A Theory of Narrative Drawing

Simon Grennan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137518446
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers an original new conception of visual story telling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, including: the relationships between vision, visualization and imagination; the theoretical remediation of linguistic and narratological concepts; the systematization of discourse; the production of the subject; idea and institution; and the significance of resources of the body in depiction, representation and narrative. It then tests this new conception in practice: two original visual demonstrations clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint. Thebook's originality derives from its clear articulation of a wide range of sources in proposing a conception of narrative drawing, and the extrapolation of this new conception in two new visual demonstrations.

© The Author(s) 2017

Simon GrennanA Theory of Narrative DrawingPalgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novelshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51844-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Drawing, Depicting and Imagining

Simon Grennan¹

(1)

University of Chester, Chester, United Kingdom

End Abstract

1.1 Drawing’s Devices

1.1.1 Causes and Consequences: An Aetiological Characterisation of Drawing

It is a commonplace of studies of drawing,¹ from practical manuals instructing in particular drawing traditions, through scholarly analyses, to identify early the focus of study—what drawing is—with types of technical activities and their histories. Even those studies that take an overwhelmingly theoretical approach, to undertake a ‘philosophical criticism of drawing,’ as Patrick Maynard describes his own study, largely concern themselves with the investigation of various types of technical production, or the ways in which different arrays of perceived effects, and the environmental and cognitive systems that support their production and perception, are evidenced in the material technologies of existing drawings.²

Consider, for example, the following sentence from Rudy de Reyna’s How to Draw What You See (which must count as one of the most utilised drawing manuals, not having been out of print since 1970), on drawing curved lines:

Again, hold the pencil (still the ordinary ‘office’ kind) in whichever position you prefer: the usual writing one, or ‘under the palm.’ Swing your arm from the elbow, and even from the shoulder,…If you hamper your rendering now by working from the wrist (…) the beautiful sweep of a fluid line will never be yours.³

Similarly, consider the following instruction from another drawing manual, Clare Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner:

To get the best results when applying your contour-drawing technique to three-dimensional objects (…) sustain long lines whenever possible (…) Project the shape of the line from start to finish on your paper so you get a brief feel for starting point and destination.⁴

Although quite different in intent, these instructions share an assumption about drawing with a theoretical comment by Maynard that he ‘will always consider appearances as various assemblages of effects, largely derived from environmental ones.’⁵ The assumption is this—that the draughtsperson selects from a number of possible technological actions productive of marks qualifying as drawn and that these possibilities are produced in two ways: as a selection from a range of devices—that is, technical activities—with particular properties in combination (as if from items on a menu, syntactically) or on the basis of the production of effects themselves, in which case, syntactics occurs in the relative array of the perceptual effects produced in each drawing, rather than in the relative array of properties that are chosen in combination.

Although they do not seek to emphatically define drawing, both Maynard’s, de Renya’s and Watson Garcia’s statements approach drawing as a group of activities technologically productive of perceptual effects, in which effects these activities—the activities of drawing––can be inferred. In this view, drawing reveals a fundamentally technical history from which it is possible for teachers and scholars alike to extrapolate and theorise the functions of similarities between drawings produced in many different circumstances and for many different reasons, generating a descriptive approach to thinking about drawing, in the majority as distinctions between forms and, in the minority, as types of actions intended to produce these distinctions.

Hence, the objects of these studies of drawing are the technical elements of formal arrays, identified through instances of repetition and considered as components, from the appearances of existing drawings, on the basis of the perceptual effects that they afford. For example, both instruction manuals and theoretical study identify ‘point,’ ‘line,’ ‘shape’ and ‘surface,’ among other, more complex topological combinations, as significant components in the array of effects perceived in existing drawings, on the basis of their comparative properties and the repeated appearances of their general topologies in a variety of circumstances.⁶

I think that the consideration of drawing as a technical activity, producing effects, following my examples from Maynard, de Renya and Watson Garcia, benefits from a little further analysis in its own terms. It suggests an aetiological characterisation in which the drawing studies of scholars who take an overall technical-activity approach overlook, such as Maynard, Philip Rawson and John Willats, for example.⁷ I use the word ‘aetiological’ here to encompass both the concept of ‘cause,’ which only concerns the relationship between an action and its antecedents, and the concept ‘teleology,’ which identifies actions by their observable tendencies, including both causes and consequences, following Wright.⁸

What has an aetiological characterisation of the activities of drawing to offer? It can simply:

1. a)
   describe technical activity relative to purpose and the inference of purpose, thus proposing that it is always oriented towards a future;
2. b)
   account for the occurrence of novel activities, which a model proposing a brute interdependence of technical activity and perceptual effect cannot;
3. c)
   offer a generative concept of failure as a definitive aspect of drawing activities;
4. d)
   offer a way of distinguishing phenomena from their antecedents and consequences, by explaining the relationships between them.

First, if I see a woman draw a mark across a piece of paper in order to make a drawing, I also see the reason for her drawing the mark. Since describing her activity as drawing suggests that she is making a mark in order to make a drawing, the description itself can be thought of as offering an explanation for her action—in order to make a drawing. If she is not drawing a mark, she cannot be trying to make a drawing. This relationship, in which a woman is undertaking an activity in order to try and achieve a goal, is central to aetiological characterisation. The relationship between goal and activity itself offers an explanation of both behaviour and phenomena. This relationship is not only causal, however. Trying to make a drawing has consequences as well as causes. In fact, the marking activities undertaken by a woman with the goal of making a drawing are undertaken precisely because they have consequences.

The woman’s activity of drawing a mark across a piece of paper can also be described non-aetiologically and, as such, can encompass a wide variety of types of technical action and topographical types of mark. Her actions can be seen as describing a particular type of gesticulation or creating and marking a particular type of pattern, group of paths or other set of topologies, body movements or groups of movements, or she might pause, motionless, mid-mark, tracing motionlessness.

Included in this type of non-aetiological description, I broadly recognise the approach to drawing taken by Maynard ‘et al.’ in which particular types of technical activity are understood to produce particular perceived effects. To summarise this non-aetiological description: commencing from an origin (a surface contacted with a marking tool), this type of description outlines a causal chain of events, which produce a result (a shape, a line or arrays of these) in any number of circumstances or, at least, in as many different circumstances as make it more likely an occurrence than not. In generalising and then categorising the types of marks that produce specific effects, the numerical instances of failure relative to the numerical instances of success are significant, in the sense that ‘in most cases’ a particular activity achieves a particular goal, if it is made in trying to reach that goal.⁹

It is easy to see from both the aetiological and non-aetiological characterisations of trying to make a drawing that identifying the precise function of an activity does not, itself, constitute an aetiological characterisation of an activity, or offer methods of analysis beyond the purely topological and formal in terms of the possible effectiveness of identified forms. On the other hand, describing activities aetiologically encompasses but is not restricted to, particular types of phenomena as end results. It is not a question of a woman utilising a specific pattern of activities (productive of a particular type of mark, for instance) in order to make a drawing that has a particular effect, because there are an infinite number of types of activities that can be directed towards a particular goal. Theoretically, the distinction between descriptive and nominal characterisations is also helpful here. Rather than descriptively deducing the roles of identified generalised components in causal chains, or possible ranges of activity (e.g. the goal of producing ‘this’ perceived contour is reached most frequently through the activity of drawing ‘that’ type of mark), aetiological characterisations are truly nominal in the sense that even very complicated activities, including drawing activities, are intersubjectively self-evidencing—immediately, I can see both the struggle towards a goal, trying to make a particular drawing, and the achievement or failure to achieve that goal, and this range of activities includes, but it not reducible to generalised topographical types of mark, for instance.

Second, because activities undertaken in order to make a drawing encompass a very broad range, including the range of types of topology of marks, an aetiological characterisation of a woman making a mark in order to make a drawing allows the spontaneous appearance of novel activities/objects (which I define as both unrecognised activities and marks and combinations of unrecognised activities and marks—those activities/marks that constitute new ways of trying to make a drawing). Novel objects are produced in trying to make a drawing. It is not a categorical requirement that they conform in any way to types of activities/marks made previously in other contexts, although, of course, they might. This is not to say that it is not possible or useful, in theory, to describe topographical types of marks that might be identified within categorical parameters in existing drawings in many instances, as Rawson does so comprehensively across a wide range of circumstances and historic periods. It is simply to establish that I cannot account for the appearance of novel activities/objects if I am approaching drawing activities, theoretically, as the task of recognising and combining components that institute specific perceptual effects.

The appearance of novel activities/objects, in this aetiological sense, also demonstrates how the products of goal-directed activities can immediately be ascribed the capacities for which they are produced. For example, a woman makes a new mark in order to (or trying to, or in the struggle to…) achieve a particular drawing. If the particular drawing is produced and her goal is reached, the new activity/mark immediately evidences the capacities for which it was made, even though the activity/mark is novel, and doesn’t belong to any category of activity previously seen to produce this effect.¹⁰

Third, mutually supporting the two theoretical possibilities above, an aetiological characterisation of goal-oriented activity encompasses rather than excludes activities that fail to achieve their goal. There are many ways in which an activity can fail to reach its goal, whilst still being goal-directed. A theoretical non-aetiological description of the activity of trying to make a drawing, on the other hand, seeks instances of congruence between types of marks identified in existing drawings. That is, it seeks to identify in drawings the shared properties of successful instances of goal reaching in the form of achieved perceptual effects. On this basis, marks that appear outside these topological-affective parameters are theoretically overlooked. They exist, on the page, but they are without status. Think of any drawing that you have seen and consider the role of every constitutive mark. A non-aetiological description of the drawing, including a description of the activity of making it, is unable to describe, let alone account for, the role of every mark. Only those marks that are identified as conforming in some degree to types of mark producing specific perceptual effects are susceptible to description.

In an aetiological categorisation, on the other hand, activities that fail are the majority of activities, and this includes drawing activities. Failure to make a drawing by marking a piece of paper structures both past and future activities, particularly past and future activities undertaken in order to make a drawing. Evidence for this is found everywhere. Failure to achieve a goal of a particular drawing through trying is often visible—think of the visible revisions made as over-drawn marks in, for example, Adam’s left leg, in the famous red chalk drawing by Michelangelo in the British Museum—and also embedded in the English word ‘draft,’ from the same etymological root as ‘draw.’¹¹ The word ‘draft,’ both verb and noun, now means a provisional activity in a series of activities, relative to the achievement of a final goal. The concept of revision itself evidences the aetiologically productive role of failure in goal-oriented activities. Failure produces revision as a constitutive type of goal-oriented activity.

But failure is not only of a ‘wrong move’ kind, either—the kind of mis-directed or unsuccessful activity requiring revision in order to achieve its goal. It is rare to undertake a mark-making activity that produces the desired goal as the result of a single goal-directed action, such as a drawing completed by making a single mark. Drawings made with a single successful action exist, but they only evidence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Drawing, Depicting and Imagining
• 2. Narrative
• 3. Drawing Demonstration One: Expounding Another’s Thought in the Style of That Thought
• 4. Drawing Demonstration Two: Time and Self-Observation
• Correction to: A Theory of Narrative Drawing
• Backmatter