La línea en el dibujo
RECURSO:
Betti, Claudia and Teel Sale. Drawing: A Contemporary Approach. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, University of North Texas, 1997, Capítulo 5, pp. 137 – 168.
Line drawings are the most elemental and purest form of drawing. Line is the element most associated with the graphic arts. It is valued both for its simple reductive power and for its expansive potentiality for embellishment. Of all the elements it is the most adaptable.
Drawing is open-ended and experimental; an ideal discipline for formative thinking and for idea generation, and line is most often the means to this uncovering of new ideas and motifs. Line can be put to analytical use; it is a good way to convert abstract thinking into visual form. No better means can be used for translating the world of three dimensions into one of two dimensions. And finally, line can be put to the most playful use-everyone enjoys doodling.
Sigmar Polke, in his felt-tip and ballpoint pen Telephone Drawing(Figure 1), has taken the doodle to an ultimate extreme by promoting that activity (with its tacky subject matter) to the condition of art. By attaching various sheets of paper filled with scribbles, messages, numbers, and kitschy subject matter (a favored target of Polke), and adopting a drawing style which is pointedly "dumb," Polke offers the viewer an insight into a culture's banality. Drawing with shapes and images that emerge unconsciously is called automatic drawing, a technique developed by the Surrealists in the early part of the twentieth century.
Line can be an economical indicator of space; it is a key element in establishing the relationship between the surface of the paper and the emerging or dissolving images on it.
Philip Guston uses line to communicate ideas and feelings without reference to recognizable imagery in his ink drawing (Figure 2). He investigates space using pure line. The kinetic marks have a somewhat disquieting physical presence; they are in an uneasy equilibrium with each other. The force and directness with which they are stated make them appear to be crowding against one another, pushing and pulling at the same time. We can sense the physical movement that went into the making of the lines, at times tentative, at other times assertive, feeling around the space, moving both laterally and in depth from back to front.
You have had considerable experience already in using line in problems in the preceding chapters. You have used gestural line, structural line, organizational line, analytical measuring line, directional line, outline, scribbled, tangled, and wrapping lines, continuous overlapping lines, crosshatched lines, and lines grouped to make value. This chapter deals with line quality; with the ways line can be used both objectively and subjectively as a carrier of meaning.
Determinants of line quality
A first step in becoming sensitive to line is to recognize the inherent qualities of various linear drawing tools. While materials sometimes can be made to work in ways contrary to their nature, recognizing the advantages and limitations of a medium is an important first step in learning to draw. From everyday experience we are acquainted with some linear tools that move effortlessly to create line: pencil, felt-tip marker, ballpoint pen, and pen and ink. And we have used some media that produce a grainy, abrasive line: charcoal, chalk and conte crayon. China markers and lithographic pencils contain can easily be smudged or dissolved.
The surface on which a line is drawn is another strong determinant of that line. Michael Gross's large earthenware container with its decorative linear patterning (Figure 3) is an example of how surface affects line quality. The character of an incised line is different from that of a painted one. Gross's naively drawn and modeled images contrast with the sophisticated and well-made pot. The piece is highly tactile; some lines are indented, others raised; the energetically drawn surface is in keeping with the zany subject matter.
Lines can be created in experimental ways, as in Richard Smith's tondo, or round, composition (Figure 4). Smith is an artist whose work crosses over the traditional categories of painting, drawing, and sculpture. He is interested in the spatial positioning of pictorial elements; particularly important are his faceted, shaped picture planes with their joined individual units. Sometimes, as in this work, he employs tying; in other work folds and cuts are used. Smith sees "shaping as a way of drawing"; the linear elements are strings, cuts, and folds. It is interesting to note that Smith uses the analogy of tent and kite making in his
fabrication of art-both tents and kites have affinity with space.
The surface that receives the mark affects line quality just as does the tool that makes it, so it is important to learn to assess both implement and surface. It is difficult, for example, to make a clean, crisp line with pen and ink on newsprint because of the paper's absorbency. On the other hand, good use can be made of ink on wet paper when it is in keeping with the artist's intent, as in Paul Klee's whimsical drawing of a fishing scene (Figure 5). Here the dampened paper has caused the ink lines to bleed, and a rather scratchy, whimsical, intimate line quality is the result. The watery medium supports the water theme. Klee, a teacher at the Bauhaus for a time, wrote a short text entitled Taking a Line for a Walk, and he did just that in his prolific art production. He is well known for his distinctive line quality and for the incorporation of line into his paintings.
In studying Klee's work one finds ample proof that the strongest determinant of line quality is the sensitivity of the artist. An artist's linear style is as personal as handwriting; just as we are able to identify
a person's handwriting, familiarity with the artist's style makes the work identifiable. Picasso's subjects, along with his several drawing styles, make his work easy to recognize.
Other major determinants of drawing styles and line quality are the times and societies in which we live. This is most apparent in the works of artists who deal with social commentary, such as George Grosz, a savage satirist of the social conditions in Germany during the war years (Figure 6). His powerful visual indictments make use of exaggerated lines to convey exaggerated commentary. Grosz's linear style is the carrier of his passionate convictions.
There are no heroes in Grosz's work. His caustic accusations are conveyed by his crabbed line. The dominant "willful possessors" fill the composition, crowding out the common people. Disparity in size (note the difference in scale between the crippled veteran and the bankers in the foreground) and disparity in line quality (in the depiction of the "bad guys" and "good guys") are extreme. The child is insubstantial; the table edge cuts through its foot, rendering its form transparent. The regimentation of society is shown in the geometric, severely ordered cityscape. Even the background figures are statically placed along a horizontal/vertical axis. The idea of a world go askew is reinforced by the angularity of the three figures at the table. Gras subjects do not invoke sympathy; indeed, he presents them for condemnation.
The technology of a given period exerts influence on contemporaneous drawing style and line quality. Many artists have recognized the relationship between art and technology as a major issue in their work. Pablo Picasso and the Cubists, the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Ball and Gino Severini, the Soviet avant-garde Vladimir Tatlin, Naum Gabo, a Pavel Filonov, and the American artists Robert Rauschenberg and John Ca are only a few twentieth-century innovators whose work used technology a springboard.
Members of the Soviet avant-garde early in the century were product of modern scientific thinking; they
were particularly influenced by new discoveries in biology and in microscopic and X-ray technology.
The Italian Futurists were dedicated to putting into practice the idea promulgated in their Technical Manifesto. In 1909, the sculptor Medardo Ross proclaimed, "The movements of a figure must not stop with the lines of contour but the protrusions and lines of the work should impel it into space, spreading out to infinity, the way an electric wave emitted by a well constructed machine, flies out to rejoin the eternal force of the universe." Ideas new to physics were quickly claimed by the Futurists. Light and speed took precedence over solid, static material form. Boccioni developed a means for expressing the group's "new absolute, velocity" in his innovative style which can be seen in Study I for Dynamism of a Cyclist(Figure 7). The abstracted figure merges with the bicycle and becomes one with the machine itself. The line quality conveys the notion of speed and space which so fascinated the Futurists. Their mechanistic worldview is in sharp contrast to the more traditional naturalistic view of the nineteenth century.
Just as scientific discoveries early in the century affected art styles, in to day's world the computer explosion certainly has had an equal effect on art, especially drawing (see Figures 1.6 and 10.16). On a daily, even hourly basis, we are bombarded with computer-generated graphic images, so it is no surprise that artists have exploited this new technology. Victor Newsome's gridded drawing of a head (Figure 8) is an example of such influence. Unmistakably a contemporary drawing, the lines resemble those generated by a computer, the grid lines themselves are another reference to a mechanically generated surface. The line quality derives from technological influence.
Line in other art disciplines
One other contemporary art phenomenon determining line quality that should be mentioned is the relationship drawing shares with the other disciplines of art painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Drawing, especially the linear element extends to other disciplines and other media. We have already looked at two examples of what an important role line plays in a weaver's and a ceramicist's work (see Figures 3a and 4a).
It is perhaps commonplace to say how the distinctions among the various art disciplines have bee blurred. The very marks that define drawing are now incorporated into their work by sculptors and photographers.
