In the 1960s and 1970s, drawing, which hitherto had occupied a central role, was elbowed off art school curricula, to be replaced by something called "research". Subsequently there was a general recognition that the baby had yet again gone down the drain with the bath-water. Nowadays you will find drawing restored to a position of prominence on the curriculum - nominally, at least, in the initial stages of fine arts courses, and often with the encouragement of passionate advocates among the staff in art schools. Yet the fact is that the change was, at some deep level, irrevocable, and things are not the same.
It is true that, in the long term, art schools were not so much causing as responding to a diminution in the importance of drawing in fine art practice. This is still a fiercely contentious issue in a fine art context, but the implications extend way beyond the preserve of fine art. Drawing is not just one specialist skill, but a core human activity that is woven into myriad areas of human endeavour and, while it looks like a safe bet to predict that it will always be so, there is no question but that the numbercrunching computer has substantially supplanted its role in some disciplines.
The machine's sheer computational capacity has had an even greater impact on what is traditionally understood by the term "drawing" than has photography, long perceived as the nemesis of representational art. In fact, the digital manipulation of imagery has turned photography itself into a kind of drawing, making it malleable to an unprecedented extent. Meanwhile, whole swathes of design activity, extending into architecture, engineering and product design, are now done on-screen. Elaborate (and beautiful) meteorological charts, drawn by hand, have now been replaced by computerised versions. And on and on it goes.
Focus On Drawing: An Anthology of Visual Thinking And Feeling, currently on view at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery is a timely, sizeable, diverse exhibition of drawings by artists and designers who teach at Cork's Crawford College, Limerick's School of Art and Design and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. A state-of-the-art survey, it was designed to accompany the publication, Drawing Texts (Occasional Press, £6), a collection of some 53 texts on drawing by artists, designers, critics, curators, historians and other interested parties (including John Berger, Michael Craig-Martin, Noel Sheridan and Dorothy Walker).
The sheer wealth and diversity of examples of, and views on, drawing, particularly from practising artists, is a convincing indication that it maintains an extraordinary centrality for them. What also comes across strongly is the fact that artists are not, on the whole, a bunch of backward-looking Luddites. In fact, more often than not they are keen on new technologies, and can have exceptionally subtle views on their own relationship to drawing and technology alike. They are also eloquent in expressing them.
