bright 7

TH E  GOOD
DRAW I N G
Edited by
Stephen Farthing
Kelly Chorpening
Colin Wiggins

cc w
ca m be rwe ll
c h el s ea
w i m ble don 1
 br i g ht 7

t he good drawing
Edited by
Stephen Farthing
Kelly Chorpening
Colin Wiggins

cc w
cam b er wel l
c h el sea
w im b l ed on
This book is dedicated to Deirdre Hopkins and the Rootstein
Hopkins Foundation for their support of the Artist in Residence
Programme at the National Gallery London, the Rootstein
Hopkins Chair of Drawing at the University of the Arts London
and for the meeting that enabled this publication.
 Contents

9 Series Editorial
11 Editorial

six pract it ion er s / six d raw in g s

15 Michael Craig-Martin
19 Katharine Stout
26 Stephen Farthing
32 Grayson Perry
38 Colin Wiggins:
On David Hockney’s chosen drawing
43 Kelly Chorpening

in con v er sat ion

49 Michael Landy, Kelly Chorpening
and Colin Wiggins

‘ wh at is a g ood d raw in g ? ’ – respon ses

69 William Cartwright
72 Mary Clare Foá
75 Michelle Fava
78 Irene Barberis
81 Anita Taylor
83 Angela Hodgson-Teall
85 Simon Betts

91 Appendix
Series Editorial
David Dibosa, Series Editor, Bright publications

The Bright series returns to the fundamental mission of higher

education: to produce, store and disseminate knowledge
and experience for the sake of the expansion of human con­
sciousness. A lofty ideal indeed – but these ideas nevertheless
still lie at the centre of a vision that enables learning to
remain sustainable despite impediments.
Through the series, Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon
Colleges of Art and Design (CCW), consolidates its existing
networks of communication, linking those engaged in art and
design both within the University of the Arts London (UAL)
and those working beyond its boundaries. Bright facilitates the
circulation of debates taking place across a range of art and
design disciplines. Today’s learning environments are not only
international, they are also inter‑disciplinary. There is therefore
a pressing need to trace the development of thinking both
across national borders and disciplinary fields in order to identify
the emergence of innovative practices and to build on them.
One important dimension of the Bright series is the
recognition that different levels of engagement with knowledge
production and dissemination take place according to the place
we occupy within existing learning networks. Students just
starting out on an exploration of their ideas cannot be expected
to work at the same level as that of professors with established
research careers. The question, though, is not about length of
experience; it’s about the intensity of a person’s commitment to
furthering their ideas.

9
Editorial

A lot of drawing requires careful observation, measuring

and plotting. While the resulting combination of lines, smudges
and erasures might resemble something of the world, it also
evidences the drawing’s own creation. Each mark is a decision
to select a bit of information and represent it in a particular way,
but what determines these choices? On reflection, it becomes
clear that drawing is really a process of translation: from the
three-dimensional world into line; from an idea to a mark;
through the eyes of a particular individual, at a specific moment
in time. For the maker, questioning this set of conditions pro­
vides an intellectual framework for drawing; but this framework
does not explain why a drawing is good for the viewer.
The question, ‘What is a good drawing?’ provided a
platform for a day of discussion between eminent artists and art
historians, and an opportunity for those present to consider
drawing’s place within current artistic practice and art education.
The National Gallery, with its collections of Western European
painting and a robust educational programme, was an ideal
venue to engage in this dialogue and examine how the practices
of the past necessarily inform the present.
The occasion brought together an invited audience of
BA, MA and PhD students and researchers associated with 
the Centre for Drawing at UAL, the associate artist of the National
Gallery of London and delegates of Drawing Out 2012, the
second in a series of cross-disciplinary drawing conferences
co‑organized by UAL and Royal Melbourne Institute of Techno­
logy (RMIT), Australia.

11
 A small but varied selection of drawings provided focus
for our discussion, with debate tending to engage with on
the set of conditions that determined each drawing’s creation.
In asking the question, ‘What is a good drawing?’, finding
consensus seemed far less important than did recognizing what
the overall conversation was saying about drawing’s place in
the world today. This publication provides a record of some of
the discussion that took place on 28th March 2012 at the
National Gallery, London.

12
si x practition e rs / Michael Craig-Martin

si x draw in g s I decided to choose a drawing by Josef Albers for quite a few

reasons. I was very lucky when I was a student: I went to Yale and
although I was not taught by Albers, he had left only a couple
of years before so I was taught by all of his assistants, and was
taught all of his courses. They had an enormous and lasting
impact on me as an artist.
Albers is so much better known for his paintings than
his drawings, and everybody knows the Homage to the Square
paintings; but far fewer people are familiar with his amazing
drawings. Albers had the idea that he wanted to focus his paint­
ings entirely on the question of colour. The reason why they
take the format that they do is to remove every other distraction
in order that one can concentrate entirely on the interaction
of colour that occurs in the paintings and prints.
When it came to drawing, he had another idea entirely,
which was that drawing should deal with space. But he also
felt that there was no reason at that point in history to draw
things that you could actually make. His idea was that drawing
should be an independent activity and that what one drew
should exist only as a drawing; one should create a kind of space
that could exist only within the drawing. That is what you
see here. There’s an aspect of the drawing, of course, which is
a perceptual play and this is true to Albers’s own interests.
Albers was very interested in the question of perception
and in the exploration of perception as a way of locating the
experience of art in the viewer; that is, in the physicality of our
capacity to visualize things. What it is to understand what it is
that we are doing when we look at art. When we look at things.

15
 Vittore Carpaccio, St Augustine in his Study, a drawing, Venice, Italy, around 1502

Josef Albers, Structural Constellation, 1954, pen and ink on graph paper, 35.6 × 45.7 cm

16 17
The other thing about choosing Albers is that in many ways
he could hardly be more unfashionable at the moment. He is
wonderfully out of fashion as the work is abstract; it’s very cool,
it’s completely non‑referential, it’s what people often call ‘mech­
anistic’. But I think that they’re amazingly passionate images.
Albers was the first artist I was familiar with who drew on graph
paper. It’s perfectly obvious why he would have done. So this
is a drawing from the 1950s. As you can see, simply through the
use of two different weights of line, he creates an image that
can be read one way but as soon as you start to see it in another,
it shifts and you then see it in a different kind of way.
Colin suggested that I look at Albers’s drawing in rela-
tion to an old masters drawing and here we have this wonderful
drawing by Carpaccio of Saint Augustine, the vision of Saint
Jerome. It is very interesting to see the difference between the
two drawings and what they tell us about the idea of vision
that each drawing represents. I do myself believe that you can
understand a culture profoundly, or a period of time profoundly,
by the different ways in which space is depicted. It tells you a lot
about everything else, about how a culture thinks about itself.
In the Carpaccio, which is a highly narrative drawing that
is wonderfully descriptive and full of detail, you obviously have
the quite recent discovery of perspective. He is very confident
of this, he knows exactly what he is doing and there is a mystery
in this drawing, which is different from the kind of mystery that
there is in the Albers. Here, the vision is taking place outside
the window. You can’t actually see it. It is the wonderful event of
the appearance of Saint Jerome, and we only get the light com­
ing in the window to show us what is takin place. So you can
see that Carpaccio’s drawing was as radically different from what
had occurred in drawing previously, as was Albers’s drawing
when he created it. It’s an intense observation of the details of
every­thing in the room and all its objects, which is also, of course,
a way of describing the great scholarship of Saint Augustine.
Michael Craig-Martin is an Irish artist and teacher,
currently living in the UK. He is represented
internationally by Gagosian Gallery in London.
18
Katharine Stout
I dislike it when someone enquires after a baby, ‘Are they good?’
as if an innate goodness or evil determines whether the child
might eat, sleep or behave in line with orthodoxy. From the mid-
18th century right through to the mid-20th century, styles and
techniques set by the academy provided the official benchmarks
for whether a drawing was considered to be good or not, though
artists always found ways to deviate. Since Renaissance times
and throughout the emergence of modernism, drawing was
the official starting point of all training and its application was
understood to be preparatory for the so-called ‘higher arts’.
Nowadays, there is no longer a question about whether
drawing is a primary rather than a secondary discipline. Artists
such as Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner expanded the definition for
drawing and moved it from the periphery to the heart of their
quest to redefine the very terms of art practice in the 1960s by
casting aside the agreed conventions of art. Its currency was
later confirmed by the resurgence of interest in drawing-based
work during the 1990s. At this time, William Kentridge, Raymond
Pettibon and a host of younger artists brought the medium to
the forefront of contemporary practice with work that followed
in the wake of a revived interest in expressionism and narrative.
Since then, the level of interest in work using this medium has
continued to grow.
It is the potential for individual expression that drawing
allows which may suggest why it is so prevalent and increasingly
visible in contemporary practice today. Drawing as a discipline
is somehow porous enough to allow itself to be ‘infiltrated’ by
19
modes that historically sat outside the realm of fine art – for
example, styles and techniques more commonly found in carica­
ture, comic books or architecture. Many artists work unequivo­
cally across numerous disciplines so the idea of a hierarchy of
media seems outmoded. At the same time, what makes drawing
appealing is that it can somehow exist ‘under the radar’; that
is to say, free of the historic baggage that is inevitably carried by
both painting and sculpture. The idea of there being a consensus
about what might make a good drawing seems a little question­
able when what defines the medium is its flexibility and the way
in which artists chooose to constantly reinvent it.
To come to the task at hand.
I find Desert Galaxy by Vija Celmins (1974) compelling on
a number of levels.
This double-image drawing brings together two of
Celmins’s recurring motifs, the desert landscape and the night
sky, both made from photographs rather than directly from
nature. In many ways, it fulfils conventional criteria concerning
what might make a good drawing in that the figurative image is
achieved through considerable skill. The technique by which the
image has been created has clearly been rigorously and
patiently refined over years of practice. Celmins spends many
hours, days and months on her intense monochromatic works,
which are created not only as drawings, but also as paintings
and different types of print.
It is significant that Celmins concentrated exclusively on
drawing for a sustained period during the 1970s, eschewing the
discipline of painting in which she was trained because she was
‘unsatisfied with the conventional space they had’. She put this
shift in focus down to a ‘realization that the image and the
support could unify, and the way to do it was through pencil’,1
and spent the next fifteen years exploring the simple materiality
of graphite and charcoal on paper to create some of her most
iconic works. Celmins has returned time and time again to the
same images – desert scenes, star-filled night skies, oceans and
most recently spider webs – as they ultimately offer a familiar
20
vehicle for interrogating the subtle differences in pencil, in her
own mood and in her handling of space. What holds the viewer’s
gaze is the way in which Celmins’s images of subliminal views
both evoke infinite depth and yet constantly remind the eye of
their inescapable flatness, being nothing more than graphite
sitting on the surface of the paper.
This demand for attention that the work seems to invite is
not accidental. In conversation with her peer and friend Robert
Gober, Celmins remarked:
I think that one of the things that people tend to look for
too much in art is meaning. And they tend to project
meaning much faster than I would like them to. If I was
a dictator, an art dictator, I would tie them up and say:
‘Here, look at this. And look at it again and look at it again.’
Her work has an intensity that derives both from the laborious
technique of laying down the graphite bit by bit and the
emotional resonance of the sublime subject matter. As such, this
work bears lengthy and repeated viewing, and as the artist
herself comments, ‘when you look at them, don’t you want to
come up for breath?’.2
Celmins is part of a generation of artists who were based
in Los Angeles during the 1960s and who sought to re‑engage
with representation instead of the expressionist abstract mark,
as a way to represent the external world rather than the subjec-
tive self. This shift from one generation to the next was perhaps
best expressed by Jasper Johns’s statement in 1965: ‘I’m inter­
ested in things that suggest the world rather than suggest the
per­sonality.’ Some artists, particularly those located in New York,
depicted the changing world around them through the strategic
adoption of figurative styles from outside the realm of fine art,
such as caricature, comics or advertising. On the opposite coast
of America, particularly in Los Angeles, artists such as Celmins
and her peer Ed Ruscha were perhaps less concerned with pack­
aging and consumer objects than their Pop Art cousins on the
east coast and were more interested in the mediated image.
21
Vija Celmins, Untitled (Desert-Galaxy), 1974

