Drawing Hands. The Themes of Representation in Steinberg and Escher's Images (2025)

Glove and Hand: The subjective basis of a drawing that concerns the observation of perception

TRACEY Drawing and Visualisation Research , 2021

The article introduces the literary genre of autofiction as a means of self-debating drawings, and suggests the efficacy of this kind of writing as a means of articulating the 'I' of the drawing-based artist as subject within their work. After a brief introduction to autofiction's history and theory, the body of the article concerns an example of autofiction written by the author to discuss the subjective basis of his drawing practice that concerns the observation of perception. This is followed by some indication of autofiction's possible usefulness to other drawing-based artists. The autofictional narrative involves a conversation of a fictional character and his interlocutor friend concerning two drawings, with some academic reference embedded in the conversation. The main formal and conceptual component of the drawings, generated by factors of perception and particularly relating to the second of them, is a space left open between its first and second layer, which is interpreted according to Lacan's theory of the Thing. Besides Lacanian theory, the article makes reference to Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory of distanciation, and ends at a point of revelation, to the author, of distanciation in practice through a chance encounter with another artist's own use of writing. It is suggested that this encounter is similar to how autofiction, if written by the drawing-based artists, may help them in relation to their visual work. Access the article here: https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY/article/view/2802

Drawing and Being Drawn by the Hand: A Dance of Animacy

2022

This visual essay narrates events of drawing in the early childhood studio with four-and five-year-old children during the coronavirus pandemic. It considers what drawings do, how they draw us to attention, and how we were drawn to the hand. We draw the hand, not as an appendage or shape, but as the hand that holds, loves, leads, is touched as it touches, and has particular potency in these times of the coronavirus. It explores drawing as feeling-knowing and close attention, and drawing in movement, through touch, and with growing bodied attunement and immersive listening. We become increasingly attuned to what is animating this attention to hands, how the hand both expresses and hides identities, plays with multiple becomings, and how the drawn lines lead, interweave, and knot together in correspondence with various situations, speculations, and concerns. The events take shape as a dance of animacy.

Lending a hand : a phenomenological exploration of the act of drawing

2016

The hand is not a slave to the body …………….…. 4.4 Drawing as embodied experience: shaping the mind…………………………. 4.5 The making of a virtual sketch ………………………………………………….. 4.6 Conclusion to Chapter Four……………………………………………………....

Iconography of Hands in Renaissance Painting

Imafronte, 2021

El estilo de pintura renacentista refleja todo tipo de principios, enfoques y comprensión del diseño plástico como un carácter estándar de las características históricas, políticas, religiosas, culturales y económicas de esa época. Al deshacerse de un tipo de perspectiva estricta y puramente centrada en la iglesia, los artistas del Renacimiento prácticamente comienzan a mirar la naturaleza, la ciencia, la literatura, la filosofía y, obviamente, la anatomía humana en un conjunto de mentes diferente. Una descripción razonable, equilibrada, científica y lógica de la vida humana lleva a los pintores a centrarse más en las partes del cuerpo humano. Aparte de los rostros de las figuras, las manos se convierten en partes esenciales del cuerpo para sujetar un espejo al universo interior de las figuras. Se incluyeron dentro del programa iconográfico tal que reflejaban las emociones y contemplaciones de la figura, y la conexión entre figuras y objetos. En este estudio, un examen a través de v...

Fictional Illustration Language with Reference to M. C. Escher and Istvan Orosz Examples

Alternative approaches in illustration language have constantly been developing in terms of material and technical aspects. Illustration languages also differ in terms of semantics and form. Differences in formal expressions for increasing the effect of the subject on the audience lead to diversity in the illustrations. M. C. Escher's three-dimensional images to be perceived in a two-dimensional environment, together with mathematical and symmetry-oriented studies and the systematic formed by a numerical structure in its background, are associated with the notion of illustration in terms of fictional meaning. Istvan Orosz used the technique of anamorphosis and made it possible for people to see their perception abilities and visual perception sensitivities in different environments created by him. This study identifies new approaches and illustration languages based on the works of both artists, bringing an alternative proposition to illustration languages in terms of systematic sub-structure and fictional idea sketches.

