DRTP 1 (2) pp.

163–172 Intellect Limited 2016

Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice

Volume 1 Number 2
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/drtp.1.2.163_2

EDITORIAL

ADRIANA IONASCU
Ulster University

Drawing matter(s)

The second issue of Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice features contributions by artists, educators
and scholars in papers that evidence the wide range of contemporary practices and disciplinary
approaches in which drawing is embedded. In proposing new debates about drawing, the issue
brings to the fore a much discussed aspect of drawing research, that of its expanding practice and
definitions. Since drawing has emerged as one of the most open areas of art practice and raised its
profile as a genre in contemporary art – with a growing number of artists attempting new directions
and experimenting with new possibilities of the medium – the practice and study of drawing are
particularly relevant in the current climate of cultural change.
That contemporary drawing is reappraised as a discipline, beyond its connections to and in
relation to other practices and disciplines, is evident in today’s pluralistic artistic practice.
Furthermore, drawing is a part of discourses connected to the academic context, where research and
critical enquiry contribute to drawing’s changing vocabulary both ‘as a material thinking process
and as a distinctive artistic medium’ (de Freitas 2010). It therefore becomes critical to explore how

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drawing, both as artistic and thinking process, defines a specific or distinct knowledge, an art a faire,
given its historical and contemporary positioning.

In distinguishing between ‘thinking about drawing and thinking through drawing’ Steve Garner high-
lights that drawing ‘[…] can be practiced as a critical and reflective form’ of investigation (2012: 17,
emphasis added). Indeed, Avis Newman suggested that drawing is an immediate method of reflecting
within the creative process: ‘I have always understood drawing to be, in essence, the materialisation of
a continually mutable process, the movements, rhythms, and partially comprehended ruminations of
the mind: the operations of thought’ (2003: 67). Marylis Guillemin also argued that ‘[…] methodo-
logically, drawings are visual products and, at the same time, produce meanings’, simultaneously
constructing knowledge (Guillemin in Hughes 2012). By underlining the interconnection between
‘expression and enquiry’ specific to creative practice, Steve Garner (2012) questions the specificity of
drawing research and the ability of drawing practice (in rapport with other types of creative pursuits)
to produce approaches and methods that lead to ‘distinct knowledge’. Such questions are related to
the historical location of drawing discipline and its dependence to and independence from other disci-
plines and practices. Michael Ginsborg (2003: 10) observed that drawing has always been ‘attuned’ to
the many changes in visual art. As drawing has evolved alongside and in correlation with other disci-
plines and ‘[…] within the wider context of art theory, history, philosophy, and aesthetics’ (Garner
2012: 15–25), its praxis and discourse have absorbed historical mutations of practice and definition. In
this view, Deanna Petherbridge noted that the definitions of drawing ‘[…] are influenced by philo-
sophical discussions and cultural theories […]’, by ‘anthropological and sociological interpretations
[…]’ and informed by ‘differences of practice’ (2012: 28). Moreover, critical discourse is enabled and
supported by a number of bodies such as universities, museums and galleries. As such, and by asso-
ciation with other disciplines and fields of practice, contemporary drawing research is informed and
functions in relation to other processes of reflection and investigation, theoretical development and
experimentation. As Brian Dillon asserted, it is not possible to separate drawing from art, ‘[…] from its
conceptual, linguistic, historical […] content and context’ (2009: 8–12); therefore, drawing practice is
sustained by many dynamic relational interdependences. And as part of such connections, ‘drawing
records and reveals the subtlest elements of a culture as any written or verbal record’ (McKenzie 1986:
11–12), contributing significantly to the literature on contemporary art.
Since drawing as practice, as medium and as a specific set of skills (practised by all artists as an essential
part of an artistic training) has shifted from its dependence to other media to a principal medium and the
status of an independent art form (being used as an exclusive artistic means), it has also shifted from
by-product to end product, from end product to process, and back. This versatility has been reflected upon
throughout history: on the occasion of the MoMA shows, Drawing Now in 1976 (a survey of drawing from
the 1960s to 1976) and Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing in 1992 (which examined the period

