John Berger: Drawing is discovery (1953) | Hacker News Reader

John Berger: Drawing is discovery (1953)

newstatesman.com

63 pointsThevet7 comments

This article seems (or attempts) to describe an artist's style. When you start out all you're doing is copying reality onto paper. That builds spatial awareness first, and interpretation (style) second. I can draw anyone's face and produce a perfectly accurate replica. I cannot, however, stylise that into a caricature. And that's why I'm no artist. This skill does have other uses however, like developing focus on detail whilst maintaining a sense of the whole.

Tongue in cheek, bit this makes me wonder sometimes whether artists like Dali skimped (or even skipped) the first, jumped to the second, producing something that resonated with a buying audience. As I said I'm not an artist, so all this may well be my imagination.

Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

The distinction he's trying to make is that (working) drawings are exploratory, while finished works are reproduction. The artist draws the subject in the same way that a developer prototypes something: to see what will work, to flesh out requirements and risks, and to capture data about the project; the full build that follows has a clear spec/goal. The author of the piece could have observed that painters often do colour studies as well as prepatory drawings for the same reason: capture data, do a trial run, experiment a little.

Old master drawings are these amazing things to see in person just because they're obviously working documents of the subject and incredibly detailed and polished in certain ways. They're among the most beautiful objects I've ever stood in front of. They have an aspect of egolessness that gets at what you identified, I think: the artist wasn't thinking about style or final presentation or their role in it, but about pure intake of the subject.

>>I can draw anyone's face and produce a perfectly accurate replica.

I think you meant this as "one can", but if it's true, you can do far more than most trained draughtsman can do and you would certainly be considered and "artist", for there is no way to do this that doesn't imbue it with your personal style. Style flows from observation and execution, or at least it should--not the other way around. At least it does in good art schools. Having a "style" is quite frowned upon for beginning students. Style is earned through dumping preconceptions and truly seeing without prejudice.

But to talk to your points, as the sibling reply points out, here drawing is being singled out as glimpse into the exploratory mind of the artist that a finished work cannot give. Its the difference between learning and knowing.

I don't think you were serious about Dali, but you should know that he was a master draughtsman, as was Picasso. These two made conscious choices to twist their hard-earned observation of the real world in ways that made them...happy?...satisfied? But make no mistake. It was all earned on the back of serious study.

It's nonsense to say that there's no way to make a perfect representation that's not imbued with personal style.

Many mediocre contemporary realist painters achieve this all the time, as you might expect from the definition of the problem as a case of exact replication of reality.

Of course, subject, setting, framing, lighting etc. all distinguish their work but only incidentally. Not conceptually.

The impact of photography and the increasingly boring trajectory of figurative painting are the reason that art has moved away from valuing imitative skill and talent/facility. As art forgers know, a personal style or flick or the painter's wrist is almost always an easily reproduced or pastiched affectation.

I feel like the ghost of PG as painter is hanging over this discussion, dooming any endorsement of the developments in art since WWII...

>>It's nonsense to say that there's no way to make a perfect representation that's not imbued with personal style.

I apologize for not communicating what I was trying to say better. What I meant was that if you were a classically trained artist that had studied long enough (by which I don't mean that you trace photographs of people or anime characters from the web) to be able to draw freehand renderings that are convincingly accurate, you would have a style already based on your long hours of study and by virtue of the way your hand moves and touches the paper. Where you take your art after this is up to your personal style (in every sense of that word)

The word style is notoriously difficult to define wrt the art world. I was just trying to say that style is another word for "how you do what you do"

For the record, I think that the post-war art world is hugely fascinating. Some of it moves me, some doesn't.

Not sure about Dali, but Picasso actually was an incredible realist painter, too; google around for a trove of cool information.

From the level of detail in Dali's work, I'd expect him to also have some incredible realist works out there.

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