Scaling Up

See more of Jim Denevan's freehand earth drawings at jimdenevan.com

FIELD work

British tech-drawing collective "Field" brings together code, gesture, interactivity, color, light and more, to create drawings in space.

Gestures On Sound from FIELD on Vimeo.

Poke through the Vimeo archive to find the amazing sidewalk campaign for Target in Union Square.

On Line Interactive

The interactive component of the MoMA On Line show is yours for the exploring - deep and broad, with great features.

MoMA Drawing/Dance Performances - On Line

Lifted directly from the MoMA website, as their text is superb - be sure to check out the five live performances as webcast from the MoMA in the weeks ahead.

MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series presents a program of live performance and dance in conjunction with the group exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. The dancing body has long been a subject matter for drawing, as seen in a variety of works included in this exhibition. These documentations show dance in two dimensions, allowing it to be seen in a gallery setting. But if one considers line as the trace of a point in motion—an idea at the core of this project—the very act of dance becomes a drawing, an insertion of line into time and the three-dimensional space of our lived world.

About On Line (through February 7, 2011)

On Line explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century, a period when numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of drawing to a critical examination and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed line across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world. On Line includes approximately three hundred works that connect drawing with selections of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and dance (represented by film and documentation). In this way, the exhibition makes the case for a discursive history of mark making, while mapping an alternative project of drawing in the twentieth century. The exhibition includes works by a wide range of artists, both familiar and relatively unknown, from different eras of the past century and from many nations, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum, and Monika Grzymala.

Chalkboard Gorgeous

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Delineate in Columbia

A national invitational drawing show has just closed here in Columbia, garnering much praise! A review of the show, which raises some good questions about drawing in general, can be found here.

Participating artists included: Anila Agha, Barb Bondy, Melissa Cooke, Laura Ferguson, Sanda Iliescu, Heidi Jensen, Clive King, Zach Mory, Julie Püttgen, Carla Rokes, Elin O’Hara Slavick, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Barbara Campbell Thomas, and Jason Watson. An online catalogue of the show is here.

Featured image is by Anila Agha.

Kentridge Countdown

Countdown - 4 nights until... (directly quoting from the PBS website):

William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible gives viewers an intimate look into the mind and creative process of William Kentridge, the South African artist whose acclaimed charcoal drawings, animations, video installations, shadow plays, mechanical puppets, tapestries, sculptures, live performance pieces, and operas have made him one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary artists working today. With its rich historical references and undertones of political and social commentary, Kentridge's work has earned him inclusion in Time magazine's 2009 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

This documentary features exclusive interviews with Kentridge as he works in his studio and discusses his artistic philosophy and techniques. In the film, Kentridge talks about how his personal history as a white South African of Jewish heritage has informed recurring themes in his work—including violent oppression, class struggle, and social and political hierarchies. Additionally, Kentridge discusses his experiments with "machines that tell you what it is to look" and how the very mechanism of vision is a metaphor for "the agency we have, whether we like it or not, to make sense of the world." We see Kentridge in his studio as he creates animations, music, video, and projection pieces for his various projects, including Breathe (2008); I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008); and the opera The Nose (2010), which premiered earlier this year at New York's Metropolitan Opera to rave reviews.

Between Blade and the Wall

The Slash exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design has long closed, but the online presence is still most definitely worth a visit and a linger, especially when you poke through the complete exhibition archive and find the interviews with the artists involved. On my end, my pink utility knife has become the summer's favorite marking tool, supplying endless edges.

http://collections.madmuseum.org/html/exhibitions/485.html






Andreas Kocks, Paperwork #935G, 2009
Photo by Ed Watkins

Gesturing across the field

I am finding myself ever on the lookout for new marks, and new ways of gesturing so as to leave a nuanced trace of experience. The works of Hiroshi Sugimoto inspire on several levels, from the ethereal to the fully fleshed, raising the question of what one can discover with light as a medium.

Art, in and of Combat

From the New York Times (July 13, 2010), an article on the US Marine Corps' art program. Carol Kino writes that the Marine Corps's combat art program "is not the only one of its kind in the United States military, but many regard it as the one most deeply committed to its artistic mission. Like those in the other services, it began after the attack on Pearl Harbor and scaled back after Vietnam. Somewhat unusually, however, it has kept at least one artist in the reserves ready to deploy."