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1. Petherbridge highlights from 1976 to 1992), Bernice Rose noted the autonomous status of drawing besides its ‘conceptual’ role in
key definitions of
drawing, citing David
other disciplines of practice:
Rosand’s Drawing Acts
(where drawing is Although increasingly an independent mode, it has become inextricably mixed with other
defined as a marking
of a surface and learnt mediums, with painting and painterly devices, with colour, and with paint itself. Distinctions
language) and Charles between painting and drawing – and printing – have become blurred, and the support no
Blanc’s Grammar of longer invariably serves as a dividing line between disciplines. A new language of the visual arts
the Arts of Drawing,
Architecture, Sculpture has thus emerged in the last two decades based on an expanded field of operations for each of
and Painting (where its disciplines, on new relationships among them, and on the use of technological means.
drawing is connected to
learning to see and to
(1992: 10)
know): ‘… the correla-
tion between the act of Further on, Laura Hoptman (2002) emphasized the changes undergone by drawing practice in the
drawing and training
the eye’, ‘… reinforcing 1960s and 1970s asserting the performative or experimental functions of drawing when art practice
drawing’s significance came to be valued beyond the materiality of the end product:
as an observational tool
and as a function to
learning to look’ Freed from the confines of the page, drawing seemed to be everywhere – in scarifications of
(2012: 31–32). the landscape, in site-specific installations, in performance. The actions that went into these
works – actions like scratching, scattering, walking – manifested a kind of drawing, but even
as artists engaged in these metaphoric and ephemeral acts of draftmanship, many of them
also continued to use the more conventional medium of pencil and paper as a means of tran-
scription. By diagramming their performances and recording their installations, artists made
visible and concrete what could not be considered material.
(2002: 11)

As the making process gains importance, other types of practices were performed as drawings in relation
to gesture and form, and thus the finished product becomes the evidence of the drawing experience, its
visual documentation. Being performed physically or electronically, such practices distance themselves
from the materiality of the page as the basic and fundamental support, proposing instead other types of
material/immaterial forms of drawing. They are acknowledged as different modalities of performing
drawing, distanced from (but still related to) primary forms of marking a surface, learnt language,
specialist knowledge and seeing (highlighted in Petherbridge 2012).1 These permutations of practice,
indicated by Hoptman’s survey of new work from the 1990s onward (Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,
2002), illustrates the plurality of drawing as a revival of ‘product’ over ‘process’ as drawing becomes
again the principal medium. Tracing out the changes of practice from the early 1990s to the present,
Emma Dexter (Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, 2005) and Tania Kovats (The Drawing Book, 2007)
signalled the ‘dismantl[ing] of hierarchies’ (Dexter 2005) reflected in contemporary critical writing

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mapping the transformations sustained by drawing practice over the years. The erasure of artistic or 2. Vilém Flusser points
out that ‘word’ is
disciplinary hierarchies was apparent once artists employed line and mark-making in real or virtual derived from the Latin
space, as part of the process of performance and conceptual or live art and installation, and under the word ‘signum’ (sign)
influences of photography, film, video and computer technology in international art. (1999).
Among such seminal publications, which record the shifting functions of drawing, exhibitions
such as Drawing Inspiration: Contemporary British Drawing (Abbott Hall Gallery, April–July 2006) and
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (MoMA, November 2010–February 2011) or
Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process (Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, September
2012–January 2013) – to mention but a few – ascertain and confirm essential transformations of the
drawing medium. The works featured in these shows continue to change traditional concepts of
drawing, expanding the medium’s definition and its role in a cultural milieu that is constantly rede-
fined. A set of radical revolutions liberated drawing from institutional definitions and so, from the
process-derived to the conceptual, drawing has acquired an essential place as a working method,
exploratory process and approach to making, contributing to research, knowledge and critical theory
in contemporary art.

