Drawings

- [Voiceover] I find drawing to be a very direct medium. You can see the artist thinking through, working through a compositional problem. It's the spontaneity, the lack of finish, the process-oriented character of drawings that attracts me to the medium. This is a drawing by Michelangelo, one of the great artists of all time, and one of the sort of titans of the Italian Renaissance. It's a multi-figured composition that depicts Mary and Joseph on their rest in the flight into Egypt. The virgin, at once, pulls off her shawl in order to expose her breast for the Christ child to nurse. The child turns back in this very, very complicated movement to nurse backwards, exposing this heroic musculature, that of course points to his divinity. The virgin is a mountainous figure, and I think in a symbolic way, meant to Michelangelo the kind of great power and protection of the figure of the virgin. We tend to think about drawing, for the most part, the standard idea is to think of it as a linear medium. Drawings are equated with line. But there are other aspects of a work of art that artists can explore in drawing. For example, how they actually lay on the paint, and I think this was a primary goal for Gainsborough in this drawing of a fashionable lady walking in the park. The chalk is laid down in a very, very powdery way, so that we can feel these textures, we can see the gestures with which Gainsborough has applied them, but also not to be missed is the coloristic aspect of it. Drawing is an extremely exploratory medium. It represents the thought processes of the artist and it also represents a kind of exploratory attempt to find graphic expression for one's creative ideas.