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On Big Drawing | 
and how it became a 
go-to medium 
in a pandemic year

 

 

Something has happened to drawing. 

 

It has been snatched back from the 

 

amateur sketcher and the art school copyist; 

 

excused from the politeness 

 

of the drawing room and 

 

the perfunctoriness of the drawing-board. 

Used for so long to outline form in nature – to describe an apple or the musculature of a classical torso - it is no longer just a stage before coloring-in. 

 

Any requirement to merely give a perspective line has been waived. Its down-and-out days in the pissed-up subways of the anti-social behaviorist are similarly in question. 

 

Drawing appears to have opened up a new space between the lyrical and the epic. Scaled up to the proportions of Renaissance fresco, Romantic history painting and Expressionist panorama, it has gone beyond the sketchbook page. 

 

 

Drawing  h a s   g o n e   B I G.