About drawing. (Art).(the Kedumba Collection Australia)

ABOUT DRAWING, there is always a deal of huff and puff. Reactionaries, in fear of alterations to their norm, use it as a whacking stick. The ratbag fringe, so often the "avant-garde", declaim against it, for it limits their scattergun approach to arrive unencumbered at their goals of nihilism and solipsism.

The difficulties of finding out what drawing is are many. A drawing can be graphically almost anything. There is no final word about its meaning. It can be expanded or reduced as you wish. It is entirely unpredictable.

Safer it is to take the route that drawing gives the shape to an idea. I asked a child in a class what his drawing was doing, and he answered, memorably, "I'm drawing my think." Such a remark provides a platform for enquiry, but lacks the concept of criteria: that is, what is excellent?

All would agree that Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Ingres and Picasso were draftsmen of genius, but, just as the sweet elegance of Leonardo da Vinci runs counter to the bluntness of line and the emphatic use of light and shade by Rembrandt, it is difficult to find among them any common line of agreement.

Matisse, another remarkable draftsman, also challenges our analysis. "The character of a face in a drawing depends not on its various proportions, but on a spiritual light which it reflects." I take this light to be the relation and space between his arabesque lines on a given format. Emptiness is as full as fullness, and the whiteness of the paper is as expressive as the marks made upon it. (Aside from the Chinese drawing masters, no one has demonstrated this as well as Matisse.)

Above all, it is Ingres whose marmoreal influence has dominated modern drawing. Consider, from his entrapped list, some random captives: Degas, Renoir, Picasso, Derain, Dali, Lucien Freud and de Kooning. Ingres' remark, "Drawing is the probity of art", is often quoted: that is, drawing should reveal a quality of search, it should investigate, it should probe into what is not at first revealed. Yet Ingres is a master of falsification. What you think is just a head or just a body is not simply that, but rather conceals serious distortions to its anatomy, leading Degas to say that Ingres should be arrested--that maybe all painters should be arrested, including himself!

To state the theory: