Saturday 20 October 2012

New Book: The Visual Language of Drawing


I also thought I'd mention that I've been reading the new book from the Art Students League this week: The Visual Language of Drawing. I'm most of the way through and have mixed feelings about it. It's written in such high Academic language that my poor, simple little brain implodes after just reading a few sentences. I will probably have to re-read it at some point. Most of it goes way over my head. I feel that if the idea of the book was to educate the general public on the various principles of drawing then it's a bit of a failure. Or maybe I'm just dumb. Possibly the latter.

There's some interesting ideas in it, for instance: never erasing a mistake before you've corrected it on the page but in general I can't really follow it. Amazing how in depth people look at Art? Maybe I'm not there yet, I doubt I ever will be, I just enjoy learning. When drawing starts getting Academic and teaching gets opinionated to the nth degree, I start to feel uneasy. But I think it's important to read everything you can about it. There are some people in this book that don't like Bridgeman. I do, though the smaller Dover books have terrible printing, he's helped me a lot.


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