Drawing is one of the most primal forms of art, which has sustained over centuries and still thrives in this fast paced era.
We live in a world where there is a bombardment of visuals, experiences, social media and networking, it is a relentless rainfall of information. Artists of the new age have now moved on , out of the canvas and into multi-dimensional spheres with performance and interactive installations , with gigantic on site earth installations to digital interactive organisms, with this expansion of possibilities comes an immense variety of art.
But one of the most important ingredient for one who is creating, be it a literary piece or an installation piece, is the ability to observe. The ability to observe is what creates a response within oneself, which later when combined with skill is able to transform into a piece of art. Observation has increasingly reduced with the new age dynamic, with ever changing vistas comes the threat of never having known anything well where everything increasingly becomes peripheral.
The people especially those from busy metropolitans and cosmopolitans are forever injected with information.
The natural progression of a child who is growing is to start drawing. It is one of the most innate forms of self-expression and an essential tool in visual culture, used to express, document and translate.
and to re connect with nature and our surroundings. Drawing is an interaction, an interaction with our subject, with one’s own thoughts, there is a lucidity to it and an incomparable honesty and spontaneity.
John Ruskin an English Art Critic said ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.’
Drawing can be a wonderful way of exploring the place we live in, the places we travel to and create visual memories.
Alain de Botton a Swiss Writer and Philosopher says “Whenever something looks interesting or beautiful, there’s a natural impulse to want to capture and preserve it – which means, in this day and age, that we’re likely to reach for our phones to take a picture” while commenting on the society’s decreasing interest in observation and increased interest in capturing something fleetingly.
John Ruskin, who wrote several instructive books on drawing between 1856-1860, points that art is just as essential as languages and arithmetic. “The art of drawing,” he writes, is of “more real importance to the human race than that of writing and should be taught to every child just as writing is.”
