I’ve previously considered the nature of drawing as opposed to painting or printing. I have done all three as university subjects in my ongoing fine art degree and whilst I feel once the lines between them would have been quite clear, in the contemporary university world the lines are much more blurred with increasing overlap.
For me drawing is mark making. So any mark produced by any means, that wasn’t there before, is a form of drawing. Of course with this wide definition, painting and printmaking are in fact subsets of drawing. Not sure how painting would feel about that :). Traditionally I recognise that most people would associate drawing with more discrete marks, like line and dots, and traditional mediums of pencil and ink, rather than blocks of colour such as used in painting, but really a block of colour is just a fat line, and is certainly a mark. Watercolour seems to fall under the auspices of drawing, despite the fact that it is called watercolour ‘painting’.
I am especially interested in setting up situations for the creation of serendipitous marks in my drawing, and would like to embrace a wide range of marks, mediums and substrates to achieve the results I look for.
My choice of medium and substrate for Project 3 is dictated by availability as well as the media I would like to experiment with more. I like things that have some degree of unpredictability and organic random marks. I like to work to a ‘rule’ that is guided by my observation of the subject matter. I want to include colour, not just because it is fairly intrinsic to the observation of plants, but because colour is important to the aesthetic I am looking for.