On drawing

On drawing in general We can situate the origin of drawing in the process of human development and the early graphic activities related to neuromotor and perceptive developments of the species, activties and forms of behaviour at the source, among other modalities, of the various graphical forms of communication which "culminate", so to speak, historically in writing. Thus considered, drawing, that is, the graphic act, its procedures and results, is an important element of human intellectual and emotional life; it is both the source and the product of developments of perception, of manual ability, of symbolization, and of the interrelated capacities of cognition and expression in social life. This characterization is relevant for the understanding of drawing as an artistic discipline in our time, as the cultural context today, marked by technological development, transforms the disciplines, pressing their boundaries as it modifies our means of knowledge, communication and expression, relating and transforming in depth the "means of production" in general, and consequently our material and symbolic ways of life. On drawing as art Drawing is both form and discipline. The autonomous discipline (that is, drawing considered and appreciated by itself) is based on the form which is also an "infrastructural" elemen of several other disciplines such as painting, design, architecture, etc. In the comparison and distinction between, for example, drawing and painting, it has been said that drawing is what remains of painting when color is removed. An operation that emphasizes the ideal nature or ideal element characteristic of drawing-a more abstract element by contrast to the essential, unmediated sensuality of painting-and also discloses drawing as an initial moment, level or basic element of the visual creation of forms in the arts of spatial representation , including the arts of space-time experience such as dance, film, among others. Point → Line → Plane → Figure, the primary generative elements of spatial analysis and representation appear in drawing as "concrete abstractions" and characterize its essential functions of mediation in the process of mapping space-time relations, in processes of identification and projection, in the construction of the experience of self and of the world. If we remove the element of color from painting, what remains is the delimitation of forms by the essential, "primitive" contrast between light and shadow. In this way, drawing can be considered as the elementary or primary way of graphical organization of the relations between lights and darks generating the forms and the rhythms of spatial representation. As an autonomous or artistic form, drawing is also a "last" or final form, both synthetic and dynamic, that is, based on a relative economy of means, self-sufficient and, at the same time, implying a space of future developments as a generative form (the same consideration applies to the use of color in the drawing). Drawing is concomitantly and essentially, both complete and incomplete form and process, the embodiment of an essential tension between being and becoming. As synthesis and, at the same time, as the overcoming of form by form, drawing is art itself.

Visual Arts Review: M. C. Escher — Shapeshifter Extraordinaire

Drawn reflections and reflections on Drawing: the \u201canti-perspectives\u201d of abstractionists and figurativists at the VchuTeMas

2020

The essay investigates some aspects of the \u201canti-perspective\u201d \u2013 i.e. the drawing that tries to figure the intrinsic spaces of Things, to graphically translate them on the plane with effects of ambiguous, reversible, reflected spatiality, reversing the (topological) meaning of interior/exterior, centre/periphery, enclosed/enclosing \u2013 in the opposite formulations of the theme that coexisted in the framework of the Muscovite VchuTeMas. The difference between (Florenskij's) \u201cfigurative\u201d and (the constructivists') \u201cabstractionist\u201d anti-perspective is studied by means of a comparison between coeval drawings, emblematic of the two opposite aesthetics. On the one hand (the abstractionist one) it mainly concerns the graphic genre of the unfolded and reversed axonometry, developed through El Lissitzky's projects for the installations of the spatial Proun works, then spread as a visual theme in the abstractionist international in the 1920s an...

Drawn Reflections and Reflections on Drawing: the "Anti-perspectives" of Abstractionists and Figurativists at the VchuTeMas

Diségno - ISSN 2533-2899, 2020

The essay investigates some aspects of the "anti-perspective" - i.e. the drawing that tries to figure the intrinsic spaces of Things, to graphically translate them on the plane with effects of ambiguous, reversible, reflected spatiality, reversing the (topological) meaning of interior/exterior, centre/periphery, enclosed/enclosing - in the opposite formulations of the theme that coexisted in the framework of the Muscovite VchuTeMas. The difference between (Florenskij's) "figurative" and (the constructivists') "abstractionist" anti-perspective is studied by means of a comparison between coeval drawings, emblematic of the two opposite aesthetics. On the one hand (the abstractionist one) it mainly concerns the graphic genre of the unfolded and reversed axonometry, developed through El Lissitzky's projects for the installations of the spatial Proun works, then spread as a visual theme in the abstractionist international in the 1920s and in its subsequent American diaspora. On the other hand (the realist one) it deals with Florenskij's anti-perspective theory, as well as some examples that testify to it: the woodcut covers by Vladimir Favorskij (instructed by Florenskij) in which the techniques of reflection and inversion are highlighted. Translating the opposition between "abstractionists" vs. "figurativists" into the one between "palingenists vs. anachronists", we clarify the difference between the two opposite "anti-perspectives" as a difference between two models of visual signification: the first excludes the "figurative" and allegorical dimension on which the second is based.

From Sketches to Morphing: New Geometric Views on the Epistemological Role of Drawing

Springer eBooks, 2021

Geometry, in the modern sense of the term, is based on the study of transformations. The diversity of those transformations has recently been used to understand the diversity of spatio-temporal representations in the brain. I argue that this new association between geometry and neuroscience can also change the way we consider drawing. The role of transformations is thus evaluated here in three differing examples, all involving the drawing of living bodies: drawing from the nude, drawing a sequence of movements, and life sketching. This analysis indicates that "strokes", rather than "lines", play a fundamental role when drawing living beings. On this basis then, it is possible to put aside the classical approach to dealing with spatial representations through "central" or "linear" perspective, and to highlight alternative principles of spatial composition such as drawing "without a point of view". This attempt to connect drawing with modern geometry and neuroscience leads to a re-evaluation of the epistemological importance of digital animation tools, according to their geometrical premises. I will discuss in more detail the role of morphing-based animation, which is based primarily on texture transformations rather than virtual cameras. The development of such a complete approach to drawing, including all its static, moving and transformational aspects, will emerge as a vital step in addressing the new challenges raised by the representation of life in the twenty-first century.