22 23
 Before the invention of photography, drawing was work in an exhibition he curated, Living Dust (2004) and in the
regarded as the most direct means to offer a visual description accompanying catalogue, he describes Celmins’s drawings as
of our environment, a convenient and practical tool for artists to ‘objects as much as views, and the kind of looking they imply
record what they saw. However, for artists such as Celmins, the is both intimate and impersonal, an afterglow of the operations
observational gaze was filtered through the camera lens. of non-human mechanisms. The subjects of the images, while
Celmins has suggested that her themes are as much vehi­ they share the quality of suggesting vastness, a resistance to
cles for the material exploration of an image as they are a res­ framing, are not the point – a photograph could convey that far
ponse to their Californian locality. Although the desert, ocean more efficiently. It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between
and sky can be understood on one level as a desire to paint and immaterial perception and its material recording that is their
draw what she could see in the immediate environment of her enduring content.’
LA studio and expansive landscape that typifies California, she is
also interested in investigating the very nature of representation Katharine Stout is a Curator at Tate Britain and
itself. Celmins has remarked that ‘the material – charcoal, and Associate Director at The Drawing Room in London.
pencil and paper – are bigger players in the night sky pieces. The
1 Grant, Simon interviews Vija Celmins, Thinking Drawing, Tate etc., issue 9, p.2
work is much more abstract, even though your mind says ‘this 2 ibid. p.5
is a deeper space’, I think that the uniform nature of the graphite 3 ibid. p.4
4 Musgrave, David, Living Dust, 2004, Norwich Gallery
sitting on the surface keeps you engaged in the flat place.
There really is no depth to it.’3 It is interesting to note that even
John Ruskin, the influential 19th-century artist, art critic and
patron who zealously promoted the practice of drawing from
nature, was aware that the mimetic act of representing nature
was only ever an ‘abstract of natural facts’. In his influential
drawing manual, The Elements of Drawing, published in 1957,
he states, ‘Good drawing is, as we have seen, an abstract of
natural facts; you cannot represent all that you would, but must
continually be falling short, whether you will or no, of the
force, or quantity, of Nature.’ The idea of mimicry or copying
after reality has informed the ongoing discourse around
mimesis by philosophers and art theorists since Plato, and it is
through the repeated treatment of a familiar subject that
Celmins explores the endless possibilities of representation, as
clearly autonomous to its ‘real’ subject.
In contrast to her peers, Vija Celmins’s highly distinctive
work has only received the international attention that it merits
in the last fifteen years or so. Yet, younger artists have always
admired the singular focus of her work, which for me is another
reason to single it out. British artist David Musgrave included her

24 25

Stephen Farthing
I believe that drawings can be made for good and bad reasons
and it is the reason or reasons why a drawing is made that is
of primary importance to me in assessing its worth. So from the
beginning, I favour moral over aesthetic judgements. After this,
there will always be the skill, fluency and accuracy with which
a drawing is made, but I am intuitively more forgiving of form
than I am of content.
I think, for example, that because Leonardo da Vinci’s
drawings of war machines are driven by a sense of brutality
and control they are not as good as his anatomical drawings.
I believe that Torres Garcia’s apparently childish drawing of
Latin America inverted is better than Gerardus Mercator’s very
precise projection of Brazil because it questions the global
distribution of power in a way that I approve of. I also believe
that the first analytical drawings of the phases of the moon are
good because they persuaded the Catholic Church to excom­
municate their author Galileo.
Throughout the writing of this short paper, I found myself
thinking as much about the people as the drawings, particularly
(because I was writing about drawing) their moods, attitudes
and mind sets. I considered, for example, Peter Gollwitzer’s two
personality types. On one side, he has the Deliberative group,
the open-minded draughtsmen who favour accuracy, impartiality
and analysis; and on the other, the Implemental, the closed,
optimistic and prone to partial analysis draughtsmen.1 Using his
system on live cases, I found it possible to situate Leonardo
as a classic Deliberative and Picasso as an Implemental; having
26
done it, however, I think that all I achieved was confirmation of
the irrelevance of authorship and the importance of looking at
drawings, not people.
With these thoughts in the background, I would now like
to introduce my first drawing. What it looked like or whether
I liked it or not were unimportant details. When I chose it, all that
was important was who drew it. It is a study, an example of
practise typical of what a nine year old, supported by informed
parental encouragement, might produce. It was drawn with
a pencil from life, from the statue of Hercules that once lived in
the hallway of Picasso’s childhood home in Malaga. As one
of a number of self‑defining drawings made by Picasso at that
time, it is the record of his struggle to draw like a ‘grownup’.
In it, he catches the turn between the upper and lower
body. He even manages to keep the body more or less in pro­
portion, but gets in a mess – as most lower intermediates would
– with the relationship between the flow of the whole image
and the irritatingly difficult detail of the hands and feet and
head. At some point towards the end of the drawing, Picasso
surrounded his central image with a scribbled zigzag line that
I suspect functioned in his mind as the energizer of what was
otherwise a lifeless image. Although today this line might
read as ‘presentation’, at the end of the 19th century it would
almost certainly have been viewed as ‘desperation’. In 1898,
the value of the learning exercise that drove this drawing was
not in question. By 1968, however, even the very best aca-
demic drawings were more likely to be viewed with irony than
with envy. By 1968, the informed audience would have readily
engaged with the nine year old’s awkwardness – but not,
I suspect, his ambition within the academy. That would have
been seen as good as worthless.
Picasso’s drawing was made as part of a well-intentioned quest
to learn to draw like his elders, as a stepping stone towards
becoming a successful artist. What we are left with today, how­
ever, is a struggle; a struggle that locks seeing, recording,
measuring, solitary rehearsal and ambition into a shaky graphite
27
line. I think it may be a ‘good’ drawing, but to see it that way The white linear arcs we see in a blue sky thirty thousand
we have to accept that good drawing is not always about feet above us are neither fixed in time nor in two dimensions.
winning. It can be about visualizing our weaknesses and recon­ We know this because they change shape as we move and time
figuring our perspective, thus acting as a learning and not passes. If they appear as perfect curves from the north and
a showing off process. south, then the same lines will appear as verticals from the east
My second drawing is unquestionably good, possibly and west. Like Alexander Calder’s bent wire sculptures, they
brilliant. It is one of billions of images that have been made are not drawings. They are linear forms animated by time and
within the same conceptual frame. It comes in multiple shapes space. We might imagine that Walt Disney’s film Fantasia is
and sizes, has multiple authors and has, as a concept, been a drawing because it is constructed from drawn two-dimensional
developed and refined over four or more thousand years or images, but it is not; Fantasia is a film that is designed to gener­
more. The excessive time and deliberation that underpin its ate rather than arrest movement.
multiple authorship and final appearance have, I suspect, had a
very positive effect on its clarity, legibility and accuracy. It is,
however, its unam­biguous clarity of purpose that attracts me to
presenting it as an example of Good Drawing.
In advance of my explaining why, I need to first set the
scene by very briefly introducing what I believe drawing to be.
You may be able to make a drawing on the surface or
surfaces of a three dimensional object, but you cannot at the
end claim that three-dimensional object as a drawing. Drawings
are images. When a Maori receives a facial tattoo, he receives
a drawing that is quite literally an interface, a second layer
of information: his face does not become a drawing, his skin
receives a drawing.
It is clearly possible to draw space, possible even to
give the illusion of a drawing existing within space, but
for something to become a drawing it must have been frozen
as a two‑dimensional image within both time and space.
There are both natural and man-made events; the wake
of a boat seen from the air, an asterism seen through a tele­
scope, or the vapour trail left by a plane can appear to be draw­
ings. They are, however, not true drawings – they are virtual
drawings. Virtual because they give the appearance of being
frozen in time and space. We see them that way because Sundial: British School at Rome
distance flattens their dimensions, close-up we know that the
airplane, boat and solar system are all heaving, spatially
challenging time-related episodes.

28 29
The sundial translates solar energy into readable drawn repre­
sentations of time. As measured conceptual images, the sundial’s
drawings join that cluster of drawings that include most maps
and diagrams. These are drawings that are all designed to be
both accurate and easily read. We see the shadow resting on the
line marked ten and know that it is ten o’clock. More sophisti­
cated than the map that requires us to turn to a key, the sundial
has a key physically embedded within the image that it draws.
Like a frame cut from an animated cartoon, the
sundial’s image is ‘fixed’ during our reading. We know that the
image is in perpetual motion but because we read it so
much faster than it moves, we perceive it as static. So for the
reader, time stands still.
When we draw, we convert multi-dimensional infor­
mation into readable two-dimensional matter. When the sundial
draws, it does just that. If we plant a stick vertically in the
earth, the shadow that the tip of that stick makes will, over the
course of a day, describe a locus on the ground beneath
that is deter­mined by, firstly the stick’s position on the earth’s
surface (its latitude and longitude), then secondly by the
movement of the earth relative to the sun. Although the follow­
ing day the stick and sun will together draw a similar locus,
it is only after three hundred and sixty-four days the shadow will
follow the same path again. So every day and every location
has its locus.
This sundial has a punctured disc at the tip of its gnomon
that enables it to draw with a pinprick of light rather than the
shadow that a conventional sundial uses. The precise design of
its face (the primary layer of each of its drawings) is determined
by its location. This sundial sits on a south, south-west facing wall
at the intersection of 41.5 degrees of latitude and 12.3 degrees
of longitude.
Each drawing it produces has a primary, secondary and
tertiary layer. There is a fixed linear ‘face’ drawn onto its base­
plate that calibrates the second light-drawn layer. Together, they
tell us that it is 11.50 am on 18th September. After these first
two layers, there is a tertiary layer that is the gnomon’s shadow.
30
That is nothing more than a by-product of the drawing process,
like the rehearsal marks that we might make on a sheet of paper
before making those more decisive marks with the tip of a pencil.
The gnomon’s shadow is contextual.
So, at 11.50 am on a bright sunny day on 18th September
in the courtyard of 61 Via Gramsci, this sundial made this beauti­
ful drawing. A drawing that not only tells us the time of day and
the day of the year but that also connects our thoughts with
much bigger issues by reminding us of our planet’s time‑based
relationship with the sun.
I started this essay by stating that for me the worth of a drawing
was tied to the worth of its purpose and in doing so placed
the draughtwoman’s intentions in the foreground. I then went on
to describe a drawing by the very young Picasso, whose virtue
I thought might lie in the visible evidence of its laudable goals.
My answer to the question, ‘What makes a good
drawing?’ takes into account not just the kind of drawings that
we come across in art galleries but the others as well – the
ones that help us to negotiate roads, coastal waters and airport
terminals; the drawings that guide our energy when we play
tennis, drive cars or shoot targets; and finally, the ones that re­
ceived opinion tends to lead us to first, the drawings that
make our thoughts visible as we design, explain and dream.
The very best drawings are all to my mind the raw
evidence (both on and off the page) of good intentions and
good deliberation.
Stephen Farthing is an artist and Rootstein Hopkins
Chair of Drawing, at the University of the Arts London.
Stephen lives and works in London.
1 Peter Gollwitzer, Professor of Social-Personality Psychology, New York University.
Since 1999 he has observed that the Deliberative mindset leads to an accurate
and impartial analysis of information that speaks to the feasibility and desira-
bility of possible goals, whereas the Implemental mindset promotes an optimistic
and partial analysis of such information. Moreover, the Deliberative mindset is
associated with open-mindedness, whereas the Implemental mindset is character­
ized by closed-mindedness. www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer
31
Grayson Perry

Why do we need to draw now? I am a contemporary artist. I live

in an age where everyone has a camera on his or her phone
and we all have access to the Internet. Drawing seems like an
activity of historical re-enactment. Back when I first started,
I drew to take control of the world. People often talk about line
drawing as a way of taking ownership of the object, sym­bol-
ically taking control over it and that’s what I wanted to do to
aeroplanes, tanks and racing cars when I was a child. That
was the spirit with which I went into the art world. Drawing as
a visual download of your fantasies.
I then learnt that drawing was meant to be this Ruskinian
exercise where we look at the world and we get a precise
record of what we’re seeing in an illusionistic way. Even in 1978
as I was learning life drawing at art school, it never really felt
worth doing. The world has enough life drawings: we don’t need
any more. For me, drawing always had a much more internal-
ized, psychological, obsessional aspect to it. I was looking –
though I didn’t know it when I was a student – for a school of art,
an area of human creation, which matched up to my own
personal attitude to making things.
In 1979, I went to a show at the Hayward Gallery called
The Outsiders and it was an absolute revelation to me, because
suddenly I saw a group of spontaneous obsessive artists who
I felt very at home with. Yet, these untrained, intuitive art makers
did not seem to fit in with the world that I was entering. Contem­
porary art then seemed like a dour socialist backwater of culture,
full of dull theory and politics.

