic wax paints and wax pencils, what makes one for drawing and the other for painting? It seems to me that drawing and painting are actually part of a continuum; however in academic settings, we focus on very different aspects of the “separate” principals.

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As an artist, I am very focused on the meaning, narrative, or theme of a piece as I work. When Professor Fick mentioned that we should try to include some sort of quirky or nearly surprising elements into our early still life drawings, I was excited to include something subtle but perhaps amusing to a careful viewer.

I arranged this still life to reflect my enjoyment and involvement in sailing. I grew up boating with my family, but my father’s intense passion for sailing has inspired my own love for the sport. Recently I’ve sailed on a wooden schooner from Boston up to Nova Scotia and back as a student crew member (2007;Ocean Classroom program), I was the Vice President of the Duke Sailing team for a year and a half, and spent this past summer working as a sailing instructor at a girls’ overnight camp in Vermont.

The still life includes items that I would take to go out to sailing practice: my very broken-in, boating Sperry Top-Siders, a small canvas bag, Duke Sailing shades, and my car keys. The careful viewer will notice my mini Sperry key chain.

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I am very curious as to when humans develop the ability to draw and produce art. Last spring, I took an Intro to Psychology course in which we talked briefly about language development in humans. We were told that human’s “language centers” were responsible for developing sense of time, sense of self, and (of course) ability to communicate. These three things are essential to the creation of art. The sense of self and one’s relation to and understanding of others and their environment is necessary to create and understand the representational nature of art. I imagine that the development of a sense of time also develops one’s sense of space – concepts that factor into creating artwork. Art is essentially a means of external expression, which is, in turn, a form of communication. Thus, I speculate that one’s ability to create and understand art is linked to the development of the brain’s “language centers”.

Chart describing "Drawing Development in Children"

Art?

Drawing is one of those things that I've just always done. I did it before I could even say the word. My parents never told me to do it, and I never really took a class until now. For me, it satisfies an inner need, not necessarily for other people to enjoy. The thing is, I get an idea in my head and it stays there in the realm of fantasy. So instead of letting it rot up there, I have to put it down on paper to solidify it in the real world. It's a fundamental need to transform the blank emptiness of a piece of paper into a solid and clear expression of idea. This way, my idea can always remain, crisp and clear rather than as a collection of hopes and possibilities in my cranial cavity, where it is subject to change and outright forgetfulness. It was only until other people started positively commenting on my work that I started to understand that this skill could be useful for various aspects of life.

The problem is, drawing is a highly introverted and antisocial activity, so I stopped for a while because it seemed like other people were more important than my own needs. However, at Duke I realized that there is a generally higher appreciation of the arts in all of the varieties. Because of this, I resumed activity and actively treated drawing like a skill to be improved and less like a personal catharsis and mental emptying. Jumping in with both feet made it so I could pursue my hobby more devotedly, and even let me get good enough to start scribbling cool looking things all over the walls of my apartment for all to enjoy, in a way that's much less individualistic and introverted. This also led me to start exploring the canvas-like qualities of buildings (aka graffiti) to better understand the practice of social art. And so I must thank Professor Fick for helping me get back on my feet, so to speak, and hopefully learn to run.

Frustration

Drawing is a very personal experience. It allows you to convey your own perspective of a thing that is seen by the public. It is a combination of your interpretation of a subject, your abilities, and how you want the rest to see it. At least for me, it gets very frustrating sometimes. I feel like I am lacking ability – or at least technique and experience – and so what I end up drawing turns out to be very different from what I had imagined in my mind.

I also feel like it tests my patience. Sometimes I wish I could include the texture of the brick wall in my drawing, or actually draw the leaves of the trees; like you would do it in a photo-realistic drawing. So since I don’t have the patience or the ability to do that I just end up using dramatic shades and try to pull the whole thing to the opposite side. I think my preference of charcoal over pencil is a result of my impatience. It just comes more naturally to me and requires less effort; I feel like I can concentrate on the drawing itself rather than technique.

