What is drawing?

 

At the Clyfford Still Museum's Fall Keynote this month, Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center - a non-profit fine arts institution in New York City whose mission and program focuses solely on the exhibition of drawings - gave his audience a wonderful presentation on the relationship between drawing and painting within an artists creative process. Simply titled "Drawing = Painting," the lecture commenced the museum's fall exhibition Drawing/Painting/Process, on view October 4, 2013 - February 9, 2014. 

To highlight this drawing/painting relationship, and how artists use drawing to support painting and vice versa, Littman references five recent exhibitions that he has curated for The Drawing Center during his tenure, including that of Leon Golub, Gerhard Richter, Guillermo Kuitca, Giosetta Fioroni and Sean Scully. The result is that we as an audience left knowing more about the complexities in which artist's use drawing: as a conceptual tool to examine their ideas about painting. 

For that of Leon Golub and Gerhard Richter, probably the most well known of the group from a historical standpoint, most of us would identify them as mainly painters - I know I certainly always have, before Littman bestowed his wisdom onto the audience. What we learn is that drawing has a strong place in these two powerful painter's careers whether they were aware of it or not. Richter, who vocalized his belief of drawing being an illegitimate art form in 1964, certainly leaned on drawing as he made hundreds of them through his career. Although he didn't prefer to exhibit or display them, drawing was a space of experimentation for Richter. He started drawing from photographs, his main source material, and drawing became a very personal place in which to think things through. Similarly, Golub never did a sketch of his paintings prior to 1960. Instead, he used his source material (also photographs) as inspiration and as his sketchbook. What Littman emphasizes here is that through this process, and through the skeleton structures in many of the artist's works, Golub ultimately drew his paintings. 
 

Gerhard Richter, R.O., 22.1.1984 , 1984. Watercolor on paper, 5 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches. 

 

Leon Golub, LIVE & DIE LIKE A LION?, 2002, Oil stick on Bristol, 8 x 10 inches. 

Another artist who I was surprised to learn had drawing practices was Sean Scully. Well-known as painter who engages the traditions of abstract expressionism and minimalism, Scully's non-figurative works concentrate on geometric forms, most notably "the stripe" which made his mark on art history. Although he began painting in the late 1960's and early 1970's, we quickly learn through Littman's discussion that Scully created many drawings in the year of 1974-75. Included are that of acrylic, ink, graphite and masking-tape drawings as well as sketches from a personal notebook, all which show the presence of important characteristics from his later works (1980's - present). Thus, as Scully used drawing in a more traditional way, we see that his evolution as a painter easily traces back to the aesthetics of his early drawings.

Sean Scully, Change #7 (detail), 1975. Acrylic and tape on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 2/3 inches. 

Giosetta Fioroni, a postwar Italian artist, is probably the one I enjoyed learning most about in Littman's lecture, maybe because I had never known of her name or work prior. This comes to no surprise though, as we know little about Italian Pop Art compared to that of the Pop Art icons who gained such fame in America (artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg come to mind). Like her American contemporaries though, Fioroni responded to the developing commercial culture in her work, using such source material as glamour images and images from films. Distinguishing her practice from that of her peers, we learn, is her use of large canvases that employ silver paint and hand-rendering with graphite pencil, in which drawing remained at the forefront of her work. Littman also points toward Fioroni's layering of drawing with painting - where does drawing begin and end? They are impossible to separate in these built images. 

Giosetta Fioroni, Ragazza TV (TV Girl), 1964-1965, pencil, white and aluminum enamel on canvas, 44 13/16 x 57 1/2 inches. - See more at: http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/22/giosetta-fioroni/#sthash.MKge71mK.dpuf

Giosetta Fioroni, Ragazza TV (TV Girl), 1964-1965, pencil, white and aluminum enamel on canvas, 44 13/16 x 57 1/2 inches.

Giosetta Fioroni, Ragazza TV (TV Girl), 1964-1965, pencil, white and aluminum enamel on canvas, 44 13/16 x 57 1/2 inches. - See more at: http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/22/giosetta-fioroni/#sthash.MKge71mK.dpuf

Giosetta Fioroni, Ragazza TV (TV Girl), 1964-1965, pencil, white and aluminum enamel on canvas, 44 13/16 x 57 1/2 inches. - See more at: http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/22/giosetta-fioroni/#sthash.MKge71mK.dpuf

The work of Guillermo Kuitca, an contemporary Argentinean artist working out of Buenos Aires, is internationally recognized and exhibited across the globe. Like the other artist Littman presents, Kuitca is a painter. According to Littman, Kuitca does draw but the drawings come long after the paintings - an artists way of deconstructing paintings through drawing. Since the mid-1990's, Kuitca has been creating what he calls "The Diarios," in which he takes discarded canvases, stretches them over a table and spends months at a time creating marks, both intentional and accidental. These marks include doodles, drawings and everyday recordings on the canvases surface such as phone numbers, titles of paintings, email address, list making, blank spots where books sat, and collages that result in a sort of transparent record keeping of the artist's life. The exhibition of these works, which Littman curated, traveled to Denver's own Museum of Contemporary Art which was on view from June 21 - September 15 of this year.

  

Guillermo Kuitca, Diario (25 May – 20 October 2005). Mixed media on paper, 47 1/4 inches diameter (1 5/8 inches deep).

The example of Guillermo Kuitca's works in Littman's presentation might have been the most challenging for me in terms of seeing the work as drawings, but that's what Littman is trying to get at - what is drawing? His mission at The Drawing Center is to keep moving the argument forward; to challenge our preconceived notions of what drawing is. In addition to that aim, Littman's lecture strove to illustrate that drawing is most importantly not secondary to painting, like so many people believe and as the market certainly conveys - shown in the price difference between artists' drawings and paintings (paintings are always priced higher and, as such, are valued and sought out more so than works on paper). Well, Littman certainly achieved both of these aims and sneakily, yet smoothly, convinced his audience that our traditional understanding of drawing no longer applies. Whether it be before, after or throughout the creative process - and whether artist's are aware of their relationship to drawing or not - drawing is the foundational tool that allows artists to discover and investigate painting on a conceptual level. And, although Littman did not speak directly about Clyfford Still's work, this is the perfect conversation to be having going into the museum's Drawing/Painting/Process exhibit, as almost no one has seen Still's drawings prior to the museum's opening... and there are nearly 2,000 of them. Below, an example of what visitors will see in the show's unification of Still's works on paper with those on canvas.

To conclude, not only is this discussion important to the Clyfford Still Museum's new exhibition, but the question of what drawing is will become evermore important as the tools of technology continue taking the artist's hand out of the process. Technology is an incredible tool at artist's fingertip's today, but in an increasingly digital 21st century, this will undoubtedly cause some controversy. Will the foundational tool of drawing cease to be? My answer is no. As Brett Littman and his work at The Drawing Center demonstrates, the presence of drawing in the artist's process will not vanish. This versatile medium has shown that it can ebb and flow, and artists will continue to surprise us as to how it is executed and explored. How will the developing motion-based and audiovisual artists, the digital draftsmen and direct filmmakers employ drawing? Time will tell, and no doubt The Drawing Center will help shed some light on the conversation.