32
going until there was nothing left of it. This was a person who
was driven to draw. You can imagine how long it took to make a
drawing like this. This drawing was done in 1905, so Wölfli didn’t
have the history of contemporary art to look back on. This was
a person who probably didn’t have a big collection of books and
he certainly didn’t have the Internet. This was a man who had
a clear relationship with a piece of pencil lead and some pieces
of paper and he drew morning, noon and night for a prolonged
period of thirtyfive years. Every Christmas, he got a box of
coloured pencils and that would last him a couple of weeks.
A lot of people like outsider art. A lot of them buy
outsider art. Therefore, a lot of people make outsider art and
consequently there’s an awful lot of bad outsider art. In the
same way, there is an awful lot of children’s art that only their
mothers would love. Like a lot of outsider art, Sonnenring
has this amazingly driven, detailed, patterned quality, but why
is Adolf Wölfli one of the best known outsider artists? Because,
in short, he was really good. His works demonstrate the kind
of qualities that we look for in great art. Wölfli is one of the
masters of outsider art. He set the genre, his sense of pattern
and dynamic composition, and the variety within his own oeuvre.
His work would stand up in a show of early 20th century art.
The other great outsider artist who is very well known is
Henry Darger. Here is someone who is almost at the opposite
end of the spectrum in their relationship to drawing in that he
had no confidence in his ability to draw. Curiously, in one of
the few instances when anyone ever saw his work while he was
alive, his landlord’s wife remarked, ‘Why Henry, you are a
great artist!’ He replied, ‘Yes, I know.’
Darger was a reclusive cleaner in a Catholic hospital and
nobody knew that he was an artist. He would go to the chemist
and get images that he liked from magazines blown up photo­
graphically so that they would fit the size of his drawings and
collages, which were often very large and elaborate. He would
then just trace them using carbon paper. He didn’t think that
he could draw, yet he is one of the most celebrated and valuable
outsider artists today.
36
In the intervening thirty years, I’ve witnessed the popular
rise of contemporary art in London and across the country,
and today it feels amazingly buoyant. But now a backlash of con­
servatism in certain sections of the art audience has emerged
for whom drawing has become fetishised as this anti-modern
thing. It’s become a handcrafted camera that people can use to
show, ‘this is what real art is. It’s not that stuff that you see
at Tate Modern: real art is drawing realistically’. I’ve never really
bought into that. Being an artist who uses craft a lot in their
work, I have become a kind of poster boy of the handmade and
so I am often lumped in with this, but I am just trying to make
art that works for me in an age of ‘anything goes’.
I spend most of my studio time drawing. I was one
of the cohorts of art students that went to art school because
they liked drawing. I know that may seem anachronistic to
the contemporary YouTube mash-up generation but that was
how I, and many of my friends, ended up there. Nowadays,
to do a realistic life drawing seems impossibly earnest. I asso­
ciate it with those posh people who go to art school thinking
that it might serve to be a nice finishing school and they
end up doing life drawings ‘with a twist’. For me, the value of
drawing is getting what is in my head down onto paper.
I have chosen the drawing Sunring (Sonnenring), by
Adolf Wölfli (1905). This is drawing as total obsession: as psy­
chotic outpouring. It is about 13 feet long. Wölfli was a man
who was terribly abused as a child, orphaned and then, as often
with people who are abused as children, went on to become
an abuser himself. He ended up in an asylum in Bern in 1895 and
it was soon after entering it that he started drawing. As you
can imagine he was angry and was kept in solitary confinement
a lot of the time so he started drawing and continued obses­
sively until he died in 1930. This was a man to whom they would
give one pencil and two sheets of newsprint at the beginning
of the week, which would only last him about two days. He would
spend the rest of the week begging, borrowing and stealing
little scraps; he would allegedly draw with a 5 mm piece of
pencil lead that he had found on the floor and would just keep
33
Adolf Wölfli, Sunring (Sonnenring), The Church Clock of Schangnau, 1905, pencil on newsprint Adolf Wölfli, Sunring (Sonnenring), Sundial, 1905, pencil on newsprint Adolf Wölfli, Sunring (Sonnenring), Bernese Highlands (Berner Oberland), 1905, pencil on newsprint Adolf Wölfli, Sunring (Sonnenring), Sunring, 1905, pencil on newsprint

34 35
 So, for me, these artists like Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger
and Madge Gill, with their obsessional need to draw are
inspiring; this is an aspect of drawing that I feel very in tune with
as an artist myself. I think that it suits me in the modern age.
If I am doing a drawing now, I don’t go out and look at nature.
I find nature quite tedious. If I need to draw something, I tend
to look it up on the Internet. If I want to draw a defibrillator
machine, I just Google ‘defibrillator’ on my computer and up
come maybe fifty images – much better than if I went out bloody
looking for one. I suppose I sit in a way with a kind of realistic
view of what drawing means in the 21st century. A way that says
that drawing is a branch of the crafts, in the way that most
painting now is craft in that it is pretty traditional. There’s not a
lot of great cutting edge stuff going on, and I’m happy drawing
with two beers and a packet of felt pens in front of X Factor
on the telly.

Grayson Perry is an artist living and working in London.

Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003
and is currently represented by the Lieberman Gallery
in London.

37
Colin Wiggins:
On David Hockney’s chosen drawing

It’s a tiny thing, hardly the size of a postcard. It is kept in a box in

the British Museum and the box is kept in a securely locked case.
And it hardly ever comes out because it’s very fragile and would
be damaged by exposure to light. It is precious and special,
because it’s very old and it’s by one of the so-called ‘canonical’
figures of Western art. I’ve chosen it because it was the choice
of someone else we’d invited to join us at this conference who
was unable to come due to his commitments with his big
exhibition at the Royal Academy, and that is David Hockney.
However, Hockney said that if he could have come, this
drawing is what he would have chosen to talk about, which
is why I am showing it. It has elements, I think, of what all of
the other four speakers have been talking about. First of all to
Grayson, I would say that it is obsessive. It’s by an artist who
couldn’t stop drawing until he died. I haven’t said who it’s by
yet, but I will in a moment or two.
It’s a drawing that is just about ten centimetres high and it
could only have taken a few moments to make. Look at the speed
with which the chalk has been used. The drawing obviously
Rembrandt, Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk, (circa) 1635–37
represents two women teaching a little child to walk. Perhaps
there is an element of caricature here: you must decide. We have
already heard mention of caricature this morning, so I’d like to
think about it for a moment. Perhaps ‘caricature’ is what all great
artists do when they make a portrait. Obviously, there is a differ­
ence between a portrait that is a stone-cold accurate repre­
sentation of someone and a caricature. If a portrait is simply an
accurate representation, then it can be very boring. If it has

38 39
qualities that make you look again, something that makes you
ask questions about the person depicted, then I think it might
indeed be approaching the condition of caricature: that is to
say, catching and maybe exaggerating the essentials.
I haven’t counted how many strokes there are in this
drawing, but I’m sure that it would be possible. I also think that
you can actually see which mark was made first, the moment
when he started the drawing. I think it is the area of the child’s
face, which has clearly been drawn with the most attention. And
after drawing the face of the child relatively carefully, the artist
seems to speed up.
When you are learning to walk, you tend to fall over a lot,
so it’s probably quite a good idea to wear some sort of crash
helmet and that’s what this rather perplexed little child seems to
have on. And now look at the two adults. This is where the magic
happens. One thing that we haven’t mentioned so far is magic.
For me, what makes a good drawing is something that we can’t
define, which is why I am here using the word ‘magic’. The magic
in this drawing is how the artist has been able to communicate
the different ages of the two women. They are both represented
with the same rapid and slight chalk scribbles, and yet we imme­
diately know that the one on the left is the mother and the one
on the right is a good 25 or 30 years older and is therefore surely
the child’s grandmother. How on earth does the artist do that?
If I could answer that, I wouldn’t be wasting my time sitting here
talking to you, I would be making my own magic drawings – but
I simply can’t answer it.
This drawing was made by Rembrandt and it’s one of
quite a few little scribbles like this that he made. It is not a
preparation for anything else. It is not a study for a painting or
a print, although when you look at his finished works you will
find children and other passers-by included, that he’d perhaps
noticed when he’d been sitting on a street corner. One senses
that Rembrandt, when he made this drawing, was in some
Amsterdam street with a pad of paper and a little box of chalks,
just watching what was going on and making these amazing
little scribbles.
40
Rodin famously used to get his models to walk about
the studio and draw them while they were moving without
looking at the paper. You can only really do that successfully if
you’ve been drawing every day of your life for a long, long
time. I think that’s what this drawing is about. It’s about a lifetime
of looking and responding and mark making. It’s about move­
ment and volume. I love the Albers drawing that Michael showed.
And although, Michael, you said that it is non-referential,
I would actually take issue with that. As soon as you make lines
that pro­duce an illusion of volume and space, you are refer-
ring to the world that we live in. For me, there is actually quite an
attach­ment to reality in the Albers drawing, despite its abstrac­
tion. And as Katharine was saying when she was talking about
the Celmins drawing, the chalk in Rembrandt’s drawing is very
definitely on the surface of the paper. It retains its identity
as chalk. The artist is not trying to say, as he might have done
when working with oil paint, that the medium has become
something else, such as fabric or flesh. No, here there is never
any doubt that we are looking at chalk on a paper surface
and yet it produces volume and movement, and a touching
narrative – utterly convincingly.
I’ll finish by quoting something that David Hockney has
said in several broadcast interviews in the last few weeks or so.
I want to think about this idea of craft that Grayson talked about
because Hockney has been advocating a great respect for craft,
the making of things, which is something that seems to have
been lost from contemporary practice. What he has recently said
about drawing is that it is a combination of three factors, ‘the
eye, the hand and the heart. Two out of three won’t do’.
Hockney attributes this idea to an unnamed Chinese
artist. Hockney has always been interested in non-western ways
of representing landscape and he has been particularly inter­
ested in Chinese scroll paintings. So, to repeat – ‘a combination
of the eye, the hand and the heart. Two out of three won’t do’.
I think this beautiful and astonishing little work by
Rembrandt fits this idea perfectly. It was made without any pre­
paration or planning and without any conscious thought.
41
There he is, watching this poor child hit the ground face first,
time and time again, with Mummy saying, ‘Come on, you can do
it this time, just three or four steps!’ And Grandma is saying,
‘have you had enough yet?’ And the poor little child is thinking,
‘please just let me stop now, I want to sit on the floor.’ The
drawing is packed with humanity and captures what is actually
a commonplace experience for all families with young children,
since families began. And it’s the communication of this human­
ity that makes this not just a good drawing but a great one.
It’s a drawing from Rembrandt’s hand that speaks from his heart
to our hearts through the medium of the eyes. That’s why it
is so precious.
Colin Wiggins is an author and narrator, currently
employed as the Special Projects Curator at The National
Gallery in London.
42
Kelly Chorpening
Plate no. 19. The image conflates Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger into a single caricature, floating on the sea, a refer-
ence to Key Biscayne, Florida where the two men often met.
Agreement about really good drawing is wide-
spread – when something has been translated into line with
sublime economy and skill – but not all subjects warrant
such glorious treatment. Sometimes, drawing needs to be bad,
that is, unrefined, even ugly, in order to express outrage,
contempt, disgust.
Exemplary of this is a series of drawings created by Philip
Guston in 1971 entitled Poor Richard. The seventy-two drawings
chart former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his administration
in their rise to the White House. The drawings, rendered in black
ink, show little evidence of revision or refinement. If anything,
there is a deliberate ‘dumbness’ about their execution: each line
is as crudely drawn as the next, simply a repetition of marks that
suggest an equally cerebral and visceral engagement; Guston
drawing under a spell of contempt for the President. At the same
time, they are skillfully done, particularly in regard to Guston’s
talent for caricature. Once seen, Richard Nixon will always
resemble male genitalia. Poor Richard indeed.
As a series, they are tied together by Guston’s clumsy,
cartoon-like drawing within a compositional format informed by
the tradition of art. Guston strongly identified with the painter
Giorgio di Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes, with their origins
linked to the early Renaissance, and this is evident in the way
that the figures and forms in Poor Richard are positioned within
43
an abstract pictorial space. This formal device provides a
tableau for events in Richard Nixon’s life to unfold. Guston gives
particular focus to episodes revealing Nixon’s unbridled
self‑interest, which eventually leave the administration in ruins.
Poor Richard accurately predicts Nixon’s future, and this only
adds potency to the work.
Philip Guston is so revered as a forebearer of the de-
skilled, anti-aesthetic that prevails in art today, that it’s easy to
overlook the risks that Guston was taking when he revealed
his new, figurative work. From the late 1940s, Guston was a well-
known Abstract Expressionist, part of a group respected for
their high Modernist ideals, making work devoid of meaning
beyond the properties of paint. But Guston was never very
comfortable making ‘art for art’s sake’ – after all, he was the
author of socio‑realist murals in the 1930s depicting the injus­
tices of poverty and racism – so as the political climate became
more tumultuous, his misgivings increased. As he later stated:
‘When the middle 1960s came along, I was feeling very schiz­
ophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality
of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading
magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything – and then
going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’ (Talmer, 1977).
When Guston first showed his new figurative work in
1970, people were shocked by what could only be interpreted
as a spurning of Modernism, a ‘shift from the lyrical to the
grotesque’ (Ashton, 1976), favouring a ham-fisted, cartoon-like
style, laden with cultural and autobiographical references.
The hostile criticism that the work received left Guston deeply
wounded. He soon retreated to upstate New York where he
Philip Guston, Poor Richard, 1971
worked in isolation for the rest of his life.
Though Guston was never thwarted by this experience,
it nevertheless played an important part in the development of
his subsequent work. Guston was plagued by intense doubt, and
this is revealed to extremes; self-portraits are interchangeable
with imagery of the Ku Klux Klan in ways that are both dark and
ridiculously funny. This character is key to why the Poor Richard
series resists becoming overly moralistic. There’s a reassuring

