Black book blackboard black book: A drawing-based strategy for knowledge transfer

This paper reflects on a project run in a first-year class of art and design degree, in the Curricular Unit of Art and Design Theory. The objective of the project was to investigate the potential of a teaching protocol where a set of drawings were generated in class by the teacher to facilitate knowledge transfer in the classroom. The drawings generated by the teacher in class have not been treated or explored as a strategy as such, but they supported the delivery of theoretical content in the classroom. As part of the teaching theory protocol, a series of drawings were built as a sequential visual narrative, in the form of a story; these drawings, acting as visual narratives, sought to enable students to understand the theoretical content. At the end of the sessions, all students involved in the project were evaluated through surveys, to gather evidence of their understanding of theory. The results obtained suggest that the use of drawing as a tool in explaining theory facilitates a better understanding of theoretical concepts for students. It also allows the teacher to clarify and adjust unclear points in the lectures, and as such this protocol could function as a recursive strategy. In conclusion, the simplicity of this strategy could benefit students with cognitive difficulties, offering a complementary approach in the dialogue between teacher and student. This approach is particularly useful in contributing to the transfer of knowledge in the classroom in a digital age.

The performing machine

In this paper, art historian Sanneke Huisman and curator Sven Schlijper-Karssenberg discuss Jorrit Paaijmans’s drawing practice based on his recent performance installation Radical Drawing Device (RDD). Huisman and Schlijper-Karssenberg show the important role notions of physicality and craftsmanship play in Paaijmans’s hyperdrawing practice and demonstrate the ways in which Paaijmans uses these notions to question mechanization and craftsmanship in relation to the artistic practice and discipline of drawing. RDD, the case study of this text, is a tattoo machine made by Paaijmans that can only perform one action: applying a straight line onto the artist’s arm. The authors argue that with RDD, Paaijmans continues his research into physicality, as well as reflects on the status of drawing in relation to technology, time and the passage of time. The paper further shines light on the ways in which the work encourages reflection on being human in a technological society.

From the ground up: Drawing on phenomenology

To draw on something means to allow yourself to be informed by and to heed the clues, suggestions and directions emanating from another source. The aim of this article is to describe how walking, as an embodied form of visual and performative practice, might open up opportunities and avenues for an expanded drawing approach. The first step is to plant one’s feet on the ground and let yourself be drawn to the terrain. The whole experience emerges from the terrain and thus it can be considered as drawing from the ground up. This article discusses and considers how un/planned perambulations can be transformed into a drawing(-out) tool that extends the meaning of the practice to comprise multimodal extrapolations and a diverse range of media. The eclectic approaches discussed in this article draw heavily on phenomenology and bear traces of a grounded theory that borrows from deep mapping combined with aspects of Dasein, which can be discerned throughout the process. The discussion explores the wider meaning of drawing as a form of seeing and making in response to place and time, while it attempts to push drawing beyond the limits imposed by a restricted flat surface.

Drawing Power: Children of Compost, curated by Joana P. R. Neves, Drawing Lab, Paris, France, 26 June–30 September 2021 and Frac Picardie, Amiens, France, 4–10 July 2021

Review of: Drawing Power: Children of Compost, curated by Joana P. R. Neves, Drawing Lab, Paris, France, 26 June–30 September 2021 and Frac Picardie, Amiens, France, 4–10 July 2021

Egological meets ecological: Drawing aspects in perspective(s)

Aspects of Edmund Husserl’s egological phenomenology and James J. Gibson’s ecological visual perception theory are construed dialectically for the purpose of informing the teaching of drawing, with an emphasis on understanding relationships between viewer positions and objects in the environment as represented through geometric projection systems. Such a grounding is conducive to a drawing practice capable of insights leading to new knowledge of our relationships with our environment, both egological and ecological, in an art school curriculum currently distorted by neo-liberal trends from the core study of visual perception and communication.

‘Taking a line for a walk’: On improvisatory drawing

In this article we reflect on a line traced by Julia. Julia is an undergraduate student in a class that includes a project entitled ‘Lives of Lines’. As part of the activities of this project, the students were asked to draw continuously for a minute with a white marker on a black page, without lifting the marker, and without trying to represent anything in particular. We analyse Julia’s tracing of the line as a kind of improvisation – the same type of improvising that occurs in conversations, music playing, hiking, dancing and countless other activities. We characterize the improviser as a daydreamer immersed in a reverie: an open field of reciprocating forces, desires, surprises and recollections playing themselves out as some of them encounter their way forward free to proceed, and others do not. The improviser becomes an arena in which body, hand, pen, paper, chair, other bodies, traces, words and sounds mutually displace and attract on their own.