ABSTRACT
I have been inspired by an article by the art historian Norman Bryson (2003), written to accompany a major exhibition on the theme of drawing. In it, Bryson compares drawing with painting, or more specifically, with the western tradition of oil painting.1 One particular aspect of the comparison caught my attention. It starts with the painter or draughtsman poised at that inaugural moment when the hand is about to make its first trace on an initially blank surface. You might think this is a moment that drawing and painting have in common. But in reality, Bryson argues, the perceptions of blankness, and of the potentials it holds, are radically different in each case. The painter perceives a surface that has to be filled throughout its extent, an extent that is nevertheless bounded by the four sides of the frame. This frame exerts a kind of pressure that rebounds inwards on the composition in such a way that every element that is added – every trace of the brush – has to anticipate the totality of the complete picture of which it will eventually form a part. It is, in other words, subject to what Bryson (2003: 150-151) calls ‘the law of the all-over’. Drawing, by contrast, is not compelled to observe this law. Instead, although the blank surface of the paper is perceptually present, it does not have to be conceived as a surface, as an area that needs to be filled. It becomes rather a ‘reserve’, a kind of insurance against finality and closure.