44 45
sense that, though disdainful of the hypocrisy of others, there is
an ever-present degree of ‘uneasiness of his not so much
aesthetic as moral and civic conscience; of his awkward position
as a painter in the sheltering womb of his plastic alchemy …’
(Gomez Aguilera, 2001). This prevailing self-doubt, combined
with a fear of more widespread criticism, also explains why
Guston never allowed the Poor Richard series to be published
during his lifetime.
Yet, without knowing the context for Poor Richard, there
is no question of Philip Guston’s contempt for Richard Nixon
and his administration; and as the living memory of the former
U.S. president fades, these drawings will remain a powerful
record of one artist’s outrage at a corrupt administration. In this
way, Guston’s work sits comfortably alongside past greats
of political satire in art, such as William Hogarth and Honoré
Daumier. Poor Richard serves as an important reminder in today’s
political climate, where most artists struggle to find ways of
addressing current events in their work, of contemporary draw­
ing’s capacity to be political. These are really good bad drawings.

Kelly Chorpening specialises in drawing, both as

a practitioner and educator. She is currently Course
Leader for the BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell
College of Arts, London.

46
 Michael Landy, Kelly Chorpening
in con v e r s at io n and Colin Wiggins

col in w ig g in s: Michael Landy has been the Rootstein

Hopkins Associate Artist at the National Gallery since 2010. He is
working towards an exhibition here in the Sunley room next
year, in May 2013. Drawing has been central to Michael’s practice
as an artist for a long time, from school days until now, but with
one exception: the Goldsmiths years.

m ic h ael l an dy: In 1998, I came up with the

idea of destroying my worldly belongings one
day at the kitchen table; it just popped into
my head. Then I started to make lots of drawings
of how I could go about destroying my worldly
belongings. These are some of my possessions
that I drew, and then thought about in various
ways. I made twelve drawings and then showed them in the
place that I used to live; it was off Brick Lane, on Fashion Street.
I called it Michael Landy At Home. I hung the twelve drawings
on plastic milk crates with my name on. The milk crates I tied
together with electrical ties and built walls and hung drawings
on them.

For me, drawing is quite solitary really. It is my way of removing

myself from the world and it’s just me and it and so one day
I decided to draw myself as I didn’t have anything else to do.
If you visit my studio in the East End there’s nothing in there, so
I went down the road and got a mirror and I just started to
draw myself. From there, I started drawing my family members.

48 49
I’m very slow at drawing. People sit that far away [holds his
hands about 75 cm apart], so we’re looking at each other’s faces
and I hadn’t looked at my sister for years and she hadn’t looked
at me. I love looking. So looking at someone’s face, no one
had a neck, so literally it was just these faces as they stared at
me. It’s very personable and you find out all sorts: it’s confes­
sional. That’s not why I took two days to draw them, to get out
as much information as possible, but I just like looking and
trying to articulate that really, through a pencil.
These are life size. It was a very, very intense period. I drew all
my family members, then I moved on to draw everybody I knew.
Not everybody, but I drew about 70 people, so I literally
drew people in the morning and afternoon every day, booking
people in like a hairdresser, and some would only come in
for a few hours and other people would come in for a whole day.
Some could commit for the whole two days. Sometimes, I’d
draw someone and it wouldn’t look like them at the end of the
day and you’d have to explain why. Maybe the top half or
bottom half looked like them but put together it didn’t look like
them and I could never understand how I could spend two
days looking at someone and not get a likeness. I put that down
to an off day.
[Ethel, 2007, HB pencil on Fabriano paper,
shown on screen]
That’s my Mum. Maybe because the bottom of her head is
flattened out it looks like I’ve beheaded her, but I actually like
my Mum. I love detail, I love looking at detail and trying to
transcribe it. I recreated my family house at Tate Britain. I did a
photographic inventory of the whole outside of the house
because everyone’s house is different, but when you walk down
the street you don’t really look at them. When you walk down
the street, you get a vague idea that they’re there, big built struc­
tures alongside you, but when you start to look at your house,
you see it has details of its own. My dad had completed various
half-finished bits of DIY around the exterior of the house.
50
kel ly c h or pen in g : I want to ask about the role that memory
plays in your work. Looking at that Break Down drawing, it’s
been 12 years now, and you’re looking at possessions that you
no longer have. Do you look at that drawing now and think
about the objects that you used to possess? What’s your con­
nection with that work now?
m l : No, I don’t. I have the list. If I look at anything, I look at the
inventory where I listed everything that I owned. If I was going to
look at anything, it would literally be the actual written list.
kc : And similarly with the portraits of people that you know.
The people have changed, but you’ve arrested their likeness at
a given point in time.
m l : Yes, it’s like we’re looking at each other but we don’t really
look. I’m looking at Colin but it’s not really until I’ve got a pencil
in my hand and I’m trying to translate what I see onto paper
that I’m really looking at him. I’m not sure if memory plays a part.
I grab things at a particular time, so that drawing is about that
particular time.
col in wig g in s: Let’s move on to some other
very detailed drawings that you made. What
I love about these is the white space of the page.
You talk about your obsession with drawing
but there is a lot of white space in your drawings.
m l : I didn’t actually draw at Goldsmiths, it didn’t
seem the time to draw. There was life drawing but
I’d done that from 16–18 and there was nowhere
to go with that. I like looking and drawing, I could
look and draw and make the connections between
the lines but with this, as I said before, you just kind of simplify
the process. That’s the living plant, a buttercup. They’re all plants
or weeds (a plant out of place). They’re very delicate plants
but stoic as well. Gardeners think of weeds as a nuisance and dig
51
them up but I like them because they’re really robust and grow
in cracks in the street and the seeds disperse and they find
new places to inhabit. Maybe if only for a brief while, on building
sites, or wasteland.
c w : We mentioned the medium of etching and we talked about
it in almost negative terms. That it’s less flexible than a pen mark,
pen and ink, but actually that is its strength. The quality of the
etched line is because of what it is; it has got that limitation and
precision, and that fineness to it.
m l : This is what I did after I had destroyed my belongings,
I ended up making weed etchings.
kc : Am I right in thinking that these were made from botanical
drawings rather than the actual plants?
m l : No, I would dig them up. There would be bugs, they would
be flowering – it was the actual plant. I’d go on expeditions to
find them, to bits of car parks or places where the plants would
be growing and dig them up. I’d have a whole room full of them.
c w : It is a direct observation.
m l : It’s one to one.
c w : How different or similar is it to doing your portrait faces?
m l : It’s all about how it’s in the face and on the plates it’s in the
detail. It’s the detail that I’m interested in and I am trying to
extradite that. I was taught drawing from 16–18 and after that, no
one taught me anything when I went to Goldsmiths.
kc : There is a difference though if you’re drawing a portrait –
you know that the sitter will come and have a look.
m l : Some did. Some would literally not want to look at it the
52
whole time. Maybe they thought that I couldn’t draw. They
literally would just not look. Some obviously do make
observations; one person in particular tried to teach me how to
draw and told me where I was going wrong – that was quite
interesting! Another person fell asleep; I’d put a baseball cap on
his head to hold the peak of the cap and I’d realize how heavy
the human head was. His head kept bobbing. It was Mark Hix,
the chef, and his head kept bobbing because he kept such weird
hours. Literally, within five minutes he’d fall asleep. It was ask-
ing a lot of people to sit and some people have to talk through
it, some have to literally talk throughout the whole process.
The reason that I like drawing is because I like being by myself
basically and I like being quiet. So with people talking to me
when I am drawing, it becomes very hard then for me to engage
with them. But I work round it. I made it work eventually.
I worked around it.
kc : For me, the thing about the portraits – having the sitter there
for such a limited amount of time – is how the pressure to
perform must have driven the way that you behaved and drew.
m l : Yes, I couldn’t be in a bad mood, I had to be nice. Some
artists, I’m sure, are very rude people and they’re like, ‘Sit straight,
shut up, stop talking to me’. I couldn’t do that. I tried to be
as neutral as I possibly could to make people feel comfortable.
kc : You don’t have to do that with weeds.
m l : No. There’s a lot of swearing involved in drawing and
I could do that. It was literally because I wanted to simplify my
creative process and just have this, me and the plant. I got
this weird thickened tendon from holding the etching tool, it’s
called painter’s claw. Your tendons thicken and I’d wake up
in the morning with an action man hand … alright for holding
a bazooka. For an etching tool, it’s not too good. My eyesight
went at the time as well, so I was really getting old and fall-
ing apart.
53
 m l: That’s my dad’s foot.
cw: So that’s not a detail is it, that’s a complete
drawing?
m l: Yes. He had an industrial mining accident
thirty years ago and as a result of that he has slowly been
deteriorating. When I talked about recreating my family house,
I basically wanted to tackle a project about my dad. So I began
with literally going to the house and drawing him. And that
felt a good way to begin the whole process, rather than training
a camera on him, which was too intrusive. I thought I’d just
draw him, so I started off, because he’s very sedentary most of
the time. So I just started to draw. Quite a lot of the portraits
are profile of hims and he looks like a statue in a lot of them.
It began at that. It eventually ended up with me because I draw
and I also do installations that sometimes take two or three
years or longer to materialize. So it’s just been my way into it,
really and a way of making him feel comfortable about the
whole process.
c w : There’s another drawing of your dad, isn’t there.
m l : Yes, he had a bypass and he said do you want to draw that,
so I said okay. So you can see the colours of his feet, you can
see he has issues with blood not pumping round his body. That’s
a watercolour. I like to draw in all sorts of different ways really.
 
