DRAWING CONTINUUM

Let’s put the following all into one bowl and stir:  lingual characters,  scientific graphs, pictograms, logographic characters, petroglyphs, transparent drawing, heiroglyphics, etc. All of these we produce with a pencil and paper. Ergo, they are all drawings.

And because all of them are drawn, we can ask how do they compare and relate to each other?  To ask this another way, which has the most communicative meaning?  Which works the hardest?

To even try to answer this, we need to establish some sort of criteria or set of variables.  One criteria might be how self sufficient is the drawing?  How easily can it communicate meaning on it’s own?  Or how about this;  how independent is the drawing from it’s culture?  How universal is it?  How complete?

This page makes a first, stumbling attempt to establish a Drawing Continuum.  The drawing above is a first attempt at this.  It attempts to show, transparently, how these various drawings relate within a somewhat three dimensional continuum.  So from left to right, here it goes:

-Safe to say that the lingual character, for example when you draw the letter “A” on your paper, is the lowest form of drawing?

-A number might be next.  It is self referential, in that is is indicating a universal concept, for example the quantity three.  But it does far more work than a lowly letter.

-Roughly, a Chinese pictorial character is somewhere to the right of the letter A.  While still a base lingual character, it has far greater meaning.  Many times, this logographic character is comprised of smaller character parts.

-A scientific graph has greater meaning than the numbers that form the graph.  We looked at this on the page titled SCIENTIFIC ICONS.

-And then there might be transparent drawing.  The meaning that a transparent drawing contains is the most holistic of any drawing you can make.  The drawing becomes culturally independent.  The drawing has the same integrity as a numeral, hieroglyphic or a scientific graph.  It just contains more information and does more work.

Here is another Transparent Drawing spin off project.  Someone who has greater focus and academic rigor than me could easily develop this communications continuum idea.  And when I say develop, I mean completely re-arrange everything.  An entire book could be written