In my first university-level class I taught, there was a student recently returned from deployment in the Middle East. He showed me some of the sketches he made while serving. They were heartfelt, smart, reflective (in every sense), and they have stuck with me ever since. Since its inception, the number of teaching artists in the Marine Corps has gone from 77 to 1. I am glad one remains, and hopeful for more.

Sgt. Jack Corillo's work is pictured above.

Nu from Blu

So exciting to see the now-familiar cast of replicating hedrons, tentacular pods, and crustacean crawlies joined by all new marks and visions (including a dino-devouring-van and a solid political sentiment)! BLU has just completed production on Big Bang, Big Boom, “an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end.”

A New Website for the DRN

The Drawing Research Network has a new look, and a new website.

http://www.drawing-research-network.org.uk/category/drn-network-news/

Your Summer Drawing Assignment

There are many viable fusions of drawing and video, and I like to think I've been good at dabbling with several in the past few years. A new one this past weekend involved being filmed while working on an extended drawing (a new experience, not posted here - great for private consumption, however!), and I highly recommend it. You have the opportunity to see how your body and the page interact, how decisions are paced, and the treat of noticing a whole set of gestures that may escape you from your standard vantage point.

If you don't have a cinematographer in the house, the next best thing is to record yourself. Timelapse drawing has come up in several conversations lately, and is also a great way to see how you make visual and kinetic decisions on the page. The video below is a random grab from YouTube. Make your own and see what happens. You have until July 1 - go!

Drawing Antarctica

Nick Hutcheson is making time-lapse drawings of the Antarctic Landscape; they can be viewed here: http://www.vimeo.com/album/231684

About the project, Hutcheson states: "In 2008 I spent 8 weeks as an Artist in Residence for the Australian Antarctic Division drawing frantically as I journeyed in and around the continent. On my return, the challenge has been to try and capture some of the Antarctica I experienced. Out there, you have a constant awareness of movement and time. Some of it is so slow - gigantic icesheets flowing towards the sea at seemingly imperceptible rates ­ but then, you can also
watch the sea water become ice, and weather fronts moving across the horizon. And the majority of what makes up the landscape is frozen water. It's defined by this ever-creeping whiteness ­ in compositional terms, a mass of negative space. How to deal with this in the drawings I was making? At the start of the year, in response to this dilemma, I began to play with making very short animations, sort of time-lapse drawings of the landscape."

His animated works are fluid, short, and powerfully evocative.

Are you a Drawing Canadian?

Enviable position, you! Submissions are now being accepted for the DRAWN Festival in Vancouver, BC, with full information found here.

Opening Sequence :: The Pacific

Thanks to Brian D for pointing the way to the opening credits of the HBO miniseries, "The Pacific."

EU Gender Equality Drawing Competition

For the fourth year in a row, the European Commission is organising an international drawing competition on Gender Equality, which will be launched on the International Women's Day – 8 March 2010. Eight to ten year old children in developing countries are invited to express in a drawing their vision on the theme of gender equality. This year's theme proposes to reflect on how girls and boys, women and men, can together make the world a better place.

The deadline for entries is May 14, 2010.

For more information, please visit the EU website.

Inscriptive Science

The International Graphonomics Society is dedicated to investigating how marks are made, be they semiotic or less so... I am more and more interested in thinking about how inscription *happens* especially as mediated through digital technologies. Any resources, please let me know!

More simple gestures...

Gestures by Koki Tenaka

Sai Hua Kua - Very Kinetic!

I like that this "space drawing" by Sai Hua Kua has the potential to inflict rope burn on innocent bystanders. Two versions, with and without thrill-seeking audience.

Studio Show at the MCA Chicago

The City of Big Shoulders (that sticks with me for some reason - I see them everywhere!) was host to a whirlwind art tour this past week, with a highlight being the first floor of the MCA, as nine artists take on the ethos of The Studio. In my solipsistic way, I considered it a drawing show, foremost, with studio explorations from Kentridge, Tacita Dean, Andrea Zittel, Nikhil Chopra, Amanda Ross-Ho, and more. Deb Sokolow's wall drawing for the lobby is hysterical and brilliant.

Full details on the show are here on the MCA website.

