HANDWRITING: THE SCRIBBLE PAGE
FIGURE 1
The scribble exercise merges with the rapid figure drawings. Vigorous, looped lines propel the eye across the top portion of the page, and outstretched arms that windmill across the top portion of the page emphasize this activity. The squatting figure at bottom center, with arms akimbo, punctuates the wildly gesturing motion throughout the page.
The Freehand Drawing course runs along two parallel tracks: the weekly studio sessions for drawing from the model make up one track. On the other track, the class also meets weekly for another session devoted to critique. Here both drawings done in studio and work from outside assignments are pinned up and discussed. As the semester proceeds, drawing concepts are introduced and layered into the weekly assignments, and drawing from the model begins to deepen the understanding of these concepts.
At approximately midsemester, the scribble page is introduced—the timing for this varies with the class’s grasp of earlier goals. Until this point little emphasis has been given to the grace or authority of the hand. In fact, the class has been cautioned not to approach drawing with “artistry.” Having lost some of their previous drawing conceits, the moment is ripe to present the handwriting/scribble page and to speed up the timing of the model’s poses.
The amusing body of work the artist Saul Steinberg presented in his book The Passport (1954) sparked the following exercises. In it he replicates passports, diplomas, governmental decrees, marriage licenses, and other documents, drawn in all manner of scriptlike writing, such as signatures with bravura flourishes, which, upon closer inspection, contain no real words or letters.1
EXERCISES
Rapidly fill a page with “scribble”—writing that is mimetic of the movement of the hand in script writing but with the avoidance of making clear letters or words. In the first week, vine charcoal on 18" x 24" (or larger) newsprint. Later, use any media. No more than 1 or 2 minutes.
Note: This is a good exercise for experimenting with new media.
Tour the room to observe each other’spages. Variety is a given. It is the same remarkable and infinite variety one encounters in handwriting, fingerprints, and snowflakes. Return to the drawing pads and wipe down the page with your palm, side of hand, or fingers to soften but not to entirely erase the marks. Apply this erasure unevenly. Superimpose scribble handwriting once again on the same paper, this time varying density and considering line weight to create darker and lighter areas.
Scribble and partly erase another such page, and then move into rapid figure drawing (poses of anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes), keeping the same energetic and fluid calligraphy of the hand achieved in the scribble pages.
The drawings that result from this exercise are seductively sophisticated, resembling variations of a Cy Twombly and hinting at any number of Abstract Expressionist painters. More importantly it is an enlivening exercise, a way to loosen up the hand. Thereafter, the class begins each studio session with this exercise.
FIGURE 2
The drawing illustrates the first part of the handwriting exercise. A smaller, softer scale of marking can be discerned in the background. The blurred gray of the first level of drawing creates the illusion of a more distant plane over which the bolder, more varied, and darker strokes of the second stage produce an elegant rhythmic pattern. This layer forms a plane that appears to be closer to the viewer’s eye. It is an abstract use of the concept of aerial perspective.
FIGURE 3
At the same time the scribble exercise is explored in the classroom, students visit the Museum of Natural History to draw human and monkey skeletons and then the zoo to draw live monkeys (see pp. 43–47). Figure 3 gives a witty response to the exercise as the drawing moves from scribble to bones, revealing a human skeleton reclining in a field of lines.
FIGURE 4
The momentum of scribbled handwriting moving into drawing takes a more consciously designed tack. While some bodies emerge from the writing—notice the middle and far-right figures scribbled in red—other more visibly pronounced bodies, in black, border a strand of writing suspended between them on the upper middle ground.
FIGURE 5
Handwriting itself is no longer seen, but the evidence and energy derived from the scribble exercise infuses the process and rhythms of the page. Figures are rubbed down and redrawn; ghosts of bodies and marks that suggest disembodied gestures continue to whisper on the page. The figures move across the paper in two tiers, resembling pictographic lines of text.