Art & Perception

Drawing can be done directly on a painting surface, but working on paper, and then transferring has advantages. Most obvious is that one can make many drawings and then select the best to transfer to a clean white canvas or panel. Another advantage is that drawing allows for experimentation with picture dimensions, before committing to a particular painting surface.

To transfer a drawing, without enlarging or reducing the size, tracing paper is useful. Tracing paper goes back at least to the 14th century (Cennino Cennini describes three techniques for making it). After the drawing is traced to the paper, it can be transferred to the painting surface in different ways. One is to rub the back of the tracing paper with charcoal, position the paper on a white grounded panel, then go over the lines with a hard pencil or stylus. This is the original carbon paper. Another technique is to prick holes in the tracing paper and then use a pouncing bag with charcoal dust to bring the design onto the painting surface. This is better for canvases, because it does not require the strong local pressure of using a pencil or stylus. Furthermore, it is easy to make a transfer, wipe of the charcoal dust, and make another, to experiment with different positioning of the design on the canvas.

Once the drawing is transferred (either in charcoal lines or dots), it must be fixed, using black ink or paint. Once this is done, the charcoal can be removed, and the drawing developed further before underpainting.

For a painting that develops over several days, it is helpful to work with explicit painting layers. The first layer may be an underdrawing. Then comes an underpainting, and finally, an overpainting. I like to think of the underpainting as a base-rhythm in music, and the over-painting as a solo played over this.

Drawing or painting from photographs is inherently different from working from life, because when working from a photograph, the subject of the work is a static image. Studying images has always played an important role in art, although the images in the past were of course not photographs, but works by other artists. As Cennino Cennini recommended in the 14th century:

take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit.

The style and spirit of the artist to be copied is as important as the subject of the artwork itself. Cennino emphasizes this point by directing the student to study one master at a time:

For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man’s way today, and in the other’s tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right.

This idea of copying another artist’s work to study style is perhaps alien to our contemporary ideas of how an artist should develop. But the goal, development of a personal style, is something that all artists share:

If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted your any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.

How can we relate this approach of copying other artists to the practice of working from photographs? Dan Bodner said recently, “We cannot separate how we see from the way photography has informed our vision.” This seems consistent with Cennino’s writing. An artist who works continually from the photograph will, intentionally or not, acquire the “style and spirit” of the photograph. The camera thus becomes the artist’s master. Dan Bodner seems to have escaped this because he already developed a personal style before turning to photography as a source.

“I walked into my new studio and this was the view, these water towers – which are typically New York. I thought, ‘yeah I should do that.'”

In early 2005 Dan Bodner changed the focus of his artwork from the human figure (painted from life or imagination) to cityscape. At the same time he began to use digital photography to study his subjects and his own work.

Bodner often makes photographs under conditions that would be difficult to paint from life, like the night scene above, or snow storms. He is in particular interested in the effects of city lights on the sky. From a large number of photos he selects a sample which he studies by making pencil drawings.

The drawings are not direct copies, but interpretations that combine elements from more than one photo. After he finds the composition, Bodner makes small oil sketches to study color. Then he makes a large painting based on all of these elements. In the end, some paintings are similar to the original photographs, others diverge substantially from the source images.

Photographs are not only Bodner’s subjects, but a way to study his own work. He has found that by making a photograph of a painting, he can see it as though looking for the first time. As Bodner explains, “By making the photographs daily, I can get a distance from the work as I’m painting it.”

Photography is associated with all aspects of Dan Bodner’s cityscape artwork, a connection which he finds appropriate. Bodner explains:

I want to use photography as a source for my work because we cannot separate how we see from the way photography has informed our vision. I think photography allows painting to be what it is today.

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first part of this interview

The question, “Who made an artwork?” affects the way we judge that artwork. I argue that the question “How did the artist make it?” is of equal relevance. My point is that the focus on “Who was the artist?” is an example of a more general question: “How was the artwork made?”

“Who made it?”

Imagine it were proved that the Mona Lisa on display in the Louvre is a copy of da Vinci’s original. This would be major news. It would not change the work on display, but it would change the way we view it. The value of the picture would be greatly reduced (especially if the original came to light).

This imaginary example demonstrates the obvious, i.e., who made a particular artwork is a critical factor in how we look at the artwork and judge its value. Perhaps this should not be the way art is judged. But in the real world, the importance of authorship is an inescapable reality.

“How was it made?”

