My first awakening to the world of art was acquired through the process intense mediums of stone lithography, woodcut, clay modeling, and stone carving.
Let me briefly note that by "world of art" I am referring to the analogies that interweave the various disciplines of making art. The complexity of art's history and the many layers of meaning that produce rich metaphors are all vital elements in this world I refer.
This awakening was brought about by the difficulty that I had in drawing and clay modeling due to the fluidity of the push and pull of the form and volume. I had much less difficulty with the reductive processes of carving stone or hacking out an image in end grain maple. This reductive model of form creation, the continual drawing and redrawing of the contour shapes to render the final form, became my foundation for understanding form and content.
The reductive method taught me the principle I needed in order to acquire the skills of drawing and modeling clay. This is the underlying mesh that glues my current ideas of drawing to my earlier traditional thinking on the subject.
In a fluid fashion I can now take a transcription of Antoine-Louis Barye's Lion Crushing a Serpent 1 and redraw the drawings surface and spatial geometry with a Connectix Cam.
Like wise with the transcription of the Titans 
2 I articulate a particular formal quality of the sculpture while drawing the original drawings. The new form is certainly not of its original character. Possibly not what we would likely consider a drawing. In the drawing's new form we use all of the senses to evaluate it's properties as we would it's parent. While concentrating on similar features of the two different sculptures the first was drawn from the actual bronze the second was drawn from an image on the internet. The former informs the latter.
This process of redrawing I just described is significantly different from this scan of icarus_fall
. The original is graphite on Sheetrock heightened with red oil. It is a material object in the space I live. I find myself moving it around my room to different corners or spots on the floor. I shift it around to make room for more drawings or I position it to take advantage of the late evening sun. What is this new form of the scan? Now that I have placed the image here in this document it now moves from computer to computer in a similar way that the original moves around my room.
This drawing of the drawing sue_o_II shows none of it's parent's material nuance such as the velvet black of the charcoal or the white oil damped with a thin dusting of ground vine.
In the same way the drawings untitled_I, untitled_II, untitled_III shows none of the subtleties of it's original subject. The Connectix Cam as a drawing tool may not reveal the full complexity of our vision, however, the crudeness of the interpretation heightens the basic graphic properties of the original form. The cam is equally selective as our use of it.
Ultimately I am asking questions and answering them through this process. It is a form of drawing conclusions about different ideas and redrawing the answer to search out it's basic form.
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Forest Dean Feighner |