c w : These are very conventional subjects aren’t they, portraits
and plants? They’re very much in the tradition of what drawing is
about. The self portrait, there is another take on self-portraiture
which is rather an amazing drawing.
[Left: Radcal Orchidectomy, 2005, coloured pencil on
paper, 56.8 × 75.7 cm, shown on screen]
m l : That’s my penis. I had cancer at the same time as my dad
had his bypass: he didn’t know I had testicular cancer.  literally me just squeezing the glue out.
54
c w : Did your dad not know, or was it that you didn’t know?
m l : Yeah, I had just had the operation, and he asked did I fancy
drawing his operation and that’s when I told him. So I just
thought I’d draw my operation.
 
kc : What strikes me is that there was a prior discussion this
morning about how there is a connoisseurship in drawing and
a lot of people talk about how your drawings have obsessive
amounts of detail, and there is this feeling of well that’s what
good drawing is. This also falls into that category. Where it differs
is the repellent subject matter, which is really interesting … .
 
m l : Well, I don’t know if I’d call my penis that repellent …
you can all have a look later on.
 
kc : The medical conditions, which I think separates this body of
drawings from the rest.
m l : This is ‘Homage to New York’. A lot of these
drawing techniques are techniques that I learnt
between 16–18. These are drawings made with
glue and gouache. Jean Tingueley is a Swiss artist
who made a work called ‘Homage to New York’,
a self-destructing sculpture that he built at
MoMa New York and it only lasted twenty-seven
minutes. ‘Break Down’, when I got rid of my
belongings, lasted two weeks and all of it went to
landfill. At the end of ‘Homage to New York’,
that all went to the New Jersey dump basically.
I liked the parallel and Jean Tingueley is someone whose
work I loved as a student. I was a textiles student for a while and
I went to Tate in 1982 and his kinetic sculptures were there
dancing. I could make drawings out of them and I wanted to
recreate this sculpture and so I began with just drawing it.
I found lots of different ways to draw it, so this technique is
55
c w : I’m not quite clear …
m l : It’s all made out of junk.
c w : This is a drawing? On black paper?
m l : No, it’s on white paper. So I draw, I actually use the glue as
a resistant to the water-based gouache so I draw out the glue
first and then add the black gouache so that the glue resists it.
It was twenty-seven by twenty-three feet, and painted all white.
So it was silhouetted and very ghost-like and sometimes ideas
start through just drawing things. I used black-and-white stills of
this particular work and I made a documentary about it, and
some fake sculptures as well. So most things start with drawing,
which is a meditative process for me and then it also allows me
time to think through the idea as well as I go along.
kc : I have to ask a question as a teacher of drawing. You talk
a lot about the techniques and the passion that you have
for drawing, but it seems to come from your school experience
and not from art college. Were you a bit baffled when you
got to Goldsmiths that there was no drawing?
m l : Not really. I always found it baffling when I spoke to students
and they couldn’t draw. Not because I’m a fuddy-duddy but
I just found it odd. But Goldsmiths just didn’t seem like the place
to draw, really. It wasn’t discouraged. I think, as I was saying
about life drawings, I could take it so far then I felt I stopped it
because I didn’t know where my own voice was within it. When it
just becomes mannerist or copying and you can’t really see
yourself within that anymore, that’s the time to stop. I just did
a lot of drawing between 16–18, I never went out. I was a bit
of a hermit and just stayed in and if I wasn’t at school, I’d be at
home drawing.
m l: That’s basically a scraperboard. White oil
on top of black and then I’ve inscribed into it.
56
You use the end of a paintbrush and you can inscribe into it.
That’s about one and a half, or two metres long. I try to find
different ways. I think if you try to find different ways to use the
media then you draw in different ways. With an etching tool,
I’d work very painstakingly but with something like this you can
make much more gestural and bolder moves that could prob­
ably be a bit more fluid, which will evoke a sense of movement.
c w : And that’s where the National Gallery come in because
one day you got a phone call and we asked you if you would be
interested in coming to the National Gallery and working
in the studio with a view to having this show in 2013. I distinctly
remember you saying, ‘Before you go any further, can I just
check that you know what I do?’
m l : Yes …
c w : We had, in fact, got the wrong artist but it was too late to
go back and so here we are. So you became interested in one or
two of our pictures.
m l : Yes, it was that. As far as not drawing at Goldsmiths, the
National Gallery was just not on our radar and so for me I only
got to know the collections once becoming the Associate Artist.
Karsten Schubert, who is my ex-dealer, offered me some money
to make a drawing of Cézanne’s Bathers and that’s how those
things start. Then suddenly, I looked at it and it’s a really fantastic
painting. Jasper Johns drew it and Picasso made a sculpture of
it, these geometric figures that are just huge, and so I started to
draw it. Cézanne seems to draw the faces but he kind of defaces
it, he seems to articulate it all at the same time. It’s just a really
wonderful thing to draw. I drew it from a postcard; I didn’t do it
from the actual painting, which is upstairs. I just drew it from
a National Gallery postcard because in some respects it simpli­
fies the shapes.
c w: So let’s look at one of your Cézanne drawings.
57
 m l: It’s just watercolour pencil, but it’s very
sculptural.
kc: You’ve remained consistent in the way that
the subject matter is pulled out of context
and situated on the white paper ground – in a way
that a lot of the drawings, perhaps all of the drawings, are.
m l : I think the Scrapheap Services and maybe the ‘Break Down’
drawings are much more so. I literally would fill in space
and make sure that there wasn’t any left, and as I’ve got older
I’ve tried to open things up a bit more. Especially drawing
from the paintings here, I especially like fragments and bits.
So I leave it half finished. Earlier in my life, I would have
a compulsion to finish everything and I’d kill it dead. I’d know
as I was drawing through it but I’d have to finish it and at
the same time I would realize that I was destroying it somehow.
The life that the drawing had, I was flattening it all and not
allowing it to have some kind of space and to breathe. I’ve tried
to open things up a bit more and, as I say, I quite like them
as fragments and to leave things out.
c w : So with all of this empty space, you’re saying that you
had the experience of making previous drawings where
you would cover every single bit and kill the drawing. If you
had done this drawing a few years ago, would you have
carried on and covered every single square centimeter?
m l : Not in this particular one but obviously part of the sense of
the original painting is how it interacts with the landscape;
the figures in the painting become part of the landscape really.
As I isolate things, I have lots of white space around.
c w : And that’s true of these drawings from El Greco.
m l: That’s Christ driving the traders from the
temple. Christ is this figure in the middle,
58
his followers are on one side and the traders are on the other.
I like it, as I had the banking crisis in my head; I partly liked
the idea of that. Also, just the way that he breaks through the
space and defines people on the left and right. But I kept
drawing Christ and I must have an issue there as in the El Greco
he is much more elongated and the head is more like a
pinhead, which drives me crazy trying to draw. I couldn’t get it
right, it was driving me round the bend. I just like how he
breaks into the picture and divides it in two. So, as I said, all the
spaces at the bottom I’ve just left open.
c w : … and given Christ a much bigger head obviously. And
I should add that there are dozens, you didn’t just do these two
drawings. You did a lot. And Cézanne?
m l : Yes, I did a lot. Often I do nothing, then suddenly I find
something to do and make hundreds of drawings.
kc : In these, the ground is more activated. The drawings
remind me a bit of late Michelangelo sculpture where the figure
somehow emerges from the rock in a natural way, not sculpted.
Your drawings have a degree of ambiguity. There appears to be
a struggle going on between the paper ground and the drawn
forms, more than in any of your other work.
m l : Yes.
c w : Yes, which is interesting because of course El Greco had
been to the Sistine chapel and looked at the Last Judge­-
ment and for a lot of these figures you can find prototypes
in Michelangelo. El Greco is actually stealing from Michelangelo.
And when El Greco was in Rome, he offered to paint the
Last Judgement again and to do it better than Michelangelo had
done it. They don’t make artists like that anymore! The
only drawing that’s not black and white is one from the Degas.
m l : Yes. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s just that during
59
my O-level art course, I remember the art teacher talking about
it and saying that it caused a big fuss at the time because it
was of naked adolescents. I just liked the way that the pictures
split into two, boys and girls, I remember that was the first
thing I related to when I came here to the collection. The Young
Spartan Exercising by Degas. I don’t do a lot of drawings with
colour. Most of the drawings are black and white. With colour, if
I limit the palette I’m fine, but if I have too many choices I can
go all over the place.
This is Dosso Dossi, a small painting. I just
love the passion within it – the amazing faces, and
the three Marys, what about their arms? Their
huge Geoff Capes shot-putter’s arms. It’s just the
passion that it conveys that I really loved.
cw: Well, this is a tiny painting and I imagine that
99% of our National Gallery visitors walk straight
past it and don’t even notice it. And it’s by Dosso
Dossi. But with your drawings I have a slide
of your drawing scaled to the same scale as the actual painting.
give to that. So something like this is, it’s like copying, as I was
saying earlier on, it’s life drawing as in copying. I wasn’t quite
sure because most artists copy and appropriate things from other
things. I drew from just four paintings in the collection and
after that I just stopped, partly because that’s not what I wanted
to show in the exhibition, but also I didn’t know where I’d
take it. Nor where I was within it. Also I draw from photographs.
I had a conversation with one artist who was appalled that
I wasn’t drawing from the actual paintings. But that’s a very public
thing to do, to set something up and actually draw in a public
space. I do know the difference between drawing from the
painting and drawing from a reproduction. But that’s just much
more performative. I wasn’t really so interested in that aspect.
Michael Landy is an artist currently living and working
in London, represented by the Thomas Dane gallery.
Michael is also currently the Rootstein Hopkins
Foundation Associate Artist at The National Gallery.

m l : You never told me that.

c w : And yours is on the left. It’s on this huge scale. Kelly, what is
your first response to this massive inflation of inflated figures
coming from a tiny little work of art?

kc : Well, it’s very different from Michael’s other work. If you go

back to the Break Down drawing, it feels very much like the scale
of all of your possessions have been reproduced as though they
were all a similar size, becoming an index. With this drawing, the
transformation has gone in the other direction, and doesn’t have
the same straightforward purpose, does it?

m l : I always thought that I drew ordinary things. I am interested

in the ordinary and the everyday, and what value and worth we

60 61
Michael Landy, Compulsory Obsolescence, 1998, ink on paper, 150 × 100 cm

Michael Landy, Claudication, 2004, pencil on paper, 42.2 × 59.7cm, MoMa

Michael Landy, Shepherd’s Purse 2, 2002, etching, 90 × 78.5 cm

62 63
 Michael Landy, H.2.N.Y. Metallic suicide, 2006, Michael Landy, H.2.N.Y. Homage to New York, 2007, oil stick on paper, 153 × 244 cm
gouache and glue on paper, 152 × 122cm

64 65
Michael Landy, Lamentation over the body of Christ (after Dosso Michael Landy, Bathers (after Cézanne 3), 2010, watercolour pencil, 152 × 210 cm
Dossi), 2011, watercolour pencil on paper, 194 × 155 cm