Imagine, in another example, that a set of genuine da Vinci drawings were found, studies for the Mona Lisa. Imagine these drawings demonstrated that the Mona Lisa is an imaginary portrait, with the face based on drawings of a fifteen year old boy. This would be major news. From a technical standpoint, it would not be shocking; indeed, it would fit with normal Florentine practice of using male models for female figures. But from an aesthetic standpoint, we would never look at the Mona Lisa the same way. Our appreciation of this painting might not be diminished, but it would inevitably be altered.

We do not so often focus on the question “How was an artwork made?” Part of the reason may be that it is difficult to find answers. But as the above example shows, the answer to this question could be no less important than for the question “Who made it?” The reason, I think, is that the questions are related. “Who made it?” is simply a specific version of “How was it made?”

This drawing is “one of Michelangelo’s most celebrated works in the British Museum,” in the words of curator Hugo Chapman. But did Michelangelo draw it?

To answer this question it helps to consider, is the drawing:

• similar to other works by Michelangelo?
• something that plausibly could have been made by someone else?

This figure drawing is different from other surviving drawings by Michelangelo, although it is clearly related to one of his lost masterpieces. But because of the unique history of that lost work, many copies were made by artists in the 16th century. The British Museum drawing is likely one of those copies.

Full-length version of this essay

When drawing, it is common that most of the drawing surface is left in its original state. In this way drawing is different from many forms of painting. Thus when drawing on paper, most of what is visible is the paper itself.

Also unlike many forms of painting, drawing is a place to play with initial ideas, first thoughts. To play with fragile ideas when sketching is to live in a world of imagination, but the physical paper that the artist uses is a necessary link to reality.

For these reasons, the type of paper that an artist uses can be of great importance, both for the final appearance of a drawing, and for how the artist develops his ideas.

If the paper does not look good, for some reason, it is more difficult to make an attractive finished drawing. For a painter, this in itself is not such a disaster, because he can use the information in the drawing to make a painting which will be attractive as a final product. The problem is that if the paper is not interesting to the artist, it can inhibit his initial creative work. This is particularly the case when drawing from imagination, when there is nothing else to look at except the paper (and what is in the mind, of course).

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find ready-made paper that is suitable. For this reason, the artist often can benefit by taking the matter into his own hands.

One traditional way to do this, described in detail by Cennino Cennini in th 14th century, is to paint, or “tint” papers using some form of water-based medium. As he explains, “you may make your tints inclined toward pink, or violet, or green; or bluish, or greenish gray, that is, drab colors; or flesh colored, or any way you please”.

Tinting paper is the fastest and least expensive ways to “make” paper. One begins with ready-made paper, but then makes it one’s own.

I have had a lot of good results with tinted paper. By changing a white sheet into a blue one, it becomes possible to draw or paint with both white and black, to develop both lights and shadows, and let the paper act as the middle tone. And a tinted sheet is interesting to look at because the tint is never perfectly even. In fact, every tinted sheet is a simple painting in its own right, before it is used for drawing.

However, tinting paper does not enable one to recreate many of handmade papers used in the past, which are special not only because of their color, but because of their texture.

Texture in a paper comes from a variety of factors. Texture can come from the mold on which the paper was formed. It can come from the felts used to transfer the paper from the mold. The texture is also modified by the way the paper is pressed and dried. In other words, the texture of a paper depends on all the steps by which it was transformed from wet pulp into dried sheet. And then we must not forget the nature of the pulp itself, because the way this was made, and the source of the pulp (wood or rags of different cloths, or other plant fibers) all have an impact on the final outcome. When we consider that there are so many factors that determine what a paper is like, and when we consider that nearly every factor is different for modern papers as compared to papers of, say, the Renaissance, it is hardly surprising that a person would become frustrated if they went to an art shop and said, “Please sell me paper similar to what Michelangelo used for his drawings.” To recreate Michelangelo’s papers would require recreating all aspects of the paper making process, from worn-out linen rags to pressed sheets. And exact nature of these steps is not known to us.

Why is the texture of a paper important? This topic will be dealt with in more detail in a forthcoming essay on drawing.

The short answer is that with every drawing medium (except perhaps pen and ink), the texture of the paper determines how the drawing material becomes distributed on the paper. That is to say, the paper has a great deal to say about what a drawing will look like. An artist, making the same hand motions, would produce two different types of pictures if he used two papers with different textures. Some of the most subtle effects of drawing depend on this factor, although it is something that cannot be reproduced well in photographs. Paper texture, and its effects on drawing, are best appreciated in person.

It is probably inevitable that someone interested in the drawing techniques of a master like Michelangelo would become a keen student of his papers. This because it is not possible to understand how Michelangelo’s drawings came to look the way they did without having access to paper of approximately the same characteristics.