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Mediterranean Landscape Art Print Picasso, Pablo 31.5 in. x 23.62 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted It is drawing, perhaps, -- the art of the line -- that shows most clearly to what an extent and how rapidly art grows beyond the mere representation of objective reality -- how all its endeavours are directed towards transfiguring what occurs in nature. To draw means to 'abstract' from nature. Even the simplest drawing of a child -- a little man composed of a few strokes -- is essentially an abstraction. Any natural object comprises an entity with coloured surfaces, it never consists of mere lines.
Without colour, drawing is removed further from nature than is painting. Birds may have pecked at painted grapes, as academicians used to tell, but they will never have pecked at the grapes in a drawing. In days gone by, therefore, men very rarely contented themselves with mere drawing. Cave drawings and the neat outlines on medieval manuscripts were not considered complete unless they were coloured.
Drawings are part of our everyday life, even if we ourselves have no artistic talent. A drawing is used to explain the plan of a house, the streets of a town. Such 'explanatory' drawings also play an important role in art, whether they are the sketches for a painting, for a statue or the plans of a building. Drawing has had this ancillary character for centuries. The drawings of the old masters are rightly called studies. The study was not recognised as a work of art in its own right until the 19th century, when sounding a genuinely original note was considered more important than conformity to the accepted pattern of the age. And, indeed, a rapid sketch has all the appearance of a spontaneous and personal expression of an artistic utterance; it often bears the same relationship to a finished painting as handwriting to copper-plate. The more rapidly the drawing is made, the livelier it appears.
Even without colour, the potentialities of drawing are considerable. How great is the difference between the smooth line of a goose quill and the hard stroke of a reed pen, between the effects obtained by a wet brush dipped in ink -- handled so skilfully by the Chinese and Japanese -- and the almost dry brush used by the Greeks on their vases! There are also the various greys of the lead pencil and of the silver-point, chalks of all kinds and charcoal with its broad, crumbling strokes.
Indeed, linear art has many techniques at its disposal. The drawings of painters and sculptors are not hard to distinguish from one another. The sculptor is usually content with a close, clarifying outline and is little concerned about light and shade. These show up very much better in the statue. The painter quite justifiably wishes to obtain the effect of light and shade in a preliminary drawing. He must know how perspective works, which does not worry the sculptor in the least. It is an old and well-tried rule that a drawing that gives an effect of great plasticity is probably the work of a painter. The painter's sketch needs shading to convey the illusion of tangible substance; white is often used to highlight a chalk or charcoal drawing. The painter likes to add an ink, or even a colour, wash to pen drawing. But such aids must not go too far, otherwise his work will cease to be a drawing. Many wash drawings are more like water colours. Chalk drawings in different colours that are used to cover whole areas, as in pastel work, belong to painting and not to linear art.
Line can be incisive or undulating, it can be delicate or coarse, hesitant or firm, but it always expresses feelings and emotions. The eye can follow its course and so will retrace the movement of the artist's hand. The beholder can thus experience the artist's moment of insight and partake of the joy of his creation.
Although by the end of the 15th century the possibilities of pure drawing might seem to have been exhausted, further means of expression nevertheless were added to linear art. There is a great difference between drawing and the graphic arts. This distinction has unfortunately been somewhat obscured in recent years but experts consider the term 'graphic arts' to apply only to the art of the hand print (in contrast to the machine-produced print). This art did not have its source in aesthetics. Efforts to reproduce drawings on a large scale led to the invention of the woodcut (c. 1400, though the Chinese had already known it much earlier), the invention of copper engraving, followed by etching in its many forms and by lithography and other techniques.
Until the end of the 19th century all these methods had a commercial, rather than an artistic, character because there had been no other way of reproducing paintings or illustrating books before the invention of photography. Their function was to imitate art, as art imitated nature. But frtom the outset, genuine artists discovered the potentialities of the engraving and practised it as 'peintures graveurs'. No pen could produce the delicate line of the etching, the vigour of the woodcut. Soft ground etching (vernis mou), aquatint and lithography also had possibilities not inherent in the drawing. Indeed, their effect is very much closer to that of water colour.
The print assumed increasing importance in the eyes of true artists from the time of the Renaissance onwards. This applies particularly to the graphic art of today, when to turn out large numbers of prints is no longer the aim. This is left to the photo-reproductive machine processes. Colour printing, in particular, has come to flourish as never before. The colour print of to-day demands the greatest economy, since at most seven plates -- sometimes as few as three -- are used. One is printed on top of the other. The colours therefore have to be distributed over large areas -- a feature that also characterizes modern painting. Thus, the man-in-the-street is now able to possess works of art which can still be considered 'originals' even though several copies of any one picture may exist.
A print made by the artist himself and not by commissioned craftsmen clearly has great instrinsic value, since it bears the stamp of his individuality. Although an etching by Rembrandt may cost less on the open market than one of his paintings, it is no less important. Size, the costliness of the material and the time spent on it do not of themselves add up to a work of art, greatly as these may contribute to its market value. It calls for the exercise of the imagination, the courage to venture into new spheres -- in brief, the creative spirit.
Art-lovers should bear these latter qualities in mind when looking at -- still more, when judging -- a work of art, for they lie at the heart of all artistic creation.
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