Extended Drawing (EDAM) Week 1 : Surface Divides

 Week 1 of long anticipated 'Extended Drawing for Artists and Makers'   started with introductions to the  year long course but moved quickly to the first 3 week project with Amanda Knight ' Surface Divides'  . The main aim   was to communicate unseen environments using the act of drawing for speculative thinking, exploring illusory space.   

 In pairs, we were asked to describe (imaginatively!) what the interior  of various fruit and veg  might look like  and then draw that interior based  on your partners notes. 

As a botanist with 40+  years of experience  cutting up plants and  understanding of plant  structure and function   I found this extremely difficult ! How do you unknow  decades of knowledge? 

So it was just as well that  I was working from Sandy's playful and poetic  description ( I think he struggled with my rather prosaic description of the interior of the  radish! ) 

We were working  on A1 sheets of paper  with charcoal  to quickly build up  form  and marks - I enjoyed depicting  the velvety skin (' puppy-like' )  and the 'small hard seeds  dispersed like currants'  when I knew that they were dates  with a single stone !

 We were  then asked to draw a section as cutaway ( like old medical drawings) showing both exterior and interior at the same time  ( above)  before imagining an environment   of leaves etc . filling in the background ( below) 

After lunch , we got to cut open our  specimens and draw the actual interiors  using a variety of  media and techniques. I started off by applying  ink to the cut surface of the radish I'd described  for Sandy and then using it to make prints . If you zoom in , you can see the vascular  bundles in the thickened tap root  but it's very subtle ! 

I then cut open  some dates, drawing the fine fibres that surround the stone  contrasting with the thicker more solid skin.

I then played around  with taking rubbings of a torn paper edge  to represent the soft  velvety texture of the skin

Other people had more exciting material to work with, I loved the textures of the ' bitter  melon ' Momordica charantia   and worked with soft graphite contrasting with an overlay on tracing paper using a fine pen .

We stuck our very varied drawings on the wall   but didn't have much time to look at them ( particularly as I had to rush off for the train).  We were also introduced  to various   artists , looking at the pre-renaissance medical drawings of Avicenna , Aristotle  and Galen  and how graphic annotation had been used in illustration  by Leonardo  da Vinci to expand the level of information in a drawing  ( and using it as an element in it's own right to enhance the composition) 

The use of paper flaps and foldouts  for medical drawings  was also  looked at . 

 I  missed week 2  as I was in Puglia  on course 'Mapping a Sense of Place'  with Matthew Harris , but Amanda  has sent me the handout on constructing a personal folly   based on James Wyld's Great Globe'  and the paper architecture of Brodsky and Utkin 

I'm looking forward to what  tomorrow's  session brings !