In this context of change, the authors presented in this issue investigate new ways in which drawing can
be defined and practiced, re-evaluating the medium as a research tool or method of production, as well as
product and process. The Articles section focuses on redefining drawing in an attempt to explore and shift
accepted definitions. Deanna Petherbridge pointed out ‘the problematic issue of defining what is drawing’
and noted that the definitions of drawing, weighing the relationships between practice and discourse, are
far too many to lead to a ‘consensus [of] views’ (2012: 27–28, original emphasis). Referring to the elusive-
ness of drawing, Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon (‘Towards [hyper] drawing… through ambiguity’)
investigate the concept of ambiguity in contemporary drawing through an examination of ‘the imprecise
use of language’ and ‘linguistic expressions’.2 The article engages with the language of drawing aiming to
respond to ‘what is lost or gained by expanding a conception of drawing’, asserting that drawing can
articulate knowledge unrevealed in a written translation. In this view, Richard Serra affirmed that ideas,
metaphors, emotions, word structures resulting from the act of doing/drawing/writing are communica-
tions formed on paper. James Elkins also attempted a rigorous examination and reading of the pictorial
mark to reveal its ‘tacit’ meanings in relation to narrative text; and E. D. Krcma (2007) suggested that
Maurice Merleau-Ponty viewed both painting and language as ‘incomplete utterances’ (2007). In aligning
their analysis with these explorations, and by deconstructing visual vocabularies and words, external refer-
ences, mental images, perceptual ambiguity and ideas of ambiguity of meaning, Marshall and Sawdon use
linguistic terminology to provide a framework for material thinking in the creative practice of drawing.
By establishing parallels between drawing marks and phrase (mark) or sentence (line), words
(points/dots), Marshall and Sawdon tease out the physicality of language in their drawing process,

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involving hand-drawn image digitally captured in seven stages of production and mapped as a reflec-
tion of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
Clive Ashwin offers a different perspective on the definition of drawing (‘What is a drawing?’),
focusing on the hierarchy of product–process–institution to argue that drawing is concerned with ‘the
articulation of space’, continuing many debates concerned with ‘what is drawing?’ (including Farthing
2005; Petherbridge 2008 in Garner 2008; Fisher 2003 in Newman 2003). In an attempt to expand a
definition of drawing, Ashwin approaches the question from a philosophical point of view, offering
insights into different types of definitions; the author provides an exploration beyond technical proce-
dures or material components, taking into account ‘the predominant use of line, the marginal signifi-
cance of colour, conceptual immediacy, and a perceived subordinate position in a production system’.
He addresses drawing as distinct from the deployment of sensory qualities (qualia) and discusses the
question of intentionality. Ashwin’s paper signals the mutability of definitions, and enables an explo-
ration of drawing’s specific potentials within an expanded field of cultural production.
The papers that focus on drawing and the body in the Project Reports section follow non-
traditional drawing techniques such as those practised in process art or automatic drawing. Here the
emphasis shifts towards the act of making and production. Michael Namkung’s contribution relates
athletic practice to physical exercise and the discipline of body training action. The report explores
the traditional notion of drawing as performative sport (not art), whereby performative drawing
suspends the demarcations between body as perception tool and body as drawing tool: line-drawing
becomes a construction of space. The paper presents drawing activity as a different method of work-
ing through which body-drawing reveals the interaction between subject and matter, an approach
that echoes David Rosand’s statement, ‘The gesture of drawing is, in essence, a projection of the
body …’ (2002: 16). Merleau-Ponty’s (2002: 239) affirmation of the body as mediator between the
world and self as well as the idea of the body as the locus and ‘subject of perception’, has pertinence
to this project in relation to the production of artwork.
Following a different perspective to Namkung’s discussion on perceptual experience, the body
and its relationship to drawing, Brooke Carlson’s paper is an analysis of a drawing performance –
what remains and is to come (2015) – by Katrina Brown and Rosanna Irvine. With a distinct focus on
drawing and physicality, Carlson is concerned with the sensorial nature (tactile, auditory) of the
performative ‘act’ of drawing – a labour-intensive, physical process, both experimental and experien-
tial. She discusses the bodily experience of mark-making in relation to temporality and space, a
mutating process whereby the tracing of movement approximates space and time. The analysis brings
into focus the physical interaction the artists (Katrina Brown and Rosanna Irvine) propose with the
material of drawing – ‘an immersion in time and matter’. The performative drawings presented here
bring to mind John Berger’s seminal essay ‘Life drawing’ in which he claims that drawing ‘records the
unfolding of an event, not the fixed reality of an object’ (in Savage 2005: 3).