For some reason, I just find soft pastels magical. Their colorfulness and smoothness remind me of a child’s imagination; a world in which he could create endless things, without worrying about their connection to the real world. I want to be that child, but I can’t do that either. I feel like I’m torn between ability and creativity; because I haven’t excelled in neither of them. I can’t be free as I would like to be and I can’t pull myself together and produce something that has an actual technical value.

I love drawing – it really is one of my passions; but not knowing where I stand limits me and I just feel like giving up. Art is supposed to be limitless; it is supposed to be an area where you can extend beyond the boundaries set by the real world. So why do I end up feeling like I’m in a cage when I know that there are endless things that can be done with a piece of paper and a pen? I want how I feel when I touch the soft pastels to be visible in the drawing; but I don’t know how to do it.

Drawing is a very personal experience for me but it just becomes too frustrating sometimes.

Who do we draw for?

In my years of making art, I have experimented with oil pastels, chalk pastels, acrylic paint, oil paint, water colours, pencil crayons, candle wax, thread, linseed oil, food colouring, incense sticks, blood, tears, saliva and even urine.  I have printed, sewn, painted, woven, sawed, dripped, scratched, moulded and drenched. I have photographed naked people and even been photographed naked. I hung a bed from a four story building.
Despite all the mediums I’ve been able to explore, nothing compares to the feeling of charcoal on paper. Drawing has always been a very profound form of catharsis for me, and since the day I discovered expressionism I have put pencil to paper to confront emotions, events and ideas. Drawing is one of my primary modes of communication.

While this course has indeed allowed me to draw, and while I have been made to practice the fundamental skills required to build up a strong vocabulary to depict the many stories that I come across on a daily basis, I find the technical restrictions of the course somewhat frustrating. This term has led me to question why it is that we create art. For me, art is first and foremost a medium of expression, and the moment that technical accuracy becomes the primary concern, art becomes an elitist pursuit. For me, the beauty of drawing lies in its accessibility. Anyone can draw. One does not have to know how to calculate algebraic expressions, or name the capitals of the states, or write profound literature in order to draw. This is not to say that those who pursue drawing are without talent, but as a medium of expression, drawing is universal. My roommate, who is a neuroscience major and would not lay claim to a single artistic bone in her body, drew this portrait of me the other night:

You may say its terrible - technically inaccurate and lacking in all the fundamental skills required to constitute a  legitimate portrait.
Now consider that she did it without looking at the page.
I think it's brilliant.

I’ve begun to think about how far we can put our own regulations on art, and drawing in particular. If we consider a duck and a gun to be “random”, does that make them meaningless? Does the artist fail if their audience disagrees with the relevance of their subject matter? And consequently, who do we draw for?  This may be considered frivolous to some, but I create art according to how I feel. I cannot read a set of criteria, sit down and construct a piece of artwork according to someone else’s rules. It’s perhaps for this reason that I would plan out a piece just as we’d been told and then two days before the due date everything would change, because I’d had a revelation, or something had hit me hard that needed to be put to paper. 

All the drawing I’ve done previously has been abstract, and for the past two years I’ve been able to draw with complete freedom. These 90cm x 90cm canvases are charcoal drawings from my last exhibition in Hong Kong talking about the degradation of the senses, and what effect that would have on our perception and judgments of others according to race.

While technically they cannot be said to have cast shadows, perfect tonal range or even structure, they carry a message in a form beyond the barriers of words, and that, for me, is the true power of drawing.

Reflection on Drawing

When I was little, one of my favorite classes would always be art. It was a class where I could relax and draw, taking a break from my academic studies. However, in high school, as I began to take classes in art, it became something more than just a break of stress-relief/recreation; it became something I clearly took pleasure in. I first thoroughly enjoyed/appreciated drawing during my sophomore year, when my art teacher forced us to draw our sketches using pen. At first I hated it because I was so accustomed to sketching in pencil, but quickly soon after, I began to prefer sketching in pen. There was just something about it - a cleaner look - that made me favor using pen.

Since this class uses predominantly pencil and charcoal, it's been a nice refresher of techniques I've forgotten over the years and a great learning experience of things I've never received any formal training on. Within this semester, I've learned a great deal of new knowledge and my perspective on drawing has expanded.