Drawing and the drawing activity

• Main Author: Bailey, G. H.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 1982
• Subjects: 700; Arts
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319736

This thesis is a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of drawing. Drawing is considered as the means whereby the draughtsman makes actual, through making graphic, his perceptual interchange with and implicit reflection of the world. The concern is set not so much in what is affected, as what is being affected. Drawing is viewed primarily as process, as the movement toward meaning. This movement is evidence of the draughtsman's imaginative engagement and brings space and time together. Through his drawing, caught within all its material structuring, he temporalises space and spatialises time. These together found and promote its image. The drawing, as image in form, demonstrates the draughtsman's move from the 'lived' of his experience to the 'thought about'. His transcription moreover discloses an intrinsic subject/object dialectic and founds the whole possibility of the drawing's 'world', ordered and sustained through all its representative and expressive potential. In this context the views of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Wollheim and Witkin among others are examined. In the light of these theoretical considerations and as visual support for the arg-wnents, the drawings of five draughtsmen are discussed. These are further amplified €hrough transcripts of conversations about their own drawing activity. The work of three of these is presented through time-lapse sequence photographs, to give opportunity to discuss in detail the process of the activity itself. The thesis maintains that the draughtsman is a phenomenologist. Within the scope of all the ways he makes his marks, through all their transmutations, he seeks routes for the interrogation of how things are. Through his drawings he seeks to inscribe a fecund spatiality that gives visibility back to vision. This is the ontological status of drawing and this is the phenomenological concern.