The drawing attitude Alison Carlier transcriptions of conversations with five artists during may and june 2013

Cover photo Reg Carlier 2

The drawing attitude Alison Carlier

transcriptions of conversations with five artists during may and june 2013 3

Stephen Farthing transcription 16/05/2013 1hour 7 minutes AC; You’re probably aware of this book What is Drawing? that is based around the residencies at Wimbledon in 2002... SF; It doesn’t tell you what drawing is does it? AC; No, (laughing) how could it? SF; Well it could but it doesn’t even try. I think it’s a great failure, that book, and not in a mischievous way...I would say that book What is Drawing? doesn’t even attempt to answer the question...I bought it and I think its sold under false pretences. It doesn’t even try to answer the question. AC; It’s interesting you should say that because I’ve picked up on something that Michael Ginsborg mentions in that book with an interview with Lucy Gunning, which I don’t think has been developed....that is that he talks about a drawing attitude and that her work embodies a drawing attitude...‘there might be very few drawings in my sense of the word in the show but the whole show embodies an attitude which is a drawing attitude’. SF; What ever that means. AC; What ever that means SF; You’ll have to ask her. AC; And him. But I’d like to ask you as well. SF; I’ve no idea what it means. I have no idea what a drawing attitude is. It depends what is drawing. You tell me what drawing is, you might be able to deduce what a drawing attitude is, but until you answer the first question, you can’t answer the second. AC; You know Vasari, in the sixteenth century, with his term disegno, that means drawing or design. But what it refers to is the concept or the process of creativity going on in that person’s mind 4

and the output. So it’s the input and the output, but it’s combined. They’re inseparable. And I think now, we see those two things as more distinct. What goes on in the mind, before making the work and the work itself. SF; They’re different, they’re not one and the same. AC; Well they’re separated. Whereas I think then Vasari was saying that they were interlinked. And I think that we could learn something from that because now there’s a wealth in looking at how drawing comes about, because you can’t just consider drawing on its own before what goes on before. The preamble before that goes on in the artists mind. SF; I don’t know what evidence there is for them being separated. I would view Vasari’s analysis as being very similar to most serious modern thinkers about drawing. Do you know anybody who has actually said they are separate? Presumably its instinctual with you? AC; Well this is partly why I wanted to ask you all you people to get some information about it because its a subject that is quite ephemeral, there’s not a lot on it, because its difficult to pin it down in the first place. SF; That’s quite a good starting point to thinking about drawing I suppose. Is that is it part of a thought process? Or is it part of a manufacturing process? Or is it simply a way of making concrete ideas? So the ideas form in your head and then you plant them on the page. So it becomes like speech. AC; Well exactly, that’s where I came from, looking at hand writing and drawing and their similarities, their differences. In terms of holding a pen or a pencil, in terms of what you might be putting down, your initial thoughts. Even things like child development, how they develop along side each other. There are all sorts of parallels. But then if you go back, trace that back, what became more interesting to me after that, is what’s that bit leading up to that mark? The decision to make that mark? What’s the attitude that you have in advance of making that mark? So I suppose my first question; Anthony Gormley says for him drawing is a form of thinking, so what differentiates drawing for you 5

from other art forms in terms of thought processes? Or that kind of preparatory thought? Is there a difference? SF; Well I think that, you see, I think what I am doing when I draw is speculating over the appearance of something, the visual appearance of something, because you are definitely giving a visual form to something that if it’s coming from an idea previously doesn’t have a true form. But also there’s another reason for drawing which is to explain things to other people. And I use both forms. As far as I’m concerned they’re distinct. AC; Both forms of? SF; Drawing. One is to give visual presence to something that I am thinking about or have seen and want to remember. Or have imagined and want to play with. So that’s the making records and speculative side. AC; That is the visual output of your goings on in your brain? SF; Yes I’m responding to neural activity and visual presences of things that I can see. And a combination of the two. But then there is another one, which is entirely about communication. Which is I draw to communicate ideas, concepts, things, appearances to other people. AC; Is that different from the first one? SF; Totally different. AC; Why? SF; Well because with the first one I’m recording for my own benefit. AC; You’re not thinking that will be ever seen by any body necessarily? SF; Well because I work as an artist, I ultimately do know that it will all be seen unless I destroy it. If not during my life time. After my life time. Because people will probably not throw everything I’ve done away. Once I’ve said that might be useful, I’ll keep it, I’m acknowledging an audience. But no, the other sort of drawing is when I’m trying to explain something to somebody else. I am aware of an audience and at that point you become aware of the need to 6

articulate things clearly, the need for drawings not to be ambiguous, the need for them to be legible, and sharable and in a way you need to deploy ways of drawing that other people will get. Whereas I can use a short hand to myself. AC; And why wouldn’t you choose another art form? Why are you using drawing for that? SF; Always because of its speed , low cost. If I’m not sure if something is worth making a painting of, I’ll draw it. AC; Speed is interesting. SF; Well you know one of the great things about the spoken word is you can get it out fast. And that is why I think drawing is not unlike the spoken word. And painting is more like the written word, in that it tends to be more crafted and correct. I suppose the demonstration of something like that is in Chinese and Japanese and Korean visual arts there is less difference between the writing and the image, than there is in Western arts. It’s partly because it’s done with a brush which is faster and it’s done with ink which is wetter than the ink that comes off the nib of a pen. So there is a kind of speed of execution. There isn’t such a strong divide between writing and painting. That could apply to Arabic as well, where the text can be used pictorially much more easily than our text. So I don’t think what I’m going to say applies that well to Oriental and Eastern work, but I think it does apply to Western concepts of writing and images. We tend now not to do very much a la prima writing, with a pen, we tend to work on a key board, we tend to cut and paste, edit and produce a kind of baggy prose as a result, where everything is always being moved around and corrected and changed. There is no manuscript with a beautiful hand moving across it, which is more like the Oriental process. And we’ve gone for this cut and paste thing, which is much more like the way people paint, in the West. You change things, you move things, and I suppose that’s really the difference between Giotto and Rembrandt. With Giotto you start with disegno which is drawing, and you colour it in. Whereas with oil painting, which I suppose starts with Titian, you have this ability to model it. So I think as soon as you start modelling, you move away from drawing, or the purest forms of drawing. So I would choose to think about drawing as a fast medium. 7

AC: So it’s fast. And it gets it out before you have to do too much action. SF; It’s labour light. And it’s very very cost effective. And very easily sharable. You don’t have to get a truck to take it to the exhibition. AC; I think what I’m referring to here is more to do with the sketch. Than the laboured, Protestant work ethic type work, where you are laboriously going over it. I’m more interested in the sketch, the primal, quick, get it down on paper and how it aligns itself with writing in that way. SF; So the thought process is very similar in drawing to writing. AC; Yes. SF; Or it should be, if you’re literate in it. AC; What do you mean by that? SF; Well some find it extremely difficult to write, and some people find it extremely difficult to draw. If you’re fully literate, you will find them equally easy to execute. AC; And would you go for either/or? Because I know some of your work has writing on it doesn’t it? SF; Yes. I think they’re interchangeable. As a lot of Renaissance drawing demonstrates that when you can’t write it you draw it, and when you can’t draw it you write it. AC; Do you ever consciously make a decision whether it’s gong to come out as writing or drawing? SF; No because you just look at it. You look at it and you think ‘I can’t draw that’, so you write ‘this will be dark green’, because you’re working with a black pen. And you can’t draw green with a black pen. You can write it though. And then you can write ‘needs more detail’ because you’ve done it too small to get the detail in. So these are pragmatic responses to what is happening in the drawing. AC; So, what do you think about this business of drawing being about the beginnings of things? Because that’s another thing that 8

Ginsborg says about Lucy Gunning, is that drawing is well known for being about the beginnings of things. But why do you think it is associated with the beginnings of things? SF; Because with painting, sculpture and a large amount of film making, you’re producing skins, you’re fleshing out the model. Er..drawing is skeletal. AC; And you mentioned film making. Do you think drawing has a parallel with film making? SF; No I think that photography is part of drawing. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s a quick way of getting down images. Um, it’s a modern sketchbook, that doesn’t require much skill to use. AC; You see this is this business of this Lucy Gunning residency, is that a lot of her work were photographs. And that’s what he’s referring to, he’s saying they’re not actual drawings in the traditional sense. And that’s what I’m interested in, with a drawing attitude, the output doesn’t necessarily have to be works on paper. SF; I think attitude is a weird word. Well attitude implies some sort of emotional stance; a bad attitude or a good attitude. It’s a very subjective, weird word. It doesn’t mean much to me. AC; What do you think would be a better word then? SF; Um, well I think you’re on the trail of it when you say about early stages. You see I think drawing is a skeletal activity, it’s not a fleshing out activity. And when it becomes that,I think it becomes a different kind of activity. So I think drawing is essentially a mapping out process. AC; So if we had a different word other than attitude, if we had something like ‘drawing preliminary stage...’ SF; You see the reason why that sentence doesn’t help me at all, is it doesn’t tell me what drawing is. So if somebody says to me ‘drawing’ my response is well ‘what kind of drawing?’ And until the’ve told me what kind of drawing it is, it’s very difficult to tell what kind of attitude you’re going to have to it. So if we stuck with the word attitude, I think that someone who draws maps, has to, by definition have a different attitude to drawing that somebody who is trying to 9

draw their emotions, or their emotional responses. Because the drawing of maps involves measurement, of some sort or another, even if it’s only estimated measurement; a real map is accurate. A pictorial map can give you the idea of what a place is like. So I think if you look at another kind of drawing, lets say drawing diagrams, the whole point of them is that they’re accurate. So the attitude of the person has to be to do with accuracy, precision and clarity. AC; It’s different from this business of the sketch isn’t it? SF; The point of doing it is to communicate information. So you see the trouble is, with that book, is that it works with the assumption that drawing is all about art schools and artists, and it’s not. And that assumption weakens everything from then on because really the introduction should say that the drawings that are made by artists within art schools represent very small amount of what is drawing. So when I use the word drawing I am using it in the context of an art history that will take us from the Renaissance through to the present day. You see I don’t think what going on in that book has much to do with Renaissance drawing. I think what it’s got to do with actually is late 20th Century drawing. So then I think Gormley draws in a very different way to Lucy Gunning, and that Lucien Freud, who was doing drawings at the same time, did drawing that had very little to do with anybody in that book. AC; So this (the book) is asking what can be considered drawing? Can we allow this that and the other to be drawing? And my interest isn’t really that, I accept that lots of things can be drawing, but what interests me is that pre...the leading up to the mark. What’s different about making a drawing in the advance of a mark? That’s where I think drawing is special, there are characteristics about drawing that I think are different from say some other art forms. There are quintessential characteristics to drawing...and I don’t know what they are. SF; That I suspect , is what you have to work out. I don’t think anyone can tell you. I can give you all sorts of clues about what drawing is, but I haven’t formulated what I would see as a satisfactory final definition. And I’m well on the way to it. AC; Drawing is a subject that is going over here, and that’s fine, but I can see from your perspective you probably would like to 10

have..because of the depth you go into, you probably need some sort of definition. SF; Absolutely. AC; You’ll be lost. SF; Because otherwise it’s impossible for me to have this conversation, if I don’t know what drawing is, I would be wasting my time, and I’ve got a jolly good idea as to what it is. But I haven’t nailed it, as they say, and the reason for that, is that there is no reason for me to. I follow different trails. I exclude the possibility that there is such a thing as three dimensional drawing. AC; I can see how that’s helpful to you, but it might not be helpful to me. SF; All you have to do when you write a book like that is say when I mean drawing I mean that. And then we’re all on the same playing field, we can all progress together. People make al sorts of assumptions. It’s like talking about God. Or talking about the spirit. So in terms of thinking about a drawing attitude, one, we don’t know what drawing is, in their terms, and it renders the word ‘attitude’ useless because we don’t know what kind of drawing they’re taking about. I would argue that there are many different attitude towards drawing. AC; So what about you? What do you think about drawing attitude? I kind of want a better word now but I can’t think what that might be. Is there mileage in it? SF; No I don’t think there is. I think to try and understand better what drawing is, you’re better off thinking about why people do it, not the way they do it. The attitude is about the way people do it; a careful attitude...he draws to demonstrate how well he can imitate nature, he draws to try and discover new things. AC; You’ve hit on something with the word attitude, in that it’s probably not the right word because it has emotive connotations, and it would be better to choose a word that didn’t have emotional connotations, because I’m not really interested in the emotional side of it. 11

SF; It’s setting up this 19th Century idea that it’s somehow romantic to be an artist. And they have a set of more finely tuned emotions than anybody else. Can you apply that to Leonardo? No. Because all of his real exploratory work is in mathematics, science and engineering. And that’s got nothing to do with being an artist, it’s to do with creative thought. AC; Leonardo said part of a process that is constantly going on in the artists mind, instead of fixing the flow in the artists imagination, it keeps it in flux, that’s what he understood drawing to be. That’s nothing to do with emotion. SF: No it’s a strategy for handling information, which is keeping it in flux. AC; Which is what interests me, it’s that bit...it’s the fact that the stream of ideas is this constant thing, and the drawing is just little points along that, but it’s a continuation of thought. SF; But in the end though, Leonardo doesn’t want to keep everything in flux, because when he comes round to building his water pump, it’s a precise reading of that drawing that enables the machine to work. Even then if we’re mistaking one kind of drawing for another, this is when I would go back to a taxonomy, which is that a sketch is not the same as a technical drawing. And a technical drawing is not the same as a map. And a map is not the same as a tracing. And that it is a complete lack of readily available vocabulary to most people. The old argument is that the Eskimos have got twenty two words for snow, and we’ve only got one or two, and a Swedish Ski Instructor has got twelve words for it. And it is a matter of how deep you dig in. And so if you apply that, you’d say the problem with most people talking about drawing is they only have superficial understanding of it, and they don’t have the kind of in depth understanding that a Ski Instructor would have of snow. AC; So in fact someone like you should have about twenty words for drawing? SF; That’s why I can say that’s not a map it’s a tracing, and that isn’t a technical drawing it’s a diagram. They’re all drawing, but there are types of drawing within it and it’s very important to know what you’re looking at. Would you want to know whether it’s estimated, whether it’s hand drawn, whether it is supposed to remain in flux of 12

whether it is a definitive image. Whether there is any scope for reading it in different ways...a wiring diagram for a battleship is fixed, or an aeroplane. One of those things in the wrong place, and it crashes. AC; You see I think this is all about the sketch. It’s all about the spontaneity of the sketch. But the sketch could manifest as a series of photographs...but it’s not about drawing per se in terms architecture or... SF; So in that case, we go back to the beginning and pretend we’ve not said any of this. You say to me ‘I’m only interested in one kind of drawing, it’s the sketch, and can you talk to me about that?’ And that’s the mistake that perhaps that book makes in it’s title. You know ‘What is Drawing? What is Sketching?’ AC; Yes. I can see they’re not really considering all the other types of drawing... SF; Yes and if you can imagine that this problem is compounded all the way through your primary, secondary, tertiary education. And there you are doing a masters degree and still arguing about what drawing is. It should have been ironed out when you were ten years old. It wasn’t ironed out for me, I can assure you. It wasn’t ironed out for me after St Martin’s, The Royal College, The British School of Rome. It was ironed out for me when I got to the age of about fifty and started thinking seriously about what a drawing was. AC; But don’t you think that’s what’s lovely about it, that it’s not ironed out? I don’t want it to be ironed out. SF; I mean it’s fun...but it’s not very useful if you’re trying to educate kids. AC; You see these questions I’m asking..how on earth is this going to be of use to the wider society? And I think in terms of learning, it could be because if you trace things back to how you arrive at a point of making a mark, whether it’s a written mark or a drawn mark, if you can think about that pre-stage, and what is characteristic about that pre-stage, and if you can be in that stage, or train someone how to be in that stage, then you can get a better outcome. 13

SF; What you’re beginning to identify is not a need for art classes in schools, or even drawing classes in schools. What you’re identifying, and it would be better if students did come with this skill, is that there should be a GCSE in the creative organisation and handling of information. And part of the curriculum would be sketching. And another part of the curriculum would be IT and handling databases. Because what you’re talking about actually is how you can support creative thinking. And you can support it through sketching, you can support it through using photography. AC; Like you said about literacy. So it’s literacy, but in a wider sense. It’s not just about writing. It’s literacy in drawing. SF; And the other part of the curriculum is about how you communicate this stuff. Because there’s no point in being creative if you can’t. It is a subject that is embedded within every subject. I would say that rather than teaching people to draw, or teaching people about art. You could have a distinct subject about the creative handling and communication of information..... I heard a very interesting thing at a conference, they said when we speak it is when we have an information overload in our head, and I think that we draw for the same reason. The example is that you’re sitting in a class and somebody says something that really irritates you, you need to speak. You don’t just want to speak, you get that...you put your hand up, because you need to say something, and that is because there is an idea buzzing around in your head. I think that a lot of very good drawings come about for that reason. People are downloading of information. AC; Almost like a direct schhh (makes noise) from your brain. SF; Yes it’s a cerebral download. You see I think that’s the type of drawing they’re talking about there. If you can do it by taking a photograph. You see an image and you just bung it on the photocopier or you scan it. You cut it out. That’s why a scrap book is a drawing because it’s a collation of information collected in the normal round of your life. AC; And that’s what makes them so interesting and alive? SF; Yes. 14

AC; They’re like sketchbooks aren’t they because they’re full of all that immediate stuff. SF; Yes if you read, like I happen to have done, examiner’s reports on sketchbooks, they’re very critical of them because they say they’re done for the examiner and not themselves. So they’re done as display books; evidence of learning rather than evidence of personal discovery. So it only really functions if it is the free will of the person, and it is firing up their creativity. AC; That’s where free will and the sketch are like brother and sister. Free will and architecture don’t go together do they? Or graphic design? SF; I think very often what people enjoy about drawing is those first sketches. There are some very famous first sketches, like the London Underground map. That’s wonderful. You know Harry Beck has talked about it and said ‘I started drawing a red line through the middle of the page which was the Central Line. And you think ‘yes why not start there?’ He didn’t start with the Circle Line. Or start at Morden and work his way up the Northern Line. He drew a line through the middle. And you get this idea of how his mind worked.

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Harry Beck (V & A Museum) 1931

And there is the first drawing of Crystal Palace that Paxton did, and it was done on a piece of blotting paper at a meeting with the Northwest Railway board in Manchester or something. And he was a judge on the competition and they didn’t like any of the things sent in, so he had to make it himself and he drew out the metal statues that would become the Crystal Palace, and that is the first sketch, and those are the things I think we all find irresistible, and it is like the first kiss. The moment of creation.

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Joseph Paxton (V & A Museum) 1850

AC; Like the Rembrandt with the little child walking. SF; Yes that’s a beautiful drawing. They are moments of creation. And I think those moments bring with them their own aesthetic, they’re not an implanted aesthetic that you get with presentation work or completed public work. And it’s interesting that we recognise the beauty and excitement of creation. AC; So do you know about the state of mind ‘flow’? SF; No. AC; Well you know when you’re drawing and you get that...you loose track of time and you and you don’t even realise where you are, and you’re not hungry, you are just so in it? 17

SF; Yes. engaged. AC; Fully engaged. Well that’s the state of ‘flow’. So I think for me, drawing has that. Flow is something you can achieve with drawing in particular. As opposed to maybe another art form. SF; Yes and there’s good reason for that. There was a person, who used to run Wimbledon called Anita Taylor, she’s written good stuff on drawing. I had a great argument with her once, in that she draws standing at an easel with charcoal. And I said ‘it’s not drawing it’s painting.’ And the argument is is that if you are stepping back and looking at what you’re doing you’re making aesthetic decisions. That isn’t drawing, that’s painting. That is modifying something because of what something might look like when you get it on the wall. So you’re actually doing drawing to hang on a wall, as that’s why you would stand at an easel and stand back like that. If you were fully engaged and had flow, you never stand back, you are 14” from the drawing, you’re probably siting down, the paper’s probably on a table. And you are working actually rather like a machine. Where the eye is driving the hand and it doesn’t stop, it pauses to re-calibrate and know where it is but it does not allow you to stand up and step back. AC; So there’s no kind of objectivity about it? No analysis? SF; And there is no audience to take into account. I think maybe a very interesting way of separating drawing is whether they were intended for an audience or not intended for an audience. You’ll never find the truth of it because people lie...I think the motive for the drawing is very important, much more important than the attitude. So I think if you’re going to get into what sketching is, I think you’re doing it for yourself. It seems to me that’s a bit personal. What you’re looking for in a good sketcher is really somebody who has blocked out the rest of the world, that they are working in an extremely blinkered way, where the idea and the image become confused between the two. AC; The looking is much more important that the action. It’s the reading that’s important. SF; I’ll give you an example of full engagement. I have spent quite a lot of time working in museum print rooms, drawing from real drawings. I will go and look at a set of drawings by John Ruskin in 18

the Ashmolean. And you have a little wooden easel in front of you. And I have a pad of paper, and I will sit and draw it. And the idea is is that I’m doing it to get to know that drawing, to see how it’s made. The first thing is, you can learn a fantastic amount about drawing by doing that, in fact the more you engage with drawing the easier it becomes to understand it. Now a weird and strange phenomenon is, that every now and then, in this process, my blood runs cold, because I think I’ve drawn on the actual drawing and not on my own drawing. Because I’ve confused the two surfaces in my mind. I can’t tell one from the other. And it’s not that mine looks so much like that. It’s happened to me about four or five times. I think at that point you are so engaged with what you’re drawing. Now that wouldn’t happen in the landscape because you’re doing a translation process that’s not so similar. But when you’re looking at sheets of paper... AC; You are going to think I’m mad for saying this but when I’m shelling broad beans for instance, the shells go over here, the beans go over here, and then all of a sudden, I start putting them in the wrong pot! SF; Exactly, it’s because you’re doing it on the remote. And you stop and think ‘is my remote working? AC; Yes and it isn’t. SF; So I would think that that could be evidence that you can become so involved that you loose yourself. You are lost in your thoughts. That is a very fine point, and you would say that most drawings are probably not so lost in their thoughts that they are like that. But I would say that there is very little between the idea and the hand drawing (as in the Rembrandt of the little child walking), or in Leonardo’s Deluge drawings. AC; So that’s because they’re both sketches. There both some hotline from a creative centre... SF; And it is to do with this immediacy and need to get it down...sketching is problematic because people don’t know what it is. It’s associated with amateur drawing...that’s what 19th Century ladies did. On hillsides, with parasols over them. Architects use the term all the time for ideas around mapping out a building, sketching 19

is a very important word to them. It’s handmade, it means early ideas... What you’re looking at is making concrete ideas and images but then we’ve got to think about the cerebral consequences of what you’re talking about, which are that it’s about intense concentration and exclusion of surrounding thoughts. So it’s about focus. So one of the interesting things is how those representations are your own handwriting, or done within a convention. You see I think that the kind of drawing we’re talking about here is very associated with handwriting. AC; Yes. Well that’s my initial interest. SF; You see I don’t think I can do an intense engagement with drawing using a Renaissance style because then I’m acting. So it has to be using a personal shorthand, or a personal writing style or drawing style. And I don’t know how we define that, we call it handwriting don’t we? But people learn at school to do a particular kind of writing in italic..you know French school kids’ handwriting is very different from English school kids’ handwriting. It is that when you get this direct engagement between what you you’re looking at, and what you feel compelled to put down, you hand, in a way moves in an involuntary way and becomes hard wired to your vision or imagination. AC; And you think that that applies as much to hand-writing as much as it does to drawing? SF; Well, in the days when they used to hand write your name infront of a passport, in turquoise ink..I always wondered if they wrote like that normally or they just wrote like that in passports. But you see when Rembrandt draws, you’re looking at his handwriting really. AC; You think? What do you mean the quickness of the mark? Do you mean the pressure of the mark? SF; If you look at Van Gogh’s letters, to his brother, they have drawings and writing in, you’ll find that his handwriting isn’t very consistent, and you’ll find that his handwriting, will tend to look a bit like the style of drawing on that page. And that some pages are big and loopy and others are smaller and tighter, and some are elegant 20

and some are rather scratchy. I imagine it’s tied up with his emotional state at the time and what he’s after...is he after money? If you look at artist’s sketchbooks where they are writing and drawing it’s very interesting to look at the relationship between the way they draw and the way they write. AC; I think that’s like a foundation for what this is all about, for me. SF; I think there might be something in looking at the relationship between sketching and writing, handwriting. You see, people don’t do much handwriting now. A friend of mine said to me, if I write a condolence card now, he said, I write it on my computer, print it out, then I copy it in handwriting. He can’t think inventively about the arrangement of language with a pen. We’re getting the end of using handwriting...kids want practice writing lessons so that they can do their exams, and their hands get tired, and they’re not used to writing. So looking at this idea of sketching, is becoming the end of an era, where really the camera does most of what people want and people seldom pick up a pen to write. So the flux there was between writing and drawing in my life, is drawing to an end. So it’s very different with say, twenty year olds now, and talk to them about the relationship between writing and drawing, because there isn’t any. AC; I think this study of sketching and handwriting and what what we’re thinking about with this sketching state of mind. They’re like volume one and volume two. They’re the same almost. I can’t really do one without the other. I need to go away and look at these artists sketchbooks...and think about what a sketch is. SF; It’s becoming a historical study, not a contemporary thing, because you’re looking now at a generation of people going through art schools who don’t hand write much. AC; I do it all the time. But I’m old. SF; You just missed the internet. If you went to school after 1995, you had internet, texting. So you’re the very last generation of people to have this experience first hand, so it’s interesting for you to explore it. This is a skill you’ll carry with you to the grave. And it’s a skill that you’ll either decide personally that we can all do without or it really needs to be invigorated. And I think that the jury’s out on that at the moment. And that’s why I say, well the whole art thing is a bit 21

of a waste of time, in what we’re talking about and that it’s much more interesting looking at whether writing and drawing might be almost one and the same thing. And that writing and drawing are key parts of literacy, and need to be seen as key parts of literacy and lets think about it in terms of communication and a generation of creative thought. Let’s forget about the word art, because all it does is takes you back to Rembrandt. People are interested whether young kids can see the difference between writing and drawing, do they know when they’re writing , do they know when they’re drawing? And then there’s the interchangeability between the two. But I can’t find anything much on the relationship between creativity and being able to manually, rapidly output ideas as two-dimensional images, which includes both writing and drawing. So my definition of drawing is that it is very much like a definition of writing, that it is the translation of multi-dimensional information into readable, two-dimensional matter. AC; I’m less interested in the illusory side of drawing, but more the communicating side of drawing. And that’s where it ties in with writing more. SF; Well that’s a very smart way of looking at drawing today because in a way typed text can be seen as part of drawing but only if you’re willing to embrace photography as part of it. It’s important. It could be enormous in that the impact would be in curriculum design and pedagogy and one of the great interests in pedagogy now is how do you enhance creativity? Creative thinking? How do you enable people to become more creative and express themselves more clearly and more usefully? I don’t think the old idea of having art classes is the answer to it. You’ve got to reckon that they’ll have an i-phone, a biro, sheets of paper, and a computer. And how to you use that and define it in terms of drawing? AC; You know that school in Italy where they learn every subject through drawing? So they do history and geography through drawing. And wouldn’t it be great not to say ‘write it down,’ but ‘draw it down’, so we conceptualise in a completely different way. Which is much more far reaching..writing is quite limiting. Isn’t it? There are confines to writing. Whereas drawing is boundless, more.

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SF; Yep. And it isn’t difficult to teach people to draw. If you dump the idea of them having to be an artist. It is interesting because it has never been a vested interest of art schools to dump the idea of art, but I think we maybe should, and we should think about it in terms of studying visual culture and learning skills enabling you to develop ideas and output them. Which goes right back to the idea that ideas come out of practice, they don’t come out of thin air. That’s a good old Marxist idea, that ideas come out of practice, like Ernst Fischer it’s all about that.

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Kelly Chorpening transcription 29/05/2013 1 Hour AC; ....I feel as if in contemporary drawing practice, people all the time are pushing what’s drawing, could it be this, could it be that, expanding it out. So what I’m kind of thinking, is trying to expand it as an activity as far as you can go. As far as the pre-mark I suppose, or pri-mark (laughs).. KC: Just before the impulse? AC; Yeah. Now where this came from was...you know Lucy Gunning? You know she did a drawing residency at Wimbledon about ten years ago. There was an interview that she had with Michael Ginsborg, and he described her work as embodying a drawing attitude. So he said that even though this residency show didn’t have so many drawings in it, in the traditional sense of the word; there were more things like photographs, photocopies, there was the odd pencil drawing, but he said that that didn’t matter almost, it was that the whole show embodied this drawing attitude. So that’s where it’s coming from. So what is a drawing attitude? Is there such a thing? What’s he getting at there? That’s what I’m trying to pin down, and I’m wondering if it is something to do with that bit before you make a mark. Or is it just a philosophical way of thinking? And what is it about? What are the characteristics of drawing that set it apart from other practices? I mean that would be a good place to start I think. Why would you draw rather than something else to get whatever it is out? KC; Well. I mean a lot of drawings’ appeal is that directness. That simplicity. technological simplicity as well as... er it’s close proximity to real bodily gesture. So it’s that directness and simplicity that might begin to define what a drawing attitude is. It’s not about the adornment or the ornamentation of what the idea essentially is, it’s trying to be as close to that idea as possible, without it turning into something else. So it’s an end and another means. But one thing I was thinking about was the..that there is, you were talking about them being distinct but I think there is a space, and it might be a very small one, that I’m interested in, which is that in an effort to communicate, 24

words don’t suffice in that kind of quickness of real verbal discussion. There’s a description for movement for example that is easier to describe by going ‘shhhheeww’ (makes sweeping gesture), you know that I think there’s something about that, that I’m interested in..

Lucy Gunning ‘Tail’ 2002 from ‘What is Drawing?’ Black Dog Publishing, London

AC; The physicality of it? KC; Yeah. The physicality and there’s potentially something universal there. Something very human about that. I couldn’t prove but is something that keeps me asking questions. AC; That’s interesting. So that’s almost, almost one of the purposes of drawing I suppose is that it’s... it represents something other than what language can represent, verbal language can represent. KC; Yeah. And in the beginning when you begin to visualise the world. I’m talking about us, as soon as we are able to grip something to make a mark, we’re not thinking about words or nomenclature, 25

anything, it’s just an effort to express something about something else. It’s something in the world, you couldn’t call it drawing or writing. It’s the same, it’s the same thing, and I think we retain maybe a small amount of that, when we learn words for things. That this is a drawing and that’s a written word, and these two things separate quite distinctly but.. AC; So that’s the activity of actually making a mark or making a gesture. And do you think that arriving at that point.. you know, what leads up to that point? Is it just the urge to get something out or is it..I suppose what’s the nature of the thing that’s coming out? KC; Well I think there is something, one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is that there is an interesting space where action and its expression, drawing and writing are quite close. You see it a lot now, mostly in cartoons, graphic novels that expression for a short hand of lines when someone has left the room ‘shhcceewww’ that kind of thing, or an explosion, that kind of short hand. But I also think that there is , there’s something, and Rudolf Arnheim talks about this in ‘Visual Thinking’, about the visualisation, what artists try and do, is the complexity of that expression, more aligned to the abstract, multi-dimensional kind of way that thinking happens. So it’s... words sometimes are too ordered and too sequential to really satisfy that kind of feeling that you have that you want to express something that’s outside of what’s straightforward prose or spoken word. AC; James Elkins talks about something like that. That..how drawing or art, is beyond a written analysis or beyond language from a descriptive point of you. Is language the right thing that we should be using to describe works or art? You know at the other end of the spectrum when you’re beholding something, is that the right way to understand it? Maybe it isn’t. That’s also been one of my interests but as I kind of cyclical thing. KC; Well it’s hard because I end up having these..when I’m trying to funnel things down into some kind of scholarly statement, that the tendency I think is to veer off into psychology which is a territory that...it’s very peace meal what I’ve read and studies of children’s drawings and writing, and what happens when someone’s had an injury to the brain..which I think is really interesting and I think...maybe it comes out of my disagreeing with the claims that drawing is universal. But also then agreeing that there maybe something universal about this kind of moment, this impulse. 26

Because, Stephen Farthing actually talked about it in that conference. Humans have been making drawings a lot longer than they’ve been writing. So the impulse to make marks is there, and they communicate something, and they don’t have to be a line to written language to mean something. So it is an interesting thing to think about. How we read those drawings, I don’t think is universal. AC; So that’s more the lack of the universal is the reading of it? KC; That there’s a ‘oh we don’t speak the same language so we’ll just communicate through drawing’ I mean it does satisfy quite a lot, when you don’t speak the same language but there are a lot of...I think some of the circles that I operate in, and you start having these drawing conversations, people are very, well drawing’s the universal form of communication and I kind of think.. AC; And is that because reading signs is going to be culturally specific isn’t it? Historically specific and all sorts of things will affect how you look at something and how you understand it. I can see your point of view. How could it be? How is one thing going to mean the same thing across the board? Depending upon who you are and where you are. KC; And even if you say just within the U.K there are some very different...I think we’re a bit bound by definitions of what makes drawing good. There’s a kind of connoisseurship and taste, and quality and accuracy and all of these kind of things that complicate the matter. AC; So Anthony Gormley says for him drawing is a form of thinking. So I’m wondering what differentiates drawing for you from other art forms, in terms of thought processes or preparatory thought? KC; Yes. I would agree that it is a form of thinking. And it is to do with the directness of it and the fact that as you’re drawing you can also write, and you’re working out a problem on the page and can see the development of your thinking. It’s visualised, in ways that I think if you’re just thinking without working that through. Especially if you’re an artist, the problems that you’re dealing with are to do with things in the world.

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AC; So does that link to something conceptual. Do you think in terms of that form of thinking is it conceptual thinking that drawing is good for? I’m only saying that because my husband works in IT and I’m fascinated by the drawings they make in the office, because they do these amazing things on a white board, mad spider diagrams with arrows going all over the place and sometimes it’s a complete mess. I can’t possibly navigate it. But they’ll be a bit of text here there and every where. But they seem to all understand it and it’s their way of understanding some sort of complex concept or a process, otherwise they can’t really understand it just by talking to each other. I don’t know whether that’s the same as being conceptual? KC; Well I think it’s inseparable. Then again, that’s a bit of the baggage that drawing has, that it’s about creating some kind of resemblance of something in the world, and with that example. Did you go to the last conference at the National Gallery? AC; No I missed that one. KC; Because that was interesting because there was a Mathematician there talking about the need to visualise some theories, for instance in his area in Astro Physics, trying to demonstrate a kind of grading pattern of solar flares, where it has to be drawn to be understandable. But then also he had an interesting observation of...there was a foundation teacher asking her students to map out their Facebook friends and he found it really interesting form a mathematical point of view, that they were beginning to tread on really complex territory in terms of mathematics. In terms of the complicated relationships, cross overs and layering of information, without even knowing it. So I think it’s conceptual. It arises out of that process of thinking something through, so it becomes a representation of that thinking. As opposed to a drawing you might make ‘see that flower, it’s so beautiful, I’d like to draw it’. It’s fundamentally different. AC; So it’s the internal workings of your mind rather than anything representational. KC; Well it represents.. AC; The internal workings of your mind! But not an external representation so much.

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KC; And nothing where you would have foreseen the outcome. In terms of how it looks in the end. Except that you have some criteria for it to be clear or accurate to a degree, whatever it is that you’re trying to work through. So there were some common denominators in the Facebook project, you can imagine there were squares with lots of lines leading out of each other, that seemed to be a kind of common denominator of how people then begin to develop a visualisation of this network of relationships. So maybe there’s an influence there of things once seen before, but it’s fundamentally different from saying ‘I’m going to draw a still life’. AC; Yes it is. And that’s interesting because I think what I’m trying to get at is the moment before you make a drawing. If I’m looking at a bunch of flowers and I’m going to draw, I wouldn’t have that, drawing attitude, this impulse, or the urge to make a mark, whether it be a written mark or a drawn mark. If you’re going to do a plant or something, it’s a different thing altogether isn’t it? What I’m thinking about is the sketch, but maybe more of a conceptual sketch. It might be used all over the shop, like mind maps, or communication drawings. So I suppose I need to hone it down a little bit, because it’s not any type of drawing I’m interested in, it’s... KC; You’re working something out. AC; I know! I need to make a drawing of what I’m working out! KC; There is a purpose in mind to making the drawing, but the purpose isn’t to create a resemblance of something in the real world, it’s something else. Another person who took part in that conference was a Plastic Surgeon, he did these very intricate drawings on the body to work out the three dimensional geometry of how, where cuts had to be made so that the skin could be moved to patch. And that is a kind of...you could see a kind of working process in the thickness of line and different coloured lines, there is.. in some ways, through experience, you do have some preconceived ideas of what those lines represent. AC; So...going back to the Lucy Gunning interview with Michael Ginsborg and what he describes as a drawing attitude. What do you think he means by that? KC; Well I think it has something to do with that working out something in the work. 29

AC; Yes. KC; It’s a kind of working methodology. That’s aligned to how you would work something out through a drawing. That’s my first response to that question without knowing the whole text. AC; So what he’s trying to say I suppose is that drawing doesn’t have to necessarily end up being what we traditionally understand to be drawing, it could be like a way, a practice, which might be really diverse, and may involve all sorts of fairly instant media. It might be text, it might be photography, it might be all sorts, sound. And that’s what is interesting to me, and that just made me think ‘gosh..drawing could be very wide as a way’ almost. KC; Well just in the way that you would, the process of working something out in a drawing, not have an idea what it would look like in the end, if you think about that in terms of having a studio practice, that you’re ideas first manifest themselves as a drawing or a diagram or a series of drawings, and then you think ‘I’d quite like to try this in 3D’ or ‘maybe if I make an animation and I make this thing move’ or ’if I introduce light’ or I think it’s that kind of not having a preconceived idea. I end up talking about this a lot because...I always think there is a footprint as to how someone has arrived at something out of a drawing process. So I think that’s the drawing attitude that Michael Ginsborg is talking about. It’s this open-endedness that might lead you to making a work of art in any possible media. If you’re doing a painting course you think ‘now what kind of painting am I going to make today?’ If your focus is drawing it’s ‘I’ve got some ideas I’m going to try and work them out, and you develop them, and develop them and maybe they take on another form, but it’s not setting out to make anything in a particular..having a preconceived idea that ‘I’m a sculptor’.. AC; That’s something I hadn’t necessarily thought. That the end product, painting, printmaking or whatever, they are very actual, there’s a product at the end. Whereas drawing seems more of a continuum almost, where you could add to it, or take it away, you could rub it out, or rip it up, or start again. You know it’s not, it’s a different lineage almost. KC; And then of course there’s the other way round within art where, in really conceptual practices, say contemporary dance, where you’re trying to find a means to capture your ideas for things that 30

don’t have much physical presence in the world whatsoever, and you’re not satisfied by a photograph, because that gives everything away, or it doesn’t represent an essence of information, it’s unedited, it’s just ‘here it is’. The drawing satisfies and reveals the emphasis that you might have on the subject matter, that’s not... that carries less baggage because it looks direct, humble, not saddled with the history of painting or sculpture. AC; It’s like it’s an escape artist almost.. KC; I think it’s something that a lot of people identify with. It looks less commercial as well. Often. It doesn’t look like you’re trying to make art. There’s an interest there in retaining a sense of that proximity with thinking and the working out of ideas. AC; Can you recognise the drawing attitude in your own work? That way of working? KC; Definitely. Yes because I’m interested in the spatial problems of the exhibition and the tension between real space and pictorial space, and for me that’s all about the initial, the drawing problem of how you begin to translate the world onto the page. And how that goes back into the world again. So at the moment everything I’m doing has to do with that..setting up an awareness of that tension between real space and pictorial space. I’m trying to push even more the suggestion of words or sounds through static imagery, that doesn’t use text. So..can you make an angry shape? A lot of it is physical as well, as I’ll draw something and then I’ll cut it out and it exists then as an object. So there are more component parts that take on more anthropomorphic characteristics than before. AC; I suppose if you’re doing that, you’re going to automatically be playing with the actual and the pictorial. Cutting it out of the pictorial and putting it in the actual. KC; The things I’m doing right now look like simple shapes. Like a slab that’s been bound up and rolled together, but at the end of the slab it becomes the letter ‘e’ and there’s this union of different things going on. So you feel the tightness of the cord being pulled tight, and the way the form or the depiction of the form is hemmed in. I’m just trying to work out intuitively through concrete means, trying to get some sort of intuitive sense of almost like language that produces this kind of response in the mind as you look at the image. 31

AC; The work then do you think it would cross over in the brain? From text to drawing? KC; I hope so. Because I quite like when non artists or children see the work and have a response to it that’s a genuine curiosity about what’s happening with the shapes, like ‘oh that one’s falling over’ that kind of thing. Trying to get back to some kind of essence, whether it’s anthropomorphic or whether we have some kind of empathy towards a very simple form of drawing. AC; So do you think then there’s a connection between sound and shape? KC; Well, there is for me, and in some ways I could probably create a case for it just by watching Warner Bothers cartoons. But there are other examples I think, where you have that evidence in time and history where the shape of something is meant to describe something noisy. AC; I remember reading about the ‘Bouba/Kiki Effect’. They wanted to find out whether there was a correlation between sound and shape and so they asked a load of people if they heard the word ‘bouba’, and they heard the word ‘kiki’, would it correspond to a circle or a triangle. Which one would be the circle and which one would be the triangle. And of course you can imagine, because everybody feels the same, pretty much, about it. KC; Do those people read the Roman alphabet? AC; I don’t know. It was just a little nugget that I got from somewhere. In the book again, when Michael’s talking to Lucy Gunning, he says drawing’s often about the beginnings of things. Why do you think that is, why is it about beginnings? KC; Well because it’s very close to the first moment when a thought is visualised, when an idea is visualised. Though I don’t think it has to remain that way. But yeah, part of what I’ve been doing with my work is to give that ‘beginnings of things’ a bit more substance because I think it’s more important than just to start. It says something.. 32

AC; So your work, is that beginning feeling, that you’re trying to get out. Is it that whatever you would put into a drawing, in a more traditional sense of the word, that initial thing that you’re getting out. You’re just doing it in a slightly different form? KC; By using essentially marquetry methods, different textures and pattern and so on within the shape and then cutting it out, it becomes less and less immediate and more laboured over. Obviously designed and created so that the immediacy that is so obvious...like the piece that was in that book, was improvised. I made a point of having all the shapes there and not planning what I was going to do, but then trying to treat it as much like a sketch as I could, that was the kind of impulse there, rather than go with a set piece, that I would have these shapes that were maybe once removed from the gesture that I might make. instead they’re made of component parts and pieced together in the 360 degrees of a real space. So drawing often is about the beginnings of things. But I’m quite interested in this retaining that quality if possible on a more monumental or grander scale. Just to se what that does. AC; Because that seems to be one of the special things about drawing. You can’t remove that from drawing almost. Drawing is, for me, you could write a word and lots of people do to get things out. But drawing, like we said earlier is might be a way of getting things out that you couldn’t put down in words. So the ultimate would be to have the drawn sketch and the written words alongside one another. To really get it all out. And that’s what a lot of artists sketches or preparatory sketches, working drawings might consist of. I was wondering about that improvised piece that you were just saying about. Would you have drawn that in the beginning in a sketchbook or something? KC; I’ve thought about if I had the chance to do the piece again what would I do differently, because what I did was abroad, I had to arrive with a suitcase of shapes that I might use. So there were limitations and decision making that occurred outside of that space, but the final resolution of the piece happened very much in the moment. I think inevitably if I were top do it again, there would be a lot more planning involved to make it look more like an improvised sketch. So I admit there’s a contradiction there that the next stage would actually involve more planning to make it look more spontaneous. It’s that whole thing in drawing which is so interesting, it’s not hard work. An individual drawing is not always...you know all the hours 33

that have preceded a drawing enable you to make one very very fluid accomplished line. Yes that’s quick but it’s built on all of that work that went into that. AC; I run a life drawing group where I live, and it is the thing with life drawing is if you look and look and look and look and look a bit more and then you make your mark, then you seem to have digested it more somewhere. And the mark is going to be somehow more true. KC; Yes there’s a lot of experience and repetition and planning, previous drawings that go into it. Whether you draw from life...it’s not necessarily a contradiction to say more planning would go into making a work more spontaneous. You think of Matisse’s drawings, how accomplished, and so confident and fluid, but they are very designed. There’s a kind of short hand involved that rose out of years of finding some kind of essential configuration of lines that describe a face. AC; I suppose if you’re not going to work it, and re-work it like that, then you’re not going to fully understand it maybe. If you’re always waiting for it to be spontaneous then it will come out differently each time, and then you won’t have learnt about the methodology. So when I spoke to Stephen Farthing, he was really unhappy about the word attitude, because he thought it was too emotional. He thought that made it seem like you have a positive attitude towards drawing or a negative attitude towards drawing. And so then we were wondering whether it ought to be something else like a sketching state of mind (laughs). I don’t know..doesn’t sound quite as good but... KC; You might use the word position. There’s a position that you take. I think for me, it’s a critical position. I don’t think it’s emotional at all. I think that it’s a critical position in that you choose not to...I’d be lying to say that every piece of work had to start with drawing. But that there is the lack of having the pre-conceived idea, the way the shape the form will take is a critical position aligned to a lot of people who associate themselves most of all with drawing. Work things out through drawing. Although even the final state isn’t drawing. It’s a critical position in some ways, if I think about myself as an artist in the 21st century, but it’s also that having an open ended enquiry. 34

AC; Because you see I have been thinking about it being about the bit leading up to the mark, but it isn’t really, it’s about the actual doing of it too. But it’s a doing of it in not a finished or completed kind of way. Kind of ongoing enquiry I suppose. That might manifest in all sorts of different ways. KC;...it’s interesting because Stephen farthing has created this taxonomy of drawing and a a lot of drawing conferences talk about definitions of drawing which go a bit further than the usual discussion...it can be really dull, it can be a navel gazing exercise. So I personally like to relate these questions to wide issues and wider discussions. So for example, what happens to society in general when drawing is no longer taught as a key part of literacy. You think about how one works out a problem. Trying to create a nation of artists and designers, but people who are able to work through problems arrive at creative solutions or make innovations, or collaborate with other people and a lot of that happens through drawing. So that’s where I think these kinds of questions are really important. That’s one example, not the only one. AC; Because that brings it back to the closeness of drawing and writing again I think. That idea of what Stephen was saying; he was talking about being literate in both writing and drawing. And if you can somehow teach that...so don’t worry about teaching art, forget that, more about teaching a literacy, just a way of communicating creatively. And if people in years to come can have that ability to use this language and that language, visual language, isn’t that great? We can communicate better. And that maybe there’s a lot of mileage in that... KC; Well I agree. Especially after having read the proposed new National Curriculum in art and design you realise that all of the things that we, in our specialised world of knowledge of drawing, appreciate about drawing, they are not widely appreciated. So relating it to wider things in the world, how can we push back out onto the world, in policy and decision making and the way we discuss it? To get people to think differently about what its function is, what it enables individually and in a group. And it’s not just from an education pint of view, if you can’t communicate your ideas you won’t get your funding. They are real issues. Which for me makes these questions much more pertinent. Its interesting because drawing’s history is relatively unwritten and it’s interesting to arrive ant some kind of definition as it’s not easy to find; what is this impulse to 35

draw? What happens between a thought and when you first make a mark? I do think all those things are interesting but they can seem after a while, well what would be the point? AC; Yes exactly. KC; Unless you think about how they... AC; And then you see my interest is in handwriting specifically, and I think these days, I’m a little bit nostalgic perhaps, everything moving on; but making a case for drawing and writing. You know the hand held communication, having real worth. KC; Though a lot of this working out drawing occurs on screen. So I hate to be so old fashioned, but I do agree with you. It was funny the conference in Melbourne, the last question I threw out at the end of my paper and that’s that it’s very interesting to talk about the relationship between drawing and writing but what is the relationship between drawing and writing when most of us type? Because you know previously, you know the written word, a line can become a letter, become something else. There’s a much closer relationship between the two things. Now it’s about to be different. AC; Mmm yes so they’re kind of shifting away. KC: But I don’t know what that means for...because I work with mainly twenty year old people, I’m still kind of analogue. Even if I type up something, I have to print it out, and I have to annotate on the page, and it has that very kind of physical evidence of me working out what it is that I want to say and write it, even. We have to accept that we might be wired differently than a young person now who’s coming up. It’s no good lamenting the loss of hand-writing its like well what’s changing and how, what is the relationship between these two things now when you’re talking about literacy and communication?

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Anne Brodie transcription 30/05/2013 1 hour 6 minutes AC; ..it’s as if she (Lucy Gunning) just grabbed things and just did it. And that’s what I’m trying to get hold of, what is that? AB; Well the bit that comes after is easy enough to look at, but what’s difficult and intangible is the bit before. AC; And I suppose in that sense I’m interested in whether drawing could be a way or an approach that has nothing to do with graphite necessarily. AB; That’s a drawing then (points to hand-made glass tubes). So that’s me instead of using my fingers with a tool like that. To make that you have to stand on a box and you don’t have a little pencil but you have like an iron, that you put into the glass. And basically you get a big scoop of hot glass you put it on an iron table, and you get a big long iron, and you roll the glass onto the tip of the iron and you use your entire body and arm movements to swing...to make the lines. So each movement, each line, individual piece of glass is a line of drawing. I think that’s exactly what it is in that case. AC; You see there’s the type of drawing which is your body or to do with the movement... AB; The physical act. AC; Yes exactly. That making of the mark. And then there’s the...whether that piece (the glass tubes) worked as a sketch for you. Did you sketch that out beforehand? AB; No, no. I wanted the movement. I was trying to get a physical presence in the glass. AC; So how did you plan it? When did it first happen? AB; Purely by actually working. You’re surrounding yourself in an environment. I sort of think where ever you are, and you’re trying to use...I just happened to be, for about three years, in hot glass 37

departments. And you look at the way people interact with the glass and the material and how it moves and people try to impose there vision onto a moving piece of material, so you just start to mould the two together. You’re using this as part of a process to get to a fancy bowl or something. And I was like, ‘oh God you’re passing through something amazing here’. And I said ‘I don’t want the bowl, I just want the body movement’. AC; So do you think it doesn’t maybe matter what the medium is, it’s if you are fluent in it? AB; You will find a way. AC; Then it becomes more like this drawing approach where you can expertly use it to articulate yourself. AB; You can control anything around you. AC; It’s so ephemeral to pin down, but that sort of.. you’re basically sketching with glass but because you’re so used to glass and you’re used to, it’s part of your environment. It’s become your language I suppose. AB; I absolutely feel, and I use the word sketches, when I’m talking about bits of film that I’m getting now, I mean I have a completed film in my head, I’m now starting to sketch. I don’t know..but I call them sketches, but they’re film. And people say ‘where’s it going?’ I don’t know until I start manipulating it. Until I start...I’ve been to the shop, I’ve bought my ream of paper, I’ve got my starting block and no from that I will do something more... AC; So this maybe, is what I’m trying to get at. It is to do with that ‘pre’ bit, making the mark, but it’s also just part of the process. Your approach when you’re in the process... AB; For me it is. I have to feel the material, I need to be familiar with it in order to... I won’t very often have much of an idea until I start. It’s been doing my head in because I’ve not been able to...so I don’t know the word ‘sketch’ is almost interchangeable for ‘explore’, and I think explore has to start in your head before you touch the material. But you can explore through a material, you can sketch through thought processes, through seeing what materials do. 38

AC; So, right, so the sketch could be in any medium. AB; Any medium, but it has to be a mark made by a human being with the material. I would say that piece of paper I put on a glacier, and it kind of curled, that’s a sketch. It’s like an interface isn’t it? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a thought or the physical doing, it’s the interface between a person and a material of some sort. Even if it’s a voice, it’s still a recording, a material that’s picked it up. And I think that it’s something bigger than a sketch it’s something that’s been taken and added to and worked. But the initial sketch, it’s always more exciting to see sketches because it’s someone’s ‘ahhh’ AC; Right, because sketch conjures up graphite doesn’t it, works on paper. But I know exactly what you mean and I think...but what you said just now about it doesn’t matter whether it’s in here or the actual action, because it is a seamless...I think what I’ve been trying to do is categorise it, or say this is this, and this is over here, there’s this prebit and there’s this other bit. But actually, it doesn’t work like that. AB; I don’t think so, not in my head anyway. I’m sure there are real purists that will do a preliminary what ever it is, that has to be in graphite, but.. AC; But that is jut like an imitation as far as I’m concerned. If you’re going to have that attitude.. AB; It’s a mind set isn’t it? And I quite admire it. Because I don’t think that it’s a comfortable place having this sort of head, it’s noisy and scary because you’re trying to...you’re constantly putting yourself into places you haven’t a clue what you’re doing. AC; So the reason I wanted to talk to you in the first place was about the work itself, and whether that tied in with, with what seemed to be this moment leading up to the mark, or the hesitation while you don’t make a mark, or that deliberation.. AB; Well that’s the whole reason I’m really using film, with these women. Probably the starting point of this whole project was this looking for the absence. And in order to see an absence you need edges for it, you don’t see it without an edge. And I was thinking ‘how do you visualise absence of someone who’s mother has died?’ And I see it in the end of my question and the start of their answer. And I see it when I ask them to write or draw the space of their dead 39

mother in their life, and I see it not in the drawing but in the bit before. I’m editing out all the lines and just keeping a pen above the paper, because that’s where the dead mother is. That’s the absence, the bit between the head and the drawing of the description of what it is. So the edges are then..and the material again...it’s indefinable, it’s not solid is it? AC; No. You see that really reminds me of what Helen Cixous said. That in your mind or in the artists mind, well it doesn’t have to be an artists mind, there’s like a continuum whereby the mark made, whether it be a written mark or a drawn mark is only just a thing, dropped down in a moment, and the continuum carries on. AB; Absolutely. AC; And maybe grief is a bit like that, in that there’s a continuum and there’s a point in time, point in time, carries on, changes maybe. AB; So you’re trying to talk about something which is definable, but it’s elusive it’s not solid you know. It’s not a thing as such. AC; And film was the best way of getting that? AB; Well yes because also if you’re dealing with peoples’ past, it seems a particularly appropriate media, film, photography, it’s already loaded with a lot of nostalgic resonance. And I was also really interested in people seeing the camera. I’d been to lots of documentary film festivals about five years ago, and I was really interested in the directors of a particular type of films, they were all a particular type of person, probably quite nice and sensitive. And without fail, no matter how difficult the topic, no matter how sort of...people filming in prisons and drug cartels and all the rest of it. And I’d say ‘didn’t you have a problem filming that?’ and they’d say ‘we want the camera to bear witness’. And I found that to be true with people I’m interviewing as well so, the camera becomes a reason in it’s own right. I think the more..it makes it more real, that intangible thing more solid because it’s being recorded. It kind of pins it down for them as well. It brings in a solidity. You’re talking about an absence; if you’re not recording it, you’re not filming it, there’s nothing to pin it down, so the camera is pinning it for that moment... 40