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The ideas expressed in these projects articulate the ways in which drawing shifts towards consid-
erations of material, the sensorial, temporal and corporeal interactions. Referring to the space of prac-
tice and the transitive aspects of production, Pamela Lee (‘Some kinds of duration: The temporality of
drawing as process art’, 1999) suggests that drawing involves an ‘[…] oscillation between materials,
forms and gestures’. There are interesting connections between the papers in terms of perceptual and
contextual mapping and recording related to place-making, narratives, experiences and readings.
The Project Report emphasizes how drawing operates in art education, informing the teaching–
learning practice process related to the creative process of art-making. Ilgim Veryeri Alaca and Piet
Grobler’s paper investigates drawing as a process where the experience of drawing and the final
outcome acquire equal importance as visual documentation. In the project presented here drawing
takes the role of a communicative tool, becoming an instrumental visual language that creates a
‘middle’ ground for an exchange of ideas and images, extending students’ skills and blurring the
boundaries between the disciplines of art and graphic design. The report follows the stages of a
project related to the development of computer-generated graphic collages by international students
engaged in a collaborative image-production. The project raises questions on the kinds of knowl-
edge cultivated through a collaborative drawing process and demonstrates the role of drawing in
visual thinking, analytical learning, experimenting and invention.
This contribution is relevant to educators engaged in teaching increasingly international groups
of students who come from different art and design backgrounds, teaching methods and experi-
ences. The authors evidence that, beyond observation and representation, drawing is an exploratory
process in visual art departments in the contemporary teaching curriculum, a language capable of
overcoming cultural barriers, one that can exist globally with an immediacy of expression.

William Platz and Kellie O’Dempsey’s Position Paper points out to the diversity of drawing practice
unframed in academic formats of presentation. Michael Ginsborg observed that new drawing prac-
tices distance themselves from what he calls ‘the evaluative apparatus and acquisitive grasp of the
academy and the art market’ (2003); in this sense Platz and O’Dempsey question the conference
format as a formal model of disseminating knowledge in the case of drawing, discussing the Drawing
International Brisbane Symposium (DIB, 2015). The paper also highlights the relationships between
research, theory and practice and features innovative, non-verbal ways of presenting drawing practice
in the work of artists like Gosia Wlodarczak, Robert Andrew, Entang Wiharso and Jaanika Peerna.
The Featured Drawings present Grace McMurray’s Cutcomb Polaroid, in which the artist (short-
listed for Jerwood Prize 2015) articulates digitally the concept of crafted labour. The drawings seem
to magnify invisible biological processes: ‘fractions of visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum of
wavelengths’, spatial maps of memory and sensory perceptions. McMurray’s drawings are composed
as overlays of indetectable, invisible marks, rendered as digital pixilations and photographic prints

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rendered as visual sensations. These digital traces of unaccounted actions address an analogy to the
creative processes engaged in drawing practice. The approach is relevant especially in terms of the
overlap between hand-and-software manipulation of image: as new technologies shift the skills and
knowledge of traditional drawing, they also enable different methodologies of practice and thinking.
Emma Febvre-Richards’ two composite drawings from the Botanics Revisited IV series resulted
from a two-year research centred on the identity of ‘site’ (the New Zealand forest). The drawings
expand the notion of the traditional observational approach to plant forms typical of the ‘botanical
study’ genre, to a ‘more participative cerebral process of response to the environment’. These studies
are related to cultural knowledge, the perception, history, interaction, memory, emotional narrative
and the physicality of a particular geography. The drawings are a reconstruction of Febvre-Richards’
experiences of a specific place organized in compositions held by pigments and printed grids, in a
process of editing, filtering and layering digitally rendered images. These mediate ideas on dwelling
and place amounting to a series of ‘cognitive mapping stills’ obtained through ‘digital and cognitive
morphing’ – represented moments of a suspended experience.
The Reviews section includes an account of the artists involved in The Prison Drawing Project at The
Old Borough of Scarborough Jail (February 2016) by Lucy O’Donnell. The review pinpoints the explora-
tory character of drawing in the confines of a prison space, with a focus on ‘drawing and dwelling’. This
is a particularly significant review that looks at approaches to drawing and space by artists who test space
boundaries (interior/exterior) to define its materiality. The physicality of drawing is discussed in the works
of Catherine Anyango, Andy Black, Russell Smith and Evy Jokova, with an emphasis on the physicality of
space. Nicola Holloway’s ‘notations’ represent hidden stories of the site, other artists (Kate Black, Andrew
Cheetham, Shelley Theodore and Sally Taylor) use drawing to imagine space; or to create a space of
performance (Hanna ten Doornkatt, Tracy Himsworth). Instead of seeing drawing as a preparatory form,
as has been its traditional role, these artists invest time and labour in the production of finished pieces.
Another project focused on drawing (We All Draw: Thinking through Drawing Symposium), reviewed by
Andrea Kantrowitz, Angela Brew and Michelle Fava, investigates drawing practice as knowledge base;
the review explores how a workshop may involve and cumulate a wide range of innovative and experi-
mental drawing practices that reinvigorate ideas of image-making and representation.
Mark Jackson reviews ANCHOR (Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, 2016), a new book
edited by Joe Graham, including projects and texts from a variety of practitioners (among whom are
Andrew Hewish, Gordon Shringley, Gemma Anderson, etc.). Jackson presents a survey of drawing
as a set of approaches to line with a focus on the ‘pre-digital ambiguities of line/outline’ highlighting
the relevance of materiality in drawing practice.
The papers included in this issue explore ideas on drawing as a material practice and bring into
focus new drawing matters: in creating connections between discourse, theory, research and prac-
tice, they reveal a continued interest in the material engagements of drawing practice.

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Acknowledgements
The editor thanks the prominent academics and practitioners in the editorial team and the advisory
board and the production team at Intellect for their sustained work in the preparation of the second
issue of the journal. Special thanks to Doris Rohr. All contributors are also gratefully acknowledged.

References
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Dexter, E. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in Jordan Kantor (ed.), Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing,
London: Phaidon Press, pp. 6–10.
Dillon, B. (2009), ‘On the elements of drawing’, in Brian Dillon, The End of the Line: Attitudes in
Drawing, London: Hayward Publishing, Southbank Centre, pp. 8–12.
Duff, L. and Davis, J. (2005), Drawing: The Process, Bristol: Intellect.
Elderfield, J. (1983), The Modern Drawing – 100 Works on Paper from the Museum of Modern Art, New
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Elkins, J. (1998), On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, New York: Routledge.
—— (2000), What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy, New
York and London: Routledge.
Flusser, V. (1999), The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, London: Reaktion.
Freitas, N. de (2010), ‘Materiality of drawing/thinking the value of slow arrival: Bodily gesture |
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ing.org. Accessed 12 March 2016.
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on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, Readings in Art and Design Education
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—— (ed.) (2008), Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, Bristol: Intellect.
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Guillemin, M. ([2004] 2012), ‘Understanding illness: Using drawing as a research method’, in Jason
Hughes (ed.), Sage Visual Methods: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research,
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Hoptman, L. (2002), ‘Introduction: Drawing is a Noun’ in Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, New
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Jones, A. (2004), ‘Reading between the lines’, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, 83: 44.
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Butler (ed.), Afterimage: Drawing through Process. Los Angeles and Cambridge: Museum of
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Contributor details
Dr Adriana Ionascu studied Fine Art in Europe (Jassy) with particular emphasis on drawing, and
Design at Loughborough University School of Art and Design. Her Ph.D. thesis (‘Poetic design’)
focuses on the cultural significance of domestic artefacts. Her research focuses on DesignArt and
critical design, especially the social role of design in modelling experiences of modern life; and

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design as a network of events, objects and histories. She is interested in the lyrical, narrative-based
drawing practices of Eastern Europe and the role of drawing in design practice. She has contrib-
uted articles to journals such as Ceramics: Arts and Perception and presented papers to Design
History Society International Conferences at Koniklijke Vlaamse Academie Brussels, Oslo School
of Architecture and Design, Delft University of Technology, Chalmers University Gothenburg and
Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. She has guest-edited for Visual Inquiry. She exhibits her
work in England, Ireland and abroad, and is member of the Research Institute at Ulster University
(Creative Environments Cluster), the Crafts Council of Ireland and the Design History Society. She
currently lectures at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.
Contact: School of Architecture, Ulster University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
E-mail: a.ionascu@ulster.ac.uk

Adriana Ionascu has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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