Kentridge at the MoMA on the Web

William Kentridge has been my hero since I picked up a piece of charcoal, and the current exhibition at the MoMA is once again testament as to why. The online resource has some of the highest-quality video footage of his animations I have seen online, combined with interviews and excellent text. If you've tried to get any HD footage of Kentridge animations from YouTube, you know how frustrating it is to have to weed through people's handheld camming attempts, well-intentioned though they may be.

http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/williamkentridge/flash/index.html

Delicious.

Rembrandt Resource

http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/ An excellent collection of image and word, used by Heidi Jensen at Clemson in teaching self-portraiture. Any other good self-portrait resources in the mix?

Of Bodies in Motion

Yesterday was art-magical in Columbia, SC. Not only was it 68 degrees and sunny (thank you, latitude!), but an inspired collaboration occurred between dancers and draw-ers, yielding sparky insights and open declarations of mutual love.

On the dance side, high school dance students and their teachers joined up with USC dance students and professors to learn a 3-minute etude that the HS folks will take back to their schools to perform and teach to other students. On the drawing side, three of my students and I spent three hours recording, through drawn gestural line, this experience of dancers learning the etude. What emerged were drawn signatures of danced phrases - 10 - 20 body positions conspiring into single figures.







The linkage between drawing and dance is in many ways easy and obvious - one makes a physical move that conveys direction, speed, intensity, pressure, duration and space. But it was truly exciting to have dancers look at abstracted marks on the page and recognize themselves in them; as well, for those drawing to feel like we were dancing as we moved and left material traces of vision. The immediacy and intimacy of the experience was inspiring (and thus highly recommended - go draw dancers! Hurry!!!).

Xenakis on AIR

Curators Carey Lovelace and Sharon Kanach speak to their exhibition Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect and Visionary, running at the Drawing Center until April 8.

AIR's David Weinstein speaks with Lovelace and Kanach here.

And morning synesthesia yields a very happy combination - a video of a Xenakis percussion piece - listen/watch/envision a drawing... delicious.

Sketchbook Project Exhibition Tour

The Art House Co-op's Sketchbook Project is now on tour for 2010, giving viewers the chance to ogle and handle hundreds of sketchbooks crafted by artists from around the world. The collection will be traveling to major cities in the US before finding repose in its Brooklyn home.

Call for Papers : Drawing and Technology

Tracey has announced their 2010 Drawing Research Topic - Drawing and Technology, and is now accepting papers for review and publication.

From their website: "Tracey is a peer reviewed electronic journal dedicated to drawing and contemporary issues. It is varied and diverse with a fast growing readership of academics, students and practitioners representing a wide range of drawing interests including fine art, architectural design, graphics, product design and visual communication, ideally any activity in which drawing is essential."

The Tracey website is a great collection of writing on a wide range of research topics, from the syntax of mark, to the state of drawing education, to mapping and memory. The questions raised are vital, and the coverage thoughtful.

Schjeldahl on Bronzino

Peter Schjeldahl (my favorite, and I think one of the smartest and most accessible art critics in the mix) writes about drawing, Bronzino and Mannerism (and echos of Mannerism today) as manifest in the new exhibition of such at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A short spoken analysis of a few key drawings can be heard here; the article appears in the February 1 New Yorker.

The Drawings of Bronzino will be on exhibition at the Met until April 18, 2010. See images from the show and hear interviews with curator Carmen Bambach here.

Lekker Bloggerie

I just ran across a great drawing blog by Renata Petrakova, a student at the London College of Communication - excellent graphic resources amassed therein! Thanks, Renata.

Kassan - Drawing Closer to Life

David Kassan's new drawing DVD, "Drawing Closer to Life," documents the artist's studio process in a way that offers a smart and exciting look at how a sharply-rendered observational drawing unfolds over time. Kassan talks viewers through every step of the process, from choosing paper to bringing the piece to a satisfying close.

The DVD will be available this spring. Sign up for an availability alert via Kassan's website.

Manifest INDA - Deadline Extended

Greetings! Happy new year and holiday season in general - I hope it was good for all.

Manifest Gallery has extended its deadline for submission to the International Drawing Annual. 48 hours remain, so act fast. The INDA features drawings, and writing about drawing, from artists the world over, and is an excellent venue for exposure and exchange. Details about how to submit are found here: http://www.manifestgallery.org/inda5/. Entries must be postmarked or emailed by January 7, 2010.

While you're on the Manifest website, check out the PDFs of all their catalogues - a fantastic offering! http://www.manifestgallery.org/manifestpress/catalogs/index.html