In Deborah Butterfield's sculpture (Figure 9), the welded steel elements are presented in linear form, much like the art of drawing itself. Using horses as her sole subject, Butterfield works with sticks, mud, scrap metals, and bronze. The open strut work in Mihoprovides a brittle, angular, linear diagram the viewer is compelled to fill in the horse's outer shape. One can imagine unlike a drawing where the view remains consistent, that this three-dimensional linear rendition of the animal would be very different from different viewpoints. When one thinks of sculpture, one generally thinks of mass· and solidity; Butterfield,
in her linear strategies, confounds the expectation.
A final example of the parallel relationship between two art disciplines can be found in a combination photo-drawing by Ian McKeever (Figure 10). His work unites two different techniques in a body of work whose subject is the processes of the natural world. McKeever says that these two discipline are like landscape itself in that they are able both "to expose and obscure, reveal and conceal ... they are like the agents of land erosion breaking down and rebuilding surfaces." He notes that photography is closed while drawing is open; it is these two opposite types of representation that coalesce in his work. What better means than line to present a world in flux!
Artists from Paleolithic times to the present have left a rich storehouse of various types of line. In contemporary art a reinvigorated use of line has been introduced. Let us now turn to some uses of line peculiar to art in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Line in recent decades
Minimalist artists such as Sol LeWitt focus on reductive means. Their work is a "deflation" of art activity. Art is stripped down with a concentration on one or two of the elements that go into its making. LeWitt is
particularly important to our discussion of line because his works are pared down to this prime element.
His work has no literary focus; it is reductive, intellectual, and analytical in character. He, like other Process artists, establishes a process, a procedure, laying down rules for the execution of the art piece. He conceptualizes the organization of the work then follows his own preset directions. We might call his finished pieces responses to simple commands. Artists such as LeWitt see this conceptualized approach as a viable organizational factor equal to, if not superior to, traditional visual, pictorial means of composing a work of art. In Process Art the viewer is able to recreate intellectually the process or action that went into the making of the work. LeWitt's title, Wall Drawing Part Two with Ten Thousand Lines 12" Long (Figure 11), sums up the entire process. Actually, anyone could carry out the instructions; it is not required that the artist actually execute the work. The work is finished when the instructions have been carried out. Yet the work, like LeWitt's, may have a visual presence that is elegant in its clarity.
Artists who occupy the extreme opposite end of the scale from the Minimalists come from the Neo-Naive, Bad Painting, and New Imagist styles Their work is often characterized by crude figuration and expressionistic handling, they reject accepted norms of the "right" way to paint or draw. PhiIip Guston's drawings exemplify one approach; his images are drawn with an ex act crudeness, a calculated dumbness, somewhat grotesque, but honest (Figure 12). It is, in fact, their ugliness that elicits our response. The object themselves are accoutrements of his studio, personal symbols of the artist struggles, and, as odd as it may seem, they are in dialogue with the art of the past over which Guston has such a command.
Guston's reintroduction of this new figuration was extremely influential over the latter part of the twentieth century. His line quality is in perfect keeping with his subject matter, a sort of groping, and an uncertain
search for personal meaning in his life.
Line is an indispensable element whether used abstractly, as in the Modernist work by Richard Diebenkorn or to depict recognizable subject matter, as in the Post-Modernist piece by AI Souza (Figure 13). Diebenkorn uses a taut line to divide the picture plane asymmetrically. This linear pattern holds the field in tension; both lines and shapes seem to push and pull inward and outward at the same time. Diebenkorn image developed from landscape, moved to abstraction, and then to nonobjective forms.
A technique that has found much favor with Post-Modernist artists is that of overlaid images. In Souza's work Arc de Triomphe (Figure 13) we see three separate overlays: the golf players, the rocking chair, and a series of tree limbs. It is impossible to assign a definite location in space for all three layers, although the golf scene forms a field for the other images. The images are not integrated by color, by style, or by scale. This overlaying of images runs counter to normal ways of representing objects and the space they occupy. It is a distinctive innovation of the Post-Modernists.
In the last two decades of the century, line seems to have been given an even more important role in artists' development of space. We have seen how adaptable line is in conveying ideas and how suited line is for generating intellectual and visual thinking. Now let us begin our investigation of the many types of line available to the artist.
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