AC; So, Anthony Gormley says drawing is a form of thinking for him, and I just wondered what your thought were about that. AB; Well, that’s pretty much what we were just talking about. But then he’s.. AC; So if you were to draw, in the traditional sense of the word, like sketch something out with a pencil... AB; It’s intermediate for him isn’t it? He’s got his head, the sketch and then his piece. I don’t sketch; sketch in the traditional sense. He’s using it in a very traditional sense of the word for me. Like I was saying, I do sketch, but I sketch with the material. AC; You see you’ve got more of a drawing attitude than him. Drawing is a type of thinking for him because it’s, he has to get it out of his head, into a visual format. AB; Yes. He’s got a stabiliser. AC; Which is what Stephen Farthing was saying drawing does that for him as well. So it serves a purpose, he has it in his head, he’s got to be able to communicate what he’s trying to say. And the sketch, or the drawing is the first way, the most instant thing he can use. But with you, like with Gunning, you use any old material to articulate yourself. The more you can articulate yourself more fluently with film, the more you’ll probably use film, or you’ll feel more confident using film..do you pick up a camera? AB; Yes I do that. Usually I’m thinking of the camera as a material and what it’s doing, so I’m sketching within...I really like exploring the material...that’s why I love these medium formats, I love the sound of the polaroid peeling off the back, that as much as what photography is for me, and that becomes pinned up as the work, that process. And if there’s a sketch maybe I smear through the emulsion when it’s still wet. There’s a big part of me that doesn’t want to impose myself too much on the work that I’m doing. AC; Whereas, I would think Anthony Gormley does want to. Here I am. I’m the artist. AB; I think I’m more of a kind of vehicle. I even find it hard calling myself an artist. But I have to because society needs to call me 41

something. I’m just somebody who asks a few questions and I have to hang it on something, and if you don’t then people think you’re a bit weird. AC; That’s interesting because I wonder how much that place..I think it’s being able to be very very loose with whatever it is you’re working with, that you don’t dominate it, you’re its guide perhaps. AB; I just think we live in such an amazing place, the most we can do is observe. It’s too arrogant to impose a will on something, to a certain extent, the most you can do, I feel, is draw attention to something that already exists. In a language that people can see. And that happens to be art, you know. You can write about it but one person can read about that at any one time and it’s just not such a good language, it’s clunky.You’re defined by your words. You have to do the art. AC; Because you can say more? AB; You can say so much more. And I get so kind of pissed off..the whole point of the art is that it’s got it’s own language, and I know that. I can talk about it, and you have to talk about it, and if you go through academic arts education, bloody hell they make you spit it out don’t they? You can’t get through it without. But for me the words are too clunky. The whole point about the art is that it is its own language. It’s a more appropriate language for certain elements of what we’re trying to do. AC; So there’s a book I’ve got by James Elkins ‘Pictures and the words that fail them’. And that’s all about the fact that written verbal language isn’t necessarily the right medium to use. They’re different languages almost and they don’t necessarily marry up. AB; I think it’s always good to have solid theoretical knowledge of why you’re doing something but then to go and do it. AC; So do you think there’s such a thing as a drawing attitude? AB; I think it’s impossible to know because everybody’s definition of drawing is going to be something different. Most people will have the same definition but how can I know because I don’t do the other 42

AC; So you think we need a definition of drawing first in order to know? Can you recognise it in your work? AB; See you’re limited by the word ‘drawing’ again. It’s the word. I think you’ve got a real fight on your hands with what the word ‘drawing’ actually is saying to people, what its connotations are. AC; So there’s the word ‘drawing’ right? That has masses of connotations. Even Stephen Farthing who, surprisingly, has a very specific view of what drawing is and what drawing isn’t, is creating a taxonomy for drawing. So that’s the word ‘drawing’, but also the word ‘attitude’ he had a problem with because it’s very emotive, it’s either positive or negative and that’s not what I’m interested in at all. It’s more like the way, or approach. And the fact that Gormley’s approach is totally different from yours, who’s totally different from Gunning. You obviously can see that kind of approach in your own work. But drawing attitude might be the wrong choice of words. What would you call it? AB; It’s an enquiry. It’s a curiosity. It’s a hunt for trying to convey something that’s not conveyable in words about something that is usually overlooked. A space that needs a voice. AC; So do you think...could you say that about all sorts of things you’ve made? AB; They’re all chasing the same thing. They’re all looking for that moment that the line pins down. It’s absolutely trying to make the least dense, the least arrogant, the least solid, noticing of our vulnerability and our place in the world. It’s all about just trying to find the best way of showing our face in the world. So I think all of the work I do are sketches when I think about it. You might think that’s really solid (pointing to glass) but to me it’s not really. I left that because I couldn’t keep working with glass. I was interested in the glass in its molten state. AC; To me it’s only solid in its appearance. That’s only one part of it. What it actually stands for is a whole load of stuff in flux I suppose. You were just working out, experimenting what you could do with it. AB; I think most things we do are sketches. I think to try and do anything other than that is just the height of arrogance actually. Everything that we do, everything that we make. 43

AC; But isn’t that just to do with the way that you work as an artist? And if you thought of someone else.. AB; You know these massive monolithic works. They’re not going to be there in two hundred years, somebody will have pulled them over, they’ll be out of fashion. It’s impossible to make a lasting piece. Apart from possibly the pyramids, but even them, who knows what they’re particularly for. They’ve lost their original, whatever they were there for. We can’t do it. We can’t make anything solid. We can’t. Because generations down the line will have changed their meaning. AC; Yes. What do you think about Stonehenge? AB; Well we haven’t a clue what it’s for. What’s the purpose of it. We can impose our own spirituality on it. There might have been something bloody functional for all we know. You know, nice that we’ve got it, but we don’t know what it’s intended for. And it might not be there in the next million years. probably won’t, so it’s all fleeting. Everything’s just going through. And why try and pin it down too much, you can’t. AC; So really this idea of sketching is it to do with time? AB: It’s a transience isn’t it? If you want to keep the original definition of sketch as an impermanent, on it’s way to somewhere, that’s a nice definition for it. But that’s why...why do we prefer fresh flowers to plastic flowers? Why do we prefer the sketches of masterpieces to the main piece? Because they’re more fragile, they’re more insightful of human beings who are passing through at that moment. They’re more human. There’s a vulnerability about them. AC; Because of the spontaneity of the hand do you think? AB; No. It’s just using the word sketching in terms of acknowledging that its not a finished piece. AC; But can anything ever be finished anyway? AB; No I don’t think it can. Which is why we are valuing sketches more because that’s all that anybody can ever do, is sketch widely, with a lot of enquiry, not to be frightened of sketches. And there’s a freedom in the sketch. That’s the exciting dynamic part, that’s the part I like. 44

AC; So when you say sketching, that could be in clay, that could be in glass... AB; I think just in my head and then I sort of pin it down with throwing. i find a line in the pot that I’m throwing that might be the pitch that i’m looking for and I remember that movement of the clay or the sound of the polaroid, these are all parts of what I put in my sketchbook. I video the clay or the sound and that becomes the work. AC; All that seems very filmic to me. AB; It’s human interaction in process isn’t it? AC; You could have a sound track. There’s quite a strong sound track it seems in your work. AB; Well that’s one of the least solid things isn’t it? Sound? I use my phone on buses and things. It’s quite surreptitious isn’t it?

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Jordan Baseman transcription 20/06/2013 22 minutes 18 seconds AC; ....so you’re saying to me, drawing is a process. It’s an ongoing, fluid, performative... JB; For me drawing is not a finite thing it’s about a process. So it’s like an open thing. It isn’t..and I don’t believe it ever was, only about accurately representing the world. And I guess, cameras have interrupted what drawing once was. The way that they changed everything anyway. But I think that drawing is just this thing that people do, that is just open and is not closed. It doesn’t...even when it’s like over...whatever that means for the person conducting or doing the drawing. What I like about it, when it works, whatever that means, is that I feel that it might change next time I look at it, but I like that openness about it. I think that a bad drawing attitude (that’s a good drawing attitude) is ‘there is my accurately rendered thing of this other thing.’ AC; And why is that bad? JB; When something is bad it’s just not interesting. There’s nothing wrong with skill or talent. But it’s back to what you were saying about the separation between the conceptual and the actual, that talent and skill are just talent and skill. And if we’re about nothing where do we start? We have to be about ideas otherwise we’re about nothing. As humans. And I think that’s essential in our understanding of the world. I think drawing does play a part in figuring out what’s going on in the world in that people try to interpret life through a drawing process, but that’s a separate thing. So I would say a bad drawing attitude is when you’re just accurately rendering stuff because you can. AC; So that’s a kind of recording type of drawing? You know, that’s recording what that thing looks like. Do you think? That’s its purpose. JB; I think it’s purpose might just be to occupy time. Yeah that the guys that you’re talking about can say ‘I can draw that thing over 46

there, make it look just like that, but on paper’. Is that harsh or cruel? AC; No. JB; I’m personally not interested in that. AC; No. Well no neither am I. That’s partly why I want to ask all these questions! JB; Even if you look at the Leonardo cartoon, it’s not like that, you know that’s an idea. That really feels like it could change tomorrow, or like next time you look at it, it will look different because it’s really open and it’s fluid. It’s not because it’s not finished, it’s just raw, it’s in a state. It’s not fixed. AC; You see he does talk about things being in flux. And doesn’t use this term ‘disegno’, but is working in that way, where, a bit like Helene Cixous talks about, things going on, going on and the moment you commit your pen or your pencil to paper, or whatever it is, is just a moment in time, but all the time it’s continuing, the work is continuing. There’s just these little (gestures points), along a continuum, throughout time. The work may or not manifest as anything. JB; Absolutely. I think the best art that I’ve experienced, music, or movies or books, or ...food perhaps, you know the things that you reflect on again and again and again. You know, you have a moment in front of these things or with these things, whatever they are. And then later it hits you, when you’re not thinking about it. It just comes over you and you understand it maybe differently or you understand it in a similar way or whatever, but there is something hidden. It has life beyond its actual self. AC; That’s what others have said, during these interviews, is this business about it being a process. So a drawing attitude is to do with um...it’s to do with a way of working. Whether that’s in your head, or whether that’s with a film or whatever it is. It’s a sketchy way of doing things, I suppose. JB; So, not to turn the tables on you. But why are you having to define what a drawing attitude is? Why isn’t just drawing enough? That kind of umbrella? 47

