Scratching one’s skin
screeching, an embrace, grazing a surface, dragging your feet,
holding your breath, touching one’s fingertips..

The decisive moment a trace occurs; an outline comes out and proudly takes stance, makes an appearance. That’s the moment that conjures up a drawing.

A drawing is a form that involves making marks on some surface; often but not always a paper using tools such as pencils, pens, charcoal, ink or gouache. It is both fundamental as it is accessible, a form that comes from immediacy, serving as both a finished work and a process of exploration and communication. Drawings can range from quick sketches to highly detailed, fleshed out compositions, capturing everything from fleeting ideas to perpetual scenes, moving imageries, isolated details. They are perhaps a modality that often remains neglected to its painterly counterpart.

For many artists, drawing is a core skill, often comes first before other ways of making work, often linked to the very first impulses of harnessing a form, of being in the world. It helps them observe the world, understand it, shape it and be with it, be in it. Historically, drawing holds immense significance. It offers a window into the past, revealing how people saw the world, what they valued, and how artistic techniques evolved.

A technique is not a form, but a form often comes from a technique; not so much what things are while arriving in this world, but how they become, how they reach their destination. In essence, drawing is always something more—it is a universality that merges so much- imagination, observation, expression, care, love, time and sensibilities. It operates as a standstill, a quick brush with time that leaves a mark, a trace, a quickness.

Drawings become a thing of intimacy. There is little room for retakes and reshoots, they are born out of vulnerability, an act of exposure, where the hand becomes an extension. In this space, the page becomes a mirrored surface and every mark is a trace of a presence, a hint that something was here. Smudges, pauses, the pressure of a pencil, the weight of a glass frame and something direct comes forward; sometimes it’s clarity, other times it‘s messy, but always real.

In those instances, we are so quick to build connections, so instant in our need, our yearning to know everything, everywhere and all at once, we neglect the moments of solace that the paradox of a drawing offers: made in an instant it requires attention, finished with a quick breath, it demands patience.

Text by Harris Giannouras