Reflection on Drawing - Julia Schönheit

Drawing is practice. This is what I realized the last months. It is important to be in the process, to draw each week, to have your pencils in constant motion. It is a practice with no start and no end, and I feel I only restarted thinking about the possibilities it bears.

Drawing is so much more than mere representation. I was mainly interested in photography the last years and dealt a lot with the realist perspective in creative expression. The advantage of drawing is that you have an active influence on which aspects of the image you want to highlight, on which parts of the image you want to focus and spend more time on. 

Drawing has narrative qualities. It differs from film in that it is still, it differs from photography because there is no democratic treatment of details, it offers the possibility to group elements realistically together in a still image but put a focus on them according to what you want to express as in an edit of a film. It seems to be something in between but it is not. It is something beyond modern media.

Drawing is a medium that does not include any technology. If you sit down with your drawing board and draw what you see with a pencil or charcoal, you are in an immediate connection and communication with real objects of the world. It is freeing to see how few things you need to establish a narration, a visual narration. And this immediate creative process focuses much more on your skills. Through developing your style the practice of drawing discloses a part of yourself.