AC; Well, I think it’s because I’ve, historically, if there’s a subject, like drawing, I happen to be on the drawing course, I kind of want to see what’s outside the room. I’m much more interested in what’s kind of... behind the door. JB; I think it’s rich terrain, taking that approach. AC; But it does mean there’s not a lot of writing on it, it’s very ephemeral, it’s something that you can’t quantify. It’s just opinion isn’t it? So opinions of artists ‘this is the way I work/this isn’t the way I work’. JB; I think it’s more than opinion though. Because as you just pointed out, Leonardo would talk about this ephemerality and this fluidity and the impossibility of actually rendering anything in a fixed state. And you know, when the hell was that? Last week? So I think these ideas, the fluidity, and the lack of physical...it’s not just the physical mark, it’s something more than that, is centuries old and still modern, it’s not that they’re unknown there just, undefinable.

AC; Now, I don’t really like Anthony Gormley’s work. But he says that drawing for him is a form of thinking. Do you go along with that? JB; Well, it’s just a way to figure stuff out, sure. But, it’s like if you’re trying to describe something to somebody and you’re, the thing that you’re trying to describe is beyond language. Then, I think a certain kind of drawing. I think that’s part of the problem with drawing is that it’s so broad. So a certain kind of drawing can fill the gap between.. can be a bridge to an understanding what you mean. AC; As an articulation of something? JB; Yeah. Cause I have conversations with a guy I’ve known for a really long time. Often, he’s like ‘I don’t understand what you mean, I don’t understand what you mean’ so I have to do a little drawing to show him, and then he understands. So I think sometimes, just taking that outside of the room, like you’re trying to do, I think yes it can be a way of expressing something that is beyond language. But for me, that is often a...it’s not illustration, it’s a description of something that you can’t quite describe with words. Does that make sense? 48

AC; Yeah. I wonder how that kind of fits with this drawing attitude thing. JB; Yeah, I think that’s a different kind of thing. Because drawing is so broad. It’s funny because I did a drawing last night, a computer drawing about this thing I’m trying to make. And I didn’t understand. I understood the end and the beginning but not the parts in the middle. And I was like ‘I don’t get it’. And he was like ‘call me’. And it was interesting because it was the opposite of everything I just said, it was like when a drawing doesn’t make sense. AC; It depends what you want out of it. If you want to understand. If you want something factual out of it. JB; Well you see again this was a way of talking about something that was beyond words. This will happen if we do this, and it will look like this, and behave like that. Both of these examples, I think Mr Gormley is probably thinking about technical stuff, practical stuff. AC; Mmm. JB; But you’re not asking about practical stuff. You’re asking about a conceptual idea. An idea of what is and what is not drawing. AC; I think what I’m asking about is whether drawing could be, notdrawing really. JB; Yeah, of course. AC; You know? Like whether drawing could be..people using photography...it depends how you use the medium. If you use the medium in an exploratory, open, investigative, um, searchy, undefined way, then that is a drawing attitude. Whatever you use. If you use your own body. That’s a drawing attitude. Doesn’t matter. Speech. Conversation. It’s sort of..it’s a philosophy I suppose. But it seems to be more about that sort of, um, what you said earlier, this open-endedness. JB; I think what you’re playing with is really exciting. And I think it’s also really difficult. Only because of the preconceived idea of what drawing is, it’s that (pointing to a found drawing) it’s not going to tell me much, except about this person’s skill. But I do think, if you think about architects or surgeons or Anthony Gormley, you know, 49

they’re going to use... I think it’s how drawing is used, because in a way a lot of people use drawing like I was talking about, like a descriptive thing. But that’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about this other form of evidence. All we have is an evidential thing. That is not anything in itself except...not proof but..anyway I wonder about time, because I think time cannot be divisible from drawing either. AC; How do you mean? JB; Well because even if it’s an open thing, a sketchy open thing that may not be graphite on paper, it somehow compresses or contains a time element in it. So it occurs over this span and it was like that then, and it may not be like that now, but it occurs like a minute a week. You know what I mean? AC; Yep. So it’s possibly the only way you could pin it down. Is that it is a temporal thing. JB; You see I think that that’s really beautiful and elegant and I think you’re really onto something with your ideas and what you’re doing I think it’s also nearly impossible, but that’s what makes it exciting. AC; Well I’m excited. I continue to be excited about it. I think that’s the only thing you can go on. If I’m bored by it, then I won’t do it anymore. JB; Well, yeah. Maybe, it’s just a quest to speak to as many people as possible to find out what things are. Maybe..maybe it’s drawing in itself. What you’re doing, and that it has no end. It’s forming itself as it goes and you have these moments where maybe like making a mark or whatever, without being too hooky about it. But maybe there is some... AC; It could be the work. JB; I think it might..I’m not saying that this is all you do. AC; No! JB; But it might be, I guess it depends whether, whether it’s an academic scholarly thing. 50

AC; Well you see what I will do Is I will underpin all this with the stuff that I’ve done on drawing and handwriting because that’s my foundation, is looking at that, looking at text. And that’s then..because that’s where this has come from, thinking about that moment of making that mark. Committing to the paper. Whatever. And then actually thinking about whats leading up to the mark. But actually from talking to people, it’s not about what’s leading up to the mark, it’s about the whole process. It’s about the whole thing. So that’s what got me going, was thinking about text. So the text is always going to to be in there, it’s a very important part of the whole exploration.That’s it’s beginning and that’s it’s end or that might be it’s end, I don’t know. ...drawing is well known for being about the beginnings of things. Why do you think that is? JB; Blimey! Well I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I would agree with that. Because then you’re saying that prior..to..you’re supposing that...I’m making a huge leap here, a huge assumption...but that there’s no thought before you make the mark. And so there’s a whole series of things that go on, you just can’t see it if you do that thing....so what I’m saying is..I think there’s a beginning before there’s a drawing. AC; That’s it! That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at. JB; There’s a guy, now how are you going to get hold of him...he’s a heart surgeon and he does these drawings in peoples’ blood while he’s in the middle of an operation, AC; What? JB; But I think he’s just showing off. But he’s obviously thinking before he’s doing the drawing. I don’t care who you are...but I do think maybe the drawing is like the middle part. It’s definitely not the end and it’s definitely not the beginning. I so disagree that it’s a beginning because, you know you’ve got to study something. Even if it’s something in your imagination. AC; Because I was making a list of what I thought a drawing attitude was the other day, just idly, and I thought ‘unplanned’, and I put a query next to it and I thought ‘no it’s not unplanned’ is it? It’s not about being unplanned. 51

JB; There’s a difference between being intuitive and being a beginning. I thinking often drawing can be really totally intuitive, like graphite on paper, or pen on paper, or mark making can be...it’s often a way of navigating something that’s open ended.

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Tania Kovats text This is such an interesting set of thoughts and questions. I would be happy to speak more with you but I'm going to say a few things here - but they relate to my own relationship with drawing and don't necessarily reach beyond that. The time before the drawing is a moment to accept failure. I know my drawing will fail, and nothing competes with the white paper and all the possibilities that it represents. The moment before the drawing is all potential. The moment at the end is the navigation of disappointment. The drawing is something against nothing. The Drawing Attitude to me is one that remains open. A finished Turner painting is shut and a closed system that I have no way into or out of. A page of his sketch book is the complete opposite - where the way in is wide open and I can leave any time I want. There is a delirious promiscuity about this. The potential for anything and everything gets locked up in an open drawing, that is hard to compare to a 'finished' work. I think this is what Lucy Gunning's work achieved. Something like Roni Horn's large cut drawings are also a good example of an open attitude. This is nothing to do with gesture or expressive mark. Its about an openness in the work, even if the drawing is made within a systematic methodology.

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Roni Horn ‘If 2’ 2011 Hauser and Wirth, London Some drawings I make are extensively planned and mapped out before they exist; so the time before the drawing is about building the parameters of the drawing. Some drawings just arrive, or grow on the page. These sorts of drawings I just need to show up for. If I am there with the paper in front of me then I can allow them to happen. I hope this in some way addresses your questions, Tania Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

made with thanks to Stephen Farthing, Kelly Chorpening, Anne Brodie, Jordan Baseman and Tania Kovats. 54