Michael Landy, Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (after El Greco), 2010, watercolour pencil,
153 × 244.5 cm

66 67
‘ w h at is a g o o d draw ing?’ William Cartwright

– re s po n s e s This essay approaches the question of, ‘What is a good drawing?’

from the perspective of drawing maps. Maps are produced
to represent many ‘geographies’ – human or physical, formal
or informal, real or imagined. It is argued that a ‘good’ map
(drawing) is something that includes information about
the essen­tial components of a geography so that, when read, it
commu­nicates pertinent information required so that the
map‑reader can build a mental map of that geography. It is this
selection of information that occurs ‘behind’ the drawing
that ultimately results in a good map – a good drawing. Yes, the
actual drawing process itself is important, but too are the
processes behind what is drawn.
I assume, perhaps naively, that this process is not that
dissimilar to how an artist makes considered decisions when
composing and producing a drawing. Where the actual ‘marks’
are made on a medium are not placed by chance. This is an
informed practice, where the decisions and deliberations made
before making a mark are the essential ‘stuff’ that make a
drawing ‘work’. It is through that this process that a good draw­
ing results.
Mapping has at its core the requirement to accurately
show phenomena in its spatial context. This has been termed
‘spatialization’. Here, the ‘stuff’ that underpins this discipline
are mathematics (developing ways of representing a spherical
earth on a flat surface), measurement of data, analysis or infor­
mation and the final depiction. Designers and producers of
map products are concerned with whereness – something that

68 69
can be formulated and depicted in quantitative terms, and what­
ness – dealing with qualitative information. The whyness element
of mapping is a combination of a user’s knowledge about the
subject being depicted and the map producer’s skill in choosing
the appropriate data, and then designing the most effective
portrayal medium.
The depiction of ‘somewhere in space/time’ depends on
a number of elements – the choice of the method of graphic
portrayal, the attributes of the information that have to be de­
picted, the influences on how the nature of the data and its
location may alter, the catalysts for change that bring about the
final location in space/time for particular data elements, and
the rules and conventions for depiction. The choice of depiction
techniques that need to be employed are those that relate to
the type of data being depicted, the viewing preferences of the
user and the specific demands of the visualization method
and equipment being employed.
The collection of data, map design and compilation
is informed by location. What is shown, where it is shown, and
whether it is shown at all, is determined by the information
that needs to be collected to enable the design of an appro­
priate map.
Before the application of computers to mapping,
the profession was focused on ‘pre-delivery device’, that is, the
consideration about what should be produced to provide
the best representation of geography. This engagement with the
actual process of ‘drawing’ enabled ideas and concepts about
what should be represented to be formalized. This was done via
sketches, map annotations and actually drawing the map draw­
ings. The mental map was transferred from the designer/carto­
grapher to a physical representation on some drawing medium.
The advantage here was that the cartographer was able to visu­
alize the geography of the real world, form a mental map, and
then devise schema that would allow a concept to be transferred
onto paper, before being further developed and refined, and
then used as the starting point for actually generating the final
representation. The sketch of the idea would then be translated
70
into the language of maps, and symbols, lines and annotations
developed to provide ‘translations’ from the language of
the sketched idea to the language of map production, with its
associated specifications.
In the era of computer-assisted cartography, computers
‘assisted’ in the development and production of maps. How-
ever, relatively recently, the whole process, in some instances,
has been transferred from the human cartographer to the
computer-as-cartographer. Maps are produced more efficiently,
for less cost and much more quickly. However, it is argued
that the ‘drawing’ input into map conception has been removed
altogether. No longer are the concepts behind ideation and
the mental map formalized, developed and implemented
via drawing and sketching. It is further argued that, by removing
the ability to sketch one’s mental map, inferior representations
of geography result.
Yes, machines can collect data, analyse and compile geo­
graphic information and draw maps. But it is the human input
that develops a good map from a good drawing. Even in today’s
computer era of cartography, it is still the engagement in the
drawing of mental images of geography that result in better,
more insightful, and more effective cartographic design – ‘good’
drawings.
71

Mary Clare Foá
The answer to the question, ‘What is a good drawing?’,
depends on who’s asking, what for and when. Knowing the con­
text and time of the drawing; conditioning the signification of
the work, and also of the questioner; and conditioning the recep­
tion of the work, allows for an informed interpretation of how
and why a drawing might be given a particular value. Also,
remembering that we are each of a time and place that positions
our own viewpoint, might get us nearer to assessing what it
is that we are looking at, while keeping in mind the issues at play
in the procedures of making and seeing. But these sweeping
statements close down debate and neglect a crucial issue in the
creating and receiving of a drawing.
What constitutes good practice in the making of a
drawing? I propose that the practitioner’s level of engagement
expands, at some unquantifiable point, to become intention and,
when intention and knowledge (informed, innocent or ignorant)
activate a work, that work then becomes credible. Engaged
application and intention activate credibility, which stimulates an
interaction with the viewer. In this way, the viewer is prompted
to assess the work and arrive at a judgement as to whether or not
they believe what they perceive to be either good or not good.
But enough waffle; if it is the case that the practitioner’s
intention is the crucial issue in the process of making and receiv­
ing a work, then perhaps we need to ask, ‘What did the maker
intend the drawing to do?’ and, ‘What does the drawing actually
do?’ – then we might be better informed to assess whether the
drawing is good or not good.
72
At London’s Drawing Out conference in 2012,
Professor Stephen Farthing referred to a drawing made with a
blue pencil on a map (The Palestine/Israel border) as being
an example of bad drawing because of what it has affected.1
That colonial zeal dictates an imposition onto others without
foresight of the consequences is no surprise; but that the
consequences are so dire, long-running and due to a pencil
marking a paper surface is destructive in the extreme. Clearly,
the maker(s) of this mark had intention, but I propose that
their intention was drawing without due care and attention, and
being badly informed. The action of the drawing was insular
and disconnected from a broader awareness of the rest of the
world. I suggest then that connection versus disconnection
within intention is another crucial component contributing to the
value of a work. I will return to this point, but first I would like
to redress the balance by referencing another map that had
more positive consequences and therefore, in my opinion,
qualifies as a good drawing. Thomas Harriet’s drawings of the
moon (1609) mapped an unexplored terrain with great care –
without it, Armstrong might have said: ‘Houston, this is
untranquil base the Eagle is stuck.’
Now, back to the importance of connectivity – why is it
important that a drawing contains awareness of connectivity?
It is not simply a hippy statement (wishing the world would wrap
itself into a big group hug) to say that everything is connected,
and I propose that to miss the significance of connectivity in any
form of creative practice is to blindly stumble through life pre­
cisely without due care and attention. Professionals from astro­
physicists to philosophers have understood the importance of
knowing we (humankind) are part of and patterned into a whole.
Pulsar discoverer Jocelyn Bell Brunell, in her 2011 South Bank
lecture (2011) stated: ‘If it weren’t for the stars, we wouldn’t be
here: we are intimately and ultimately children of the stars.’
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his phenomenological interpretation
of the world, believes that the merging between our bodies
and our world occurs because the fabric of our bodies is the
same as the fabric of our environment: ‘Between the seeing and
73
the seen a blending of some sort takes place.’2 If it is the case
that all things are interconnected, then an action (in this case,
a drawing) affects consequences, and we are responsible for
the effects of our actions.
So to conclude, in my opinion a good drawing is a
drawing that contains the practitioner’s intention, and is one
that is mindful of connectivity and careful of its consequences –
and as form follows function, it may be the case that if we are
pleased by the intention of the drawing, then we might also
find the drawing aesthetically satisfying – although why some­
thing is beautiful or not beautiful is a different kind of argument.
1 See Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916, in which the British and French divided up
the Middle East, then colonial secretary Winston Churchill’s 1921 White Paper
leading to the 1922 Balfour Declaration in which the UN decreed that the Jewish
homeland should be placed ‘in Palestine’. See further the Belgian artist Francis
Alÿs’s performance drawing, The Green Line, in which he walked the border
through Jerusalem that separates Israel from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria,
which the green pencil had marked on the map in 1948 denoting the Armistice
Agreement. Since 2000, a blue line now runs close to the green line, and so it
goes … (whose God is it anyway?).
2 M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Primacy of Perception, USA: Northwestern
University Press, 1964, p.162–164
74
Michelle Fava
When we see a drawing, we make an immediate judgement.
We decide whether it’s worth a second glance, what it might be
telling us and whether we like it. These judgements are fast,
intuitive, emotional, complex and unstated. That we make these
snap judgements points to an unconscious process of analysis
and evaluation, with idiosyncratic, undeclared criteria.
Those judgements aren’t static or permanent, but we
judge a drawing’s quality before we can articulate why. Indeed,
any explanation will fall short; never quite doing justice to
the richness of our intuitive grasp of the quality that we seek.
Our explanations may even be unwittingly fabricated, post-
rationalizations of why we felt the way that we did when we first
saw the drawing. It is only when a consensus is needed that
we must validate our criteria. A collective judgement is neces­
sarily explicit, wordy and likely incomplete.
When the purpose of a drawing is clear – to ideate, to
present structural information, to convey a design concept –
its quality can be defined by how well it performs its function.
In a fine art context, any definition of quality (or indeed of
drawing) would necessarily provoke rebellion. Perhaps this is
an important function of the exercise of defining ‘good
drawing’: to continually and cyclically define, challenge and
redefine.
There are a few situations where drawing is explicitly
judged, for example in curatorial or educational contexts.
I will argue that, in arts education, what makes a good drawing
need not be defined.
75
 There is a distinction to be made here between other The question of defining quality is of central importance
people’s drawings and our own. We judge our own drawings in academia as, over time, our definitions come to shape
even as we make them an intuitive process that guides us our institutions, and the students and work produced by them.
incrementally towards what becomes our practice. Despite this To illustrate this, I would like to draw an analogy with the
tacit knowing, when pushed, most artists will resist defining peacock. Over generations, the male peacock’s tail has become
the quality that they strive for, likely giving a different account increasingly large, spectacular, predator-enticing and un-
each time that they are asked. wieldy. This is due entirely to the aesthetic preferences of the
Students often judge their own drawings harshly, as female peacock. Over time, the process and criteria for
anyone who teaches drawing can testify, sometimes rejecting judgement come to shape that which is judged. I would like to
them after only a few marks have been made. Sometimes posit that, within the academic arena, universities and the
(more and more frequently) students even fear making the first institutions that monitor and assess them play the role of the
mark. Why is this? female peacock. As such, they should be suitably careful with
In my own observations of artists drawing, it seems that their measures and definitions of quality.
they evaluate periodically during the process. However, this The critical faculty for independently defining and
only appears to be happening part of the time. Another phase pursuing purposeful work is (arguably) the cornerstone of an
of drawing involves an absence of judgement: periods during arts education. I therefore argue that the responsibility of
which the drawer simply draws, postponing the moment defining ‘good drawing’ be decentred, from lecturer or institu­
of judgement to a later pause in drawing activity. This is likely tion towards the student, with a more dialogical and fluid
because the process of judgement impedes the drawing act. set of criteria.
Judgement and perception compete for cognitive resources.
A judgemental thought taking place as the pencil meets the
paper leads to an uncertainty, which is in turn imbued in
the quality of line: a premature evaluation, if you will, caused
by a performance anxiety. In my own judgement, this becomes
a poor drawing. Similarly, a forced, over-confident line is
equally unsatisfactory. The line that I seek is free of judgement,
at least in the moment of its conception.
I believe that this performance anxiety can be con-
nected with students’ experiences of assessment procedures.
Cumulative experiences engender an awareness that one’s
work will be judged by someone else, against often ambiguous
criteria. This awareness can also lead to a shift in the intuitive
judgement processes. The danger here is that the student’s aims
shift towards the short term goal of achieving highly at assess­
ment, their intuitive judgements becoming concerned with
the anticipated judgement of others, rather than with their own
developing sense of purpose.

