In an article by Andrew Frost of the Guardian alled Top draw: artists pushing the boundaries of drawing he ends up asking ” If you could draw anything, what would it be?”  

I have chosen to feature just one of the artists that he is talking about Gosia Wlodarczak.

This work goes far beyond the normal scope of drawing as a discipline and when Wlodarczak  talks live at GOMA in this video she talks about a multi modal approach to seeing and then drawing.   Her approach to seeing and capturing impressions is exciting and takes the involved audience far beyond traditional drawing practice

Frost says,

There’s always a tendency in art to push ideas to their limit. While more conservative artists and their followers are happy to paddle in the predictable shallows of generic art making, braver souls are willing to dissolve the limits of their chosen form.

When talking about the trio of exhibitions currently on show in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, we feel that the reason he has grouped them together is that the exhibitions suggest that “even drawing is an idea that’s up for grabs.”

Room Without A View is a performance piece in which Wlodarcza, from 10.30am until 5pm every day (until July 5) resides inside a big black box. She draws what she sees onto the surface of the box.

Readers can see when looking at the GOMA example in the video above that Wlodarcza was drawing what she saw through the window while she drew on it.  But in this more recent example she is inside a box  and in this case she draws the outside of the gallery, people who come to look, her own shadows and lines, in fact anything that enters her visual field.

As Intriguing as the Complexity of Life Itself

Wlodarcza builds up a densely layered knot of lines that become complex and intriguing. Wlodarcza draws these rich detailed drawings with a silver paint pen. They become as intriguing as the complexity of life itself.  It is this capacity to capture fleeting impressions and nuance that makes her work relevant to Jacobs Process.

And as an artist committed to her audience she mingles with art lovers.  After the performance part of the show at RMIT from July 16 until August 4, Wlodarczak can be found in the Soiree Bar at Sofitel Sydney Wentworth from Tuesday to Sunday afternoons.

Readers who follow the Global Citizens Creative Arts Blog will realise that multi-modal arts based practice has a  natural attraction to Wlodarcza’s work.  This suites the valance towards   mult-modality and Transmedia.  I can see great benefit in encouraging the students to draw the world through a sheet of perspex capturing the movement of a crowd, or the subtle shifts of nature in the style of Futurism, and as a way to develop a sensitivity for animation techniques.

I will make up worksheets so that teachers can have the students capture gesture drawing through a sheet of perspex where the movements of the dancer are all captured on atop of each other.  This could be both fascinating and beneficial.

Frost finishes his article by saying

I suppose the question is: if you could draw anything, what would you draw? And how? What’s interesting about these artists is that while they’re pushing the limits of what many people would even consider drawing, they’re also exploring something essential – their responses to the world.

I believe transmedia, animation, augmented reality, multi-variant scripting and the like will change the way we think about every creative arts discipline including scripting in the near future.  Frost’s article presents another way of talking to teachers about the need for gesture drawing in whatever way it can be utilised in a classroom or excursion context.  What I mean is that the world is rapidly moving, changing and evolving as the students evolve their approaches to the creative arts with it capturing glimpses of reality will become a more and more necessary skill.

Resources: 

• Frost,A. (2 July 2013)  Top draw: artists pushing the boundaries of drawing. The Guardian.co.uk
• Murphy,J. (2013) What Transmedia Is Not.
• Murphy,J. (2013) Jacobs Process. 
• Murphy,J. (2013) Setting Up for Gesture Drawing.
• Murphy,J. (2013) Global Citizens Creative Arts Text. Kindle.
• Virtual & Traditional Jigsaws in the Classroom. Book soon to be released: Educators if you sign up for TPT through this link I will support you in your endeavour to publish educational texts though a FaceBook Community.
• FaceBook Support Site for Educators.  (Love to hear your thoughts)