Drawing and Visualisation Research
TRACEY:  journal | space
 


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  • QUESTIONS

  • What do you personally use drawing for?

    What are the functions and purposes of drawing?

    What are the characteristics of contemporary drawing ?

    In the face of 21st century technology, why do we still draw ?

    Do we feel that drawing is the closest to a primary, creative instinct?

    What motivates children to draw?

    In what way is drawing used as an analytic tool?

    What characterizes the search for significance through drawing?


  • EDITORIAL

  • Russ Marshall

    There is a futility with the asking of certain questions. "What is the Ultimate Answer to The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?", is one such question. "Now, where did I put those keys?" is another. To the former, Deep Thought eventually obtained an answer, though it took 7.5 million years, and the answer itself was not terribly satisfying. The problem was, that it was never really understood what the question was in the first place (Adams, 1979). There may be an argument for similarly categorising "What is drawing for?". To write the question off, is probably wholly appropriate but does rather make a nonsense of posing it as a TRACEY theme. However, in rejoicing the nonsense of it all patterns emerge that the contributors to this theme embody. Indeed, it could be postulated that the futility of asking "what is drawing for?", can be conveniently ignored if we also conveniently ignore looking for an answer. Instead, TRACEY attempts to embrace the exploration of the topic, irrespective of where it leads.

    The approach taken above, is rather flippant. The whole notion of trying to actually define, map, or scope the use of drawing is ignored in favour of the safety of avoiding the complexity of the task. However, there is probably a compromise that can be tackled sufficiently within the remit of an editorial and that is to identify the main purpose(s) of drawing so at least we do have some sort of answer to the original question. Of course this assumes that drawing does have a purpose, but then we are straying back into the approach taken above and TRACEY is back to thinking about that world 'futility'. So with a purpose taken as a given it is possible to identify that drawing is, and has commonly been, used a great deal for communication, either with the person who is drawing themselves or to someone else. Communication covers a lot of ground and indeed there is another TRACEY theme devoted to the subject. To elucidate what has already been covered well within that theme is unnecessary here other than to identify that communication also seems to be a strong domain of design activity and thus drawing is a strong domain of design activity. This however, masks the much wider application of drawing to communication across the breadth of drawing activity. It could be argued that all drawing is for communication, consciously or not. Whether it is the drawing of a shopping list, a concept for a costume for one of the characters in A Winter's Tale, a map to buried treasure, an architectural layout for Terminal 5, a fine art portrait of medical student, or a video sequence of trolls stabbing things, communication can be attributed to all of them.

    Other purposes identified by the contributors address recording and play, amongst other things. It could be argued there is communication embodied within all of these. That is drawing for you. There is probably a little of everything in everything and, there we are, back at the f-word. Whether you like Gordon Ramsay or not you can't deny his enthusiasm. But that's a different discussion. Back on topic, or is that theme, if there ever was one, it leads us to the clichéd and now rather un-PC phrase that drawing is probably all things to all men, not strictly in the biblical sense, but in that drawing is used, and in turn 'does' different things for different people.

    Those still looking for an answer to the question "What is Drawing For?" hopefully know better by now, but, and in the nicest possibly way, to borrow a de facto answer to all the questions asking about things that the poster really should know better about, well…

    WIDF? - RTFM!


    References
    Adams, D., 1979. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books.