Word: draftsman
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...restored in the wildernesses of the new world. No wonder Hicks looks so quaint in 1975. For 50 years since his "rediscovery," he has been thought to be the best of all American primitive painters whose works survive from the 19th century-not because he was a great instinctive draftsman like the Douanier Rousseau but because his whole way of imagining the world derives from a hope about human nature that is peculiarly and particularly American. If that view -along with the religious view that supported it-is now nearly as dead as the moon, it remains an aspiration that...
...Kooning is a traditional kind of draftsman, and his work with pencil or crayon always pursues an active, symbiotic relationship with his paintings. Drawing explores and refines but does not quite fix an inventory of shapes that eventually find their way onto the canvas. It is a way of keeping the choices open by profuse addition. Now this process of working from drawings into paintings was not much to the fore in abstract expressionism. For Pollock to do a preliminary sketch for one of his drip paintings would have subverted their aesthetic intent, since the web of form depended...
...them one on top of the other, study the composite drawing that appears on top, make a drawing from this, reverse it, tear it in half, and put it on top of still another drawing." What this show indicates most clearly about De Kooning's enormous output as draftsman is that he managed to synthesize the painstaking approach to drawing that he learned as an art student in Rotterdam with the demands of spontaneity, which, by temperament, he deeply felt. This brilliant resolution now seems to be one of the coupling points at which the continuity between past...
...paradoxes about De Kooning the draftsman is that his pencil, in movement, is always describing contour, even though the shapes one infers from the contours are rarely closed or fixed. His early pencil portrait drawings from 1940-41, done 15 years after he smuggled himself into America, are manifestly homages to Ingres-or, more precisely, to Ingres as filtered through Picasso. But that sense of exact and probing contour was not dissipated by De Kooning's progressive moves toward abstraction. Instead, it was reinforced. The line in Abstraction, circa 1945, knows exactly where it is going and what...
...between painting and drawing; line turns out to be equal to brush mark in its power to suggest density, friction, displacement, tactility and all the other signs by which we recognize the life of forms. It seems likely that in the future, De Kooning's originality as a draftsman will be seen to reside in his power to cross the bound aries of category and process: painting as drawing as painting...