"“Drawing”, says Susan Lambert of the Victoria & Albert Museum, “is the most basic skill of both the artist and the designer… the creative idea made visible in the preliminary sketch.”
The act of manually drawing is as much mental as it is physical. From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the present, the physicality of drawing—using pencil or something like it on paper—has been the fascination of countless artists, architects, and critics alike. Drawing is a thinking process bent toward art—whether it is painting, sculpture, architecture—in its infancy. The drawn line conveys basic mysteries depending on how it varies in weight, value, and emotion. A line can be created using countless mediums: lead, ink, charcoal, or even a pixilated sequence on a screen (which seeks to imitate drawing but lacks the tactical quality of pen on paper). When I discuss hand drawings versus computer drawings with my colleagues, we seem to agree the brain and hand can lead to ideas that surely would not have happened electronically.
Computers can’t sketch. They have no imagination of their own (not yet). User interfaces haven’t evolved to the point where all those ones and zeros can engage the human imagination. That’s why the design process is not well represented by the computer. There’s no on-screen metaphorical equivalent for the early tentative ideas, the maturation of ideas into concepts, the emergence of a design from the deep recesses of the brain. Digital likenesses lack the instantaneous rush of inspiration and, paradoxically, the weeks and even months of life it takes to refine an idea into something that can be communicated and built.
With engagement as a guiding principle, my partners and I expect our staff to draw both ways—on the computer and on paper. Technology could theoretically abbreviate the time required, but whatever efficiencies are gained are negated by the need (more than ever) for the intimacy of labor. Technology has made mind-numbing complexity possible—is that a good thing? As the world rapidly embraces the computer as the design tool of choice, I find us drifting farther from the emotion that is the signature of a hand drawing.
So I’ll make a bold prediction: that the need to express by hand will continue to flourish. Drawing can be accomplished on a digitized tablet—but does it engage the artist? Can it be read with as much clarity of purpose as a hand drawing? Is this electronic medium as portable? A pencil and paper are mobile; sketches can be scanned digitally and sent anywhere in the world—a wonderful combination of 21st century technology with that of the 14th. Limiting oneself to the confines of a computer monitor is so 1999.
“Drawing is a means of finding your way about things,” says Lambert, ”and a way of experiencing, more quickly than sculpture allows, certain try-outs and attempts at the act of converting an idea into lines.” Drawing is thinking, intuiting, beginning."