76 77

Irene Barberis
Drawing is a continuum; a multi-faceted, transdisciplinary
global practice. It is something that almost every person
encounters and partakes in at some period during
their lives; from the early childhood marks of notations,
writings and texts to open-ended contemporary
processes. Drawing is akin to a visionary process, is open
ended, in itself is kinetic; as some have said, it is a
verb, it is an action, it is a movement across a thought,
gesture and trace, it is the mark and its residue.
There are no rules; drawing can be as minimal as a breath
and as complex as the wave structures and recordings
of the ocean. Drawing is kinaesthetic; a movement
between points, a connection, recognition and gesture
of any idea, mark, trace, line, symbol, shape, medium,
space or surface. Everyone has their own language of
the mark.1
Drawing is the sensory and/or conceptual transmission of ideas.
It is a cultural conduit for articulating the transformation of
meanings and experience, a cultural lens through which to view
complexities of human endeavour and the environmental,
social, political and economic forces of globalization.
Defining what a ‘good’ drawing is, is a remarkably diffi­
cult task, especially as the word ‘drawing’ has such expansive
meaning. In the western art academy, a ‘good’ classical or
traditional drawing is one which ticks the boxes of design/
desegno – composition, line, tone, balance, spatial harmony,
78
volume, rhythm – and on which contains conceptual clarity.
It encom­passes ‘traditional‘ skill and is a product of ‘good
draughtsman­ship’. A good drawing has simplicity, a pared-back
or essential presence; it contains animation and spontaneity,
and a unity of components linking us in some way to the wider
spectrum of the cosmos.
A good drawing explores intersecting porosities of
the visible, invisible and conceptual, and in so doing reveals
particularities of ideation – the artist’s process of thinking.
Sol Lewitt, in his paragraphs on conceptual art, says that ‘it’s
difficult to bungle a good idea.’ 2 (I think this is so.) William
Kentridge speaks of an invisible work that precedes his visible
work, an interface between himself and the realization and
formation of his ideas.3 This invisible work is part of his metho­
dology in the overall drawing.
My theory is that a good drawing, in whatever manifesta­
tion, moves us neurologically and kinetically into a space that
I term the ‘liminal edge’, the boundary between logic and the
unknown or intuitive, permitting the viewer to potentially access
both the rational and intuitive experience of the artist’s percep­
tions at the point of making.
The artist is witness to the selection of … (idea, beauty,
phenomenon, light, time, conviction, pathos, etc.); the drawing
is a ‘signifier’, a residue of the artist’s perceptions at that time;
and the viewer, in a transhistorical way, is witness to the draw-
ing. In this sense, a good drawing carries the artist’s intentions
and visual knowledge succinctly, allowing others to experience
their insights. It is the poetry of the mark-making, the intuitive
response to the visible, invisible and conceptual, which elevates
the ordinary into the extraordinary.
A ‘great drawing’, or a ‘great work of art’, transforms
you; it shifts your being, your thinking, your emotions and your
perceptions. You are transfigured by the interaction – you move
away, knowing that you are altered, your perceptions changed
and your thinking expanded – it is liberating, or it can be the
most confronting experience – either way you have entered
a meta-space.
79
Conclusion
Technical prowess, obsessive outworking of vision, inspired
moments, deep perceptual insights, clarity of vision (to name
a few), translated into marks or movements, produce in the
viewer a neurological shift, a ‘psychochoreography’4 mirroring
what the artist has experienced. The drawing is the conduit
whereby the viewer is able to become a participator and sharer
in the translation, response and outcome of the one who has
drawn – be it on a cave wall, an altar, a sketchbook from the
Renaissance period, a wall from the 12th century or 21st century,
or a pattern of equations – this, for me, is good drawing;
a ‘great’ drawing changes you.
1 Barberis, I., Keynote as a Drawing, Drawing as a Keynote, Crossing the Line:
Drawing in the Middle East conference, 2011, American University in Dubai,
Dubai, p.1
2 Lewitt, S., ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, Art Language, Coventry, vol.1, no.1,
May, 1969. New York, pp.11–13. In Art In Theory 1900–2000, Harrison, C. (ed.)
and Wood, P., USA: Blackwell, 2003, pp.849–851
3 Rosenthall, M. (ed.), 2009, William Kentridge, Five Themes, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, p.13
4 ‘“Psychochoreography” is my neologism for the process of the neurobiological
activity of the internal journey of the production of the mark and the witness
of that mark.’ Barberis, I., A Parallel Paper: Blurring the Edges 2012, Drawn Out
conference, 2012, University of the Arts London, London, p.6
80
Anita Taylor
The history and practice of drawing is as long and extensive
as the history of human culture, and the act of drawing remains
a fundamental means to convey and to analyse experiences
of the world(s) we inhabit. Drawing exists in many forms, is used
for many functions and with many intentions, be they conscious
or subliminal. The quest to define ‘a good drawing’ brings into
play multi-layered relationships of the value, nature and question
of intent, of measurement against a benchmark or convention,
of authority and connoisseurship, and of consensus or accord
with regard to the meaningful and qualitative exchange between
viewer and originator posited in the drawn form.
Since 1994, the annual Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibi-
tion has aimed to affirm the value of drawing by providing
an open forum to evaluate and disseminate current drawing and
its practices. Through the selection process, panellists are
encouraged to collectively establish criteria and to consider the
nature and boundaries of drawing as a field. Continual refine­
ment takes place as literally thousands of drawings are laid out
for each panel to see. Consequently, debate arises about
what is of value in drawing as a field, in the drawings presented,
and as to what makes ‘a good drawing’.
To understand what makes a good drawing, the tacit
intentions and purposes of a drawing, and its realization
through the drawn act, need to be considered. Why and how
drawings are made, and the known exemplars in that field,
help to establish what constitutes ‘a good drawing’, be it
a measured objective or realist drawing; an invented scene;
81
a diagram, plan or map; a rock drawing; a decoration; a medi­
tation; a record or documentation of an event; a sketch of
emergent ideas; or a construction after nature. The lens of the
drawn language provides a vital means to record, to confirm,
to probe, to speculate, to document and to digest the world
as experienced, in order to gain and share insight, knowledge
and understanding.
Inherently, a good drawing is one that is fit for purpose
and inventive within its means – a consummate synthesis
of idea, form and content. One that creates equivalence to the
experience or communication at hand, and one that can
apprehend and captivate the viewer (and maker) to find a new
or renewed relationship with, and understanding of, what
it conveys.
Often an autographical means of forming a record,
drawing inscribes and enshrines particular values as a distillation
of the experience of seeing and being; visually embodying
and physically tracing a residue of thoughts and actions that
ultimately represent and affirm human presence. A good
drawing embodies these qualities and interprets and translates
the originator’s present, and prescience, into the viewer’s
present. A good drawing confirms the visible, encounters the
past and the present, and tests the possible.
Ideally, these qualities proffer an exquisitely rendered
visual invitation to locate the interstices between proposi-
tion and possibility, between seen and unseen, and between
memory and forgetting. An imprint of the imagination,
a good drawing enables discovery.
82
Angela Hodgson-Teall
I use the term drawing to mean ‘the act of telling a story or
making an impression with a simple tool or material that fits
in the palm of one’s hand’.
Working from the dual positions of art and science, my
drawings belong in both areas, hovering between one and
the other. Good drawing hits the spot – attention hovers in the
act of becoming.
The psychoanalytic framework to my position was
exemplified by Paula Heinman when she explained that:
We know that the analyst needs an evenly hovering
attention in order to follow the patient’s free associations,
and that this enables him to listen simultaneously on
many levels […] By listening in this manner, the analyst
avoids the danger of becoming preoccupied with any
one theme and remains receptive for the significance of
changes in themes and of the sequences and gaps in
the associations.1
Using drawing as an analytic tool, one crystallizes the story.
The drawing hovers in a state of becoming.
Drawing belongs in many worlds and enables the
examination of thoughts and feelings over time. For example,
attention may hover and slowly turn into words so that it
becomes a line of poetry.
Imagine another thought forming into an idea in a scien­
tist’s mind, which she expresses as a scribbled note or diagram
in the margin of her experimental notebook.
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 The diagram is not only the province of the scientist.
Rosalind Krauss2 in the Optical Unconscious, a re-examination
of 20th century culture, explains that there are both linear and
diagonal axes in the relationship between figure and ground.
For me, grounded in science, these relationships are key. Krauss
includes the expanded fields of the not figure and not ground,
giving my concept of drawing more scope. She refers to the
diagram’s ‘idiotic simplicity and its extravagant cunning’.
The drawing can be a simple line of movements that
become a dance or performance.
A useful description of drawing by Gerlinde Gabriel3
expands the position of the figure. ‘For the hand holding
the pencil which makes the line of drawing is also a form which
cups itself into a container, suggesting a structure, a “body”,
which begins to be the inside and outside of what is the material
condition of sculpture.’ This flows back into the inclusion of
dance and performance in the definition of drawing and social
sculpture.4
So, if a drawing can fit into any of these categories, then
what is a good drawing? I argue that a good drawing tells a story
or gives an account of something that exists in the world and its
imaginations. And a bad drawing … well, that’s just the drawing
you do before you make a good drawing.
1 Heinmann, Paula (1950), ‘On countertransference’, International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis, issue 31, pp.81–84
2 Krauss, Rosalind (1993), The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Massachusetts, p.27
3 Gabriel, Gerlinde (1993), The Body of Drawing, South Bank Centre, London, p.5
4 www.thefutureissocial.co.uk
84
Simon Betts
‘What is a good drawing?’ Any answer to that question would
require a set of prescriptions that could force the practice,
kicking and screaming, into a definition that contemporary
drawing denies. Tony Godfrey, in his essay ‘Jerwood Drawing
Prize 2004’, quite rightly asks, ‘How can we say one draw-
ing is better than another when we can see so many types of
drawing, with different media, different interpretations?’.
One: a Landscape
What counts as drawing now can move between its graphical
and material heritage (with the continued relationship with its
earliest materials and processes), and practices and approaches
that leave the page altogether, and use actual architectural
spaces, digital processes, performance and live forms, at times
even photography. What seems clear to me is that drawing
has an inexhaustible capacity for reinvention and change. And
depending on an individual practitioner’s interest, purpose,
intent or material inquisitiveness, what makes a good drawing
will only be as definable as the last ‘good’ drawing.
At its core, drawing is a democratic activity. It belongs,
like writing, to everyone. Drawing’s graphical materials can
be relatively cheap, are relatively easy to use, and allow all of us
at some point – even if it is only a doodle while on the phone –
to make a drawing. It does not belong exclusively to artists, and
the use of drawing by engineers, doctors, surgeons, architects,
carpenters, performers and choreographers underlines a demo­
cratic reach. Therefore, with so many practitioners who use
85
drawing and so many approaches to drawing being explored,
I am with Godfrey; defining a set of shared criteria for ‘good’ or
‘bad’ drawing is problematic. One size does not fit all.
Two: an anecdote.
Three years ago, I showed a young A-level art student around
the Wimbledon College of Art undergraduate costume
design summer exhibition. We came across a costume design
drawing of an old figure, cloaked, hunched and using sticks
to walk with. Drawn with only line, articulated only with a stick
and ink. Ink, stick, lines: humble materiality and process.
But reading the lines and reading between the lines, this
drawing offered up a rich, moving and highly evocative por-
trayal of character. This drawing told us about age and spoke of
poverty and loneliness. This drawing was powerful in sugges-
ting a narrative, that we could only begin to understand, of how
a life must have felt and been endured. We could almost
smell the ill health and hardship. All this was communicated with
only line and marks; no need for anything else, a masterful
coalescence of process and content: a good drawing.
I asked the student what she thought of this piece. She
thought it was a good drawing, and we discussed why she liked
it so much and why it moved her. But I was completely taken
aback when she commented that she would not be allowed to
draw like this at school. Why? Because it was drawn without any
‘shading’ and apparently you cannot draw with only line. Good
drawing seemingly involves drawing the subject using line
and then shading it in. (I inferred from the conversation that she
meant shaded using a pencil followed by ‘smudge-‘n’-rub’.)
So this exquisite drawing, this piece of emotionally
charged graphic invention, drawn with the simplest of means
but with the maximum of content and feeling, would not be
deemed a good drawing because it did not have any ‘shading’.
So there you have it; what makes a good drawing is
‘shading in’.
This anecdote has niggled away at me over these last
three years as it says much about a certain drawing pedagogy
86
that fails to recognize drawing as a communication skill. It has
niggled at me because it speaks of a prescribed and simplistic
methodology for teaching drawing. And it has niggled at me
because it fails to encompass the rawness and richness of draw­
ing, its unlimited capacity for experimentation, its processes
and techniques, and how it can support an individual’s desire to
think, interpret and communicate visually.
Tony Godfrey asked the right question, ‘How can we say
one drawing is better than another when we see so many
types of drawing?’. But if we accept that what counts as drawing
now is less fixed and more fluid, then discussing, or rather
defining what makes a good drawing needs to be more open-
ended, and less singular. (The word ‘makes’ is a good one.
I have always preferred the idea of making drawings over draw­
ing drawings). Therefore, perhaps the answer, or answers,
to what makes a good drawing resides in the multiplicity of uses,
functions and purposes of drawing.
Three: provocations.
What makes a good drawing:
is asking through making drawings, what makes
a good drawing
is experimenting with drawing and asking, ‘what if I try this?’
is challenging convention and taking liberties
is the visibility and immediacy of the hand, and the actions
it produces, even when it makes mistakes
is a sense of touch
is a drawing’s purpose, intent, and capacity to communicate,
is the refusal of drawing to be categorized and to close
down possibility
is when a drawing explains, and gives us information or know­
ledge that helps us to negotiate the world
is its discourse between definition and the unresolved,
the systematic and chaotic, certainty and speculation
is its ability to instruct
is its capacity for reinvention
is when content and process coalesce
87
is its capacity for material exploration, and invention through
making marks
is a drawing’s capacity to create a life of its own
is its ability to capture our imagination, catch us off guard,
or encourage reverie
is the space it gives to visual thinking, playing with ideas
and finding solutions
is disregarding the rules and subverting technique
is never being afraid to make a bad drawing.

