Welcome -draw first, think later

Hi! Frances here, and welcome to my Year 2 course on drawing philosophies and practice. I've set up this space because I've written the course so that there are three weeks when I'm asking you to post your own short text with an analysis of a selected image, focussing on 3 different aspects of drawing practice today. For the first task, I'd like you to select one of your own recent drawings that you think is most successful -and explain why.

When you've completed all three tasks, you should have between 600-1500 words to use towards composing your final written assignment.

When I started to draw the sequence of images on this page, I had only one aim, which was to take pictures of the act of drawing, so I grabbed a marker pen in one hand and my camera in the other, and just started. --Just doing this has made me think about a few new things, and I hope that documenting, sharing and analysing your own image choices will also allow you to craft new thoughts and arguments about drawing.

So I realised two things: firstly that my sequence of marks followed theformal structural principles that John Matthews (1989) describes in his essay 'The genesis of aesthetic sensibility' when he talks about the marks made by very young kids: closure or closed shape; parallel or concentric grouping; and finally perpendicular attachment (when I add those sprouts coming off the central axis). So I am up to speed with the preschoolers in my visual armoury. The second thing I realised is that setting a self-documenting task (e.g. 'take pictures while drawing') can work, like this did simplistically as an experiment that reminded me of some of the literature on drawing. I hope that this is a method that we can work with here together on this blog site.