ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the ontogenetic aspect of the origins of drawing and painting—in features basic to cognition and experience. It investigates how drawing and painting relate to physical and pictorial space and to the complexities of self-consciousness. In terms of overtly philosophical approaches, there a number of works in the analytic tradition that discuss pictorial representation, but none of them have a developed notion of the aesthetic, and only Richard Wollheim has focused on the properties of drawing and painting as unique artistic media in any extended way. Philip Rawson said that “there always lies at the bottom of every drawing an implied pattern of those movements through which it was created.” The term “material practice” is sometimes used as shorthand for viewing an activity in terms of the circumstances under which it was produced. The pictorial image involves a creative tension between the fact of its physical and made materiality and its way of projecting virtual space.