But what really makes a good drawing is not having to ‘shade in’.
Ever.

88
Appendix

Biographies

iren e bar b er is
Irene Barberis is a committed artist with an extensive and
diverse exhibiting history both in Australia and internationally.
She is a painter, working also with drawing, installation and
new technologies. She has contributed significantly to arts
education through her academic work in various Australian and
international universities, most recently at R M I T University,
working in research, painting and drawing, and with national
and overseas postgraduate supervisions at PhD level. Irene
has participated in RMIT’s offshore programme in Hong Kong
since 1999. She is an international curator and speaker who
has hosted and organized international conferences on drawing.
She is the Founding Director of Metasenta® Pty Ltd, a global
arts research ‘satellite’, which functions between universities,
arts organizations and artists, and initiated the Global Centre for
Drawing (GCfD), which is dedicated to deepening the role
of drawing throughout the developed and developing world.
Her international arts projects collaborate with artists and
institutions in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA, the Middle East
and the Far East.
Born in London, Irene holds a PhD from Victoria Univer­
sity, Melbourne. She runs Metasenta® Publications, which
publishes artists’ writings, ideas and studio works, is currently
authoring a book on Metasenta®, and is the instigator and
commissioner of Contemporary Australian Drawing #1 (2012),
Australia’s pre-eminent book on drawing, authored by Dr Janet
McKenzie. She is Co-Director (with artist Wilma Tabacco)
of Gallery Langford120, a commercial gallery in Melbourne,
Australia.

sim on b ett s
Simon Betts is currently Dean of College, Wimbledon College
of Art, University of the Arts London. He studied painting at

91
Sheffield Polytechnic and Chelsea College of Art and Design,
and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His drawing
research interests are centred on developing drawing courses
and pedagogy that promote new approaches to teaching and
learning drawing. He co-authored (with Stephen Farthing
and Kelly Chorpening) the UAL Drawing Certificate course, and
led the development of the cross-disciplinary MA Drawing
course at Wimbledon College of Art. He is currently working on
a joint science/drawing project with the Medical Science
Faculty at RMIT Melbourne, where he recently held an Interna­
tional Visiting Fellowship.
w i l l i a m ca rtwright
William Cartwright is Professor of Cartography in the School of
Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences at RMIT University,
Australia. He joined the University after spending a number of
years in both the government and private sectors of the
mapping industry. He is Chair of the Joint Board of Geospatial
Information Societies and Immediate Past-President of
the International Cartographic Association. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the British Carto-
graphic Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Mapping Sciences
Institute Australia and an Honorary Fellow of the Surveying
and Spatial Sciences Institute. He holds a PhD from the
University of Melbourne and a Doctor of Education from RMIT
University. He has six other university qualifications – in the
fields of cartography, applied science, education, media studies,
information and communication technology, and graphic
design. He is the author of over 300 academic papers. His major
research interest is the application of integrated media
to cartography and the exploration of different metaphorical
approaches to the depiction of geographical information.
m i c h el l e fava
Michelle Fava attended University College Falmouth (MA) and
University of Central Lancashire (PGCE). Having taught drawing
in FE and HE, and worked as a visiting artist in schools, Michelle
92
is currently a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University,
where she is a member of t rac ey, the Drawing Research
Network, and Loughborough University Design Education
Research Group. 
Co-founder of the symposium series ‘Thinking through
Drawing’, which seeks to bring together cross-disciplinary
perspectives on drawing and education, Michelle’s research
interests are concerned with drawing and cognition, and
pedagogic and curriculum development in arts education. Her
PhD research is concerned with observational drawing and
the psychology of attention. This research involves close obser­
vation of artists’ drawing processes, using video and eye-
tracking footage, together with verbal accounts of drawing. 
It considers the educational relevance of contemporary theories
of visual attention and their relevance to contemporary draw-
ing pedagogy, seeking an account of drawing that bridges
disciplinary perspectives and has practical value for educators.
m ar y c l are foá
Mary Clare Foá graduated from the RCA in 1984 where she was
awarded the RCA drawing prize. Foá teaches drawing at the
University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins College of
Arts and Design) and London Metropolitan University. Foá
completed her PhD, ‘Sounding Out (Drawing in response to the
outside environment)’ at Camberwell College of Arts (University
of the Arts London) in 2011. Recent exhibitions include the
Jerwood Drawing Prize (2010) and Berlin / London C4rd (2011).
Foá’s work can be seen in Hyperdrawing (i.Taurus 2012) and at
Summer Hall in this year’s Edinburgh Festival.
an g el a h od g son - t eal l
Angela Hodgson-Teall has worked as an artist in the territory
of medical humanities since the 1990s. Through diverse drawing
practices and empathic interactions, she entices others to
produce artworks with her. Drawing is used to explore thoughts
and emotions, both in crafted pieces and interventions. These
allow viewers and participants to slow down, play, analyse and
93
reflect, creating a third arena within the context of the gallery or
other public space where the practice of empathy is critiqued.
Recent projects include the artist’s residency The Future is Social
at Flat-Time House in Peckham run by artist Sonia Boyce, and
the exhibition and conference Thinking Through Drawing at
Macy’s Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 2011. Her PhD is
entitled ‘Drawing on the Nature of Empathy’ and the research
practice is located in the hospital trust where she works as
a consultant medical microbiologist, bringing the two practices
into the same tight and often uncomfortable arena.
a n i ta taylor
Professor Anita Taylor is Director of the National Art School
in Sydney, Australia. She was formerly Professor of Fine Art and
Director of The Research Centre for Drawing at the University
of the Arts London; Dean of Wimbledon College of Art, UAL;
Vice Principal of Wimbledon School of Art; Deputy Head of Art,
Media and Design, University of Gloucestershire. She is the
founding Director of the Jerwood Drawing Prize, the annual
open exhibition for drawing in the UK (1994 – present).
Anita Taylor studied at Mid-Cheshire College of Art
(1980–81), Gloucestershire College of Art (1981–84); Royal Col­
lege of Art (1985–87); and was elected Academician of the
Royal West of England Academy (2004). She was artist-in-
residence at Durham Cathedral (1987–88); and also Cheltenham
Fellow in Painting at Gloucestershire College of Art (1988–89).
She has exhibited widely since 1989 with works held in public
and private collections in the UK, Europe and Australia, includ-
ing the Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal West of England
Academy and The Jerwood Foundation.
Professor Taylor has an extensive record of teaching,
research degree supervision, and external examining in Fine Art
in the UK and internationally. She was a member of the Art &
Design Panel for RAE 2008, and the AHRC Peer Review College
(2004–07).
94
Image rights
P.16  Josef Albers, Structural Constellation, 1954, pen and
ink on graph paper, 35.6 × 45.7 cm. © The Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2012
P.17   Vittore Carpaccio, St Augustine in his Study, a drawing,
Venice, Italy, (circa) 1502. © Trustees of the British Museum
P.22–23  Vija Celmins, Untitled (Desert-Galaxy), 1974.
© Tate, London 2008
P. 29  Sundial, British School at Rome. Photo by Stephen
Farthing 2009
P.34 left  Sunring (Sonnenring), The Church Clock of Schangnau,
1905, pencil on newsprint. © Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum
of Fine Arts Bern
P.34 right  Sunring (Sonnenring), Sundial, 1905, pencil on
newsprint. © Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Bern
P.35 left  Sunring (Sonnenring), Bernese Highlands (Berner
Oberland), 1905, pencil on newsprint. © Adolf Wölfli Foundation,
Museum of Fine Arts Bern
P.35 right  Sunring (Sonnenring), Sunring, 1905, pencil on
newsprint. © Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Bern
P.39 Rembrandt, Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk,
(circa) 1635–37. © Trustees of the British Museum
P.45  Philip Guston, Poor Richard, 1971
P.49/62  Michael Landy, Compulsory Obsolescence, 1998, ink
on paper, 150 × 100 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas
Dane Gallery
95
P.51/62  Michael Landy, Shepherd’s Purse 2, 2002, etching,
90 × 78.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane
Gallery © Tate, London 2008

P.54/63  Michael Landy, Claudication, 2004, pencil on paper,

42.2 × 59.7cm, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary
Drawings Collection Gift © MoMa 2012

P.55/64  Michael Landy, H.2.N.Y. Metallic suicide, 2006,

gouache and glue on paper, 152 × 122 cm. Courtesy Thomas Dane
Gallery, London © Michael Landy

P.56/65  Michael Landy, H.2.N.Y. Homage to New York, 2007, oil

stick on paper, 153 × 244 cm. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery,
London © Michael Landy

P.58 top/67  Michael Landy, Bathers (after Cézanne 3), 2010,

watercolour pencil 152 × 210 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and
Thomas Dane Gallery

P.58 bottom/66  Michael Landy, Christ Driving the Traders

from the Temple (after El Greco), 2010, watercolour pencil,
153 × 244.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas
Dane Gallery

P.60/66  Michael Landy, Lamentation over the body of christ

(after Dosso Dossi), 2011, watercolour pencil on paper,
194 × 155 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane
Gallery

96
The Good Drawing

Editors: Stephen Farthing, Kelly Chorpening, Colin Wiggins

Series Editor: David Dibosa
Editorial Assistant: Laura Lanceley

Thanks to:
CCW Graduate School Assistant Hope Freeman
The National Gallery, London
The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation and to Deirdre Hopkins
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia

Copy editor: Colette Meacher

Design: Atelier Dreibholz
Printing: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Austria

Published by: CCW Graduate School,

16 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU

This title was published as part of the Bright series of

publications produced by CCW.

i s b n 9 7 8 - 1- 9083 3 9- 01- 0

© 2012, CCW Graduate School and contributors

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