Draftsmanship

The art and craft of drawing.

That’s like saying beauty is what is beautiful.

What is draftsmanship and why should an artist care?

Draftsmanship is the underpinning of any composition; it is the structure behind the paint, the graphite, the clay. The Old Masters knew it, they spent years as apprentices, mixing their master’s paint, copying the art of earlier masters, learning the secrets and subtleties of shade and light. And boy does it show. Even the modern masters, who deconstructed the image and sought new ways of seeing, knew their draftsmanship. The light and color of Lautrec, the fractured grotesques of Klee and Picasso, the Pointillists and Cubists all of them could draft.

What’s the difference? I’m an abstract artist, more interested in form and color. The difference is that people have trouble seeing something they cannot identify. If they can’t find the form inside the image they just can’t see it.

So, there’s no image just colors and shapes. The thing has no form, it’s abstract.

Even the most wildly abstract images have form. Mondrian used hard geometrics as the basis of his images, Jackson Pollock’s splatter patterns have strong groupings of lines and colors, they have form.

And just in case your image does have some underlying form it has to be right. If the form is wrong then the piece fails. The most terrifying image an artist can make is a bad nude. It’s immediately apparent. The trouble is we all have seen a nude. (If only in the fogged bathroom mirror as we run from the shower to the dresser to get our drawers.) We know when it isn’t right.

Now add to that some bit of artistic license and you have an eye-catcher alright, but not the way you’d hoped. People will spend hours starring at your work, but not to understand the meaning, they want to know what the heck you covered up!

Building, motor vehicles, sports and even relaxed senics or Norman Rockwell vignettes, all have to be under-pinned by draftsmanship.

So the next time you skip the sketch and go straight to the color pots think before you splash, spatter, stroke, is it right? The eye knows.