ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 is about the connection between the drawing hand and thinking. In writing about drawing, artists, as well as art critics and art historians, use terms associated with the hand and the sense of touch: an artist’s handwriting, freehand drawing, gesture drawing, loosening up. While drawing, practitioners think through their hands in practices such as making drawing gestures in the air before their pen or pencil touches the paper and using an imagined sense of touch to understand what they see. I discuss Nicolaïdes’ “gesture drawing” exercise and how it facilitates spatial thinking and an embodied understanding of one’s subject. I discuss the relationship between hand and eye and how an understanding of one’s subject is informed by touch in practitioners’ use of drawing tools. The chapter concludes with a discussion of copying drawings as a way of learning from the hands of other artists.
