ABSTRACT
Building on the idea in the previous chapter of the artist as model, we examine in more detail the potential power of movement in image-making, responding to the artist’s own body in motion and capturing changes in the external environment. Games will explore how speed, energy, pace, and patience affect the drawing process, and ways of alternating our physical state to produce different kinds of images. We extend our understanding of mimetic performance and our perception of animals by comparing drawing and drama with hunting. Using anecdotes from physical theatre performers and exercises developed by Lecoq and Butoh dance, the reader will consider ways to react, capture, and identify with nonhuman actors. Anthropological accounts of drawing with ephemeral materials and making transient images, including Howard Morphy’s description of Yolngu shark painting, will accompany the exercises. This situates image-making as a social and spiritual process.
