Margaret Davidson - Contemporary Drawing: Key Concepts and Techniques

CONTEMPORARY
DRAWING

KEY CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES

MARGARET DAVIDSON

WATSON-GUPTILL PUBLICATIONS
NEW YORK

Copyright 2011 by Margaret Davidson

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Watson-Guptill Publications, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com
www.watsonguptill.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, Margaret (Margaret A.), 1949
Contemporary drawing : key concepts and techniques / by Margaret Davidson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8230-3315-7
1. DrawingTechnique. I. Title.
NC730.D278 2011
741.2dc22
2010023294

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8230-2718-7
Hardcover ISBN: 978-8230-3315-7

Designed by Kara Plikaitis

Margaret Davidson, Burning Gap , 2009, soot and colored pencil on Rives BFK paper, 15 15 inches (38.1 38.1 cm) 2010 Margaret Davidson; Photo: Nancy Hines

Barbara Robertson, Tilt, 2009, archival pigment print, acrylic, collage, and graphite on paper on panel, 24 30 inches (61 76.2 cm) 2010 Barbara Robertson; Photo: Nancy Hines

v3.1

for my parents, Harold and Phyllis Davidson, with thanks

My words are only a fraction of the information this book is meant to convey. The greater understanding can be found in looking at the art, varied and wonderful, that is pictured here. It is to the artists and their various representatives that my deepest thanks go. Their willingness, professionalism, and deep commitment to the art of drawing show that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

Equally important to this book are the professional and dedicated Nancy Hines and Christina Olsen Burtner, photographer/manager and digital photographer at the Classroom Support Services Department of the University of Washington in Seattle. Their skills with film and digital, with computers and color, were absolutely essential and inspiring, and I thank them for their patience with me as well as for their abilities.

Many thanks go to those who provided critical reading: Anne Moon, Joseph Pentheroudakis, Fran Lattanzio, and Sharron Pollack, and also to the members of my drawing group: Kathleen Coyle, Anne Moon, Tannis Moore, and Sheila Siden. They may not realize it, but they provided great aid and comfort during the writing of this book.

I glory in art books, and do much of my art study within them. Special thanks go to Beth Dunn, owner of Art Books Press in Seattle, who shares this love and was tremendously helpful in finding books I wanted, and introducing me to those I didnt yet know I needed. Thanks also go to Ramona Hammerly, who loaned me some hitherto unknown books on design and aesthetics, and to Michelline Halliday for the loan of her materials on Walter Tandy Much.

The concepts and ideas on contemporary drawing presented in this book have grown and developed through my twenty-odd years of teaching art, the majority of which has been done at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington. I have been very fortunate in working for Pamela Belyea and Gary Faigin as the Executive Director and Artistic Director, respectively. They have designed Gage Academy from its very beginning to be a school that promotes multiple styles and many viewpoints. In so doing, they have created an environment in which I feel happy and creative, where I have been able to develop ideas as well as drawing, and for all that I heartily thank them.

It is also thanks to them that Candace Raney, Executive Editor at Watson-Guptill/Random House, saw some of my drawings and suggested the idea of writing a book to me. Many thanks go to her for patiently fielding phone calls and e-mails from me while I worked my way through various false starts to the present work. Also praise and many thanks go to editor Alison Hagge, who has happily and patiently corrected my errors and helped me state things more clearly. This book is much the better for her work.

Finally, my gratitude goes to my friend Susan Free, who agreed to assist me with all of the incredibly detailed and exacting tasks that go with acquiring image usage permission, and organizing this disparate pile of thingstext, slides, transparencies, digital files, e-mails, and usage contracts (all the details that really matter)into something organized and ready for the publisher. More than once Susan calmly solved a problem I found insurmountable, and kept me from being too encumbered to go on. My thanks go to her and to the rest of the Free family for helping with whatever was needed. With seedlings on the windowsill, newborn puppies in the corner, and bread baking in the oven, it was a pleasure to work on this book at their house, with those reminders all around that this task was not overwhelming after all, but just another part of a cheerful everyday life.

Drawing has changed.

Drawing has changed. Even the most cursory glance at some of the recent books and show catalogssuch as The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of Expression (2005); Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002); and even Contemporary American Realist Drawings: The Jalane and Richard Davidson Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (1999)show us drawings that are new and different, and show us an interest in drawing that is unprecedented.

This new, contemporary drawing is its own art form, and is no longer merely preparatory to painting or sculpture. Why is this happening? I think it is because artists have discovered that drawing, in its own right, is something unique and different from painting. It is an intense, sensitive, compelling, personal, and utterly direct art form, one with its own concepts, characteristics, and techniques. It is these main concepts of contemporary drawing, and their specific characteristics, that I am writing about in this book.

Contemporary drawing is a phrase that covers any and all drawingrealist, abstract, modernist, post-modernistfrom 1950 to the present. It is not governed by any particular imagery, but instead by the understanding, held by all contemporary drawing artists, that the choices with which they contend, the choices that pertain to the concepts outlined in this booksurface, mark-making, space, composition, scale, materials, and intentionalityare essential for the delivery of the image and meaning of the drawing, or are themselves the image and meaning. These issues are not about what is drawn, though they certainly affect that. Instead they relate to how something is drawn: what material is used, on what surface, at what scale, using what kind of mark, incorporating what kind of space, and involving what compositional structure. This separation of the how from the what is, in my opinion, what makes contemporary drawing so significant and able to stand on its own. Regardless of whether the final image is recognizable or unrecognizable, these issueswhich artists must sort through, and about which they make their choicesare known as abstract issues. To arrive at the finished image, artists must work out how they are going to draw, not just what they are going to draw. To be a contemporary drawing artist it is necessary to be aware of this, and to work with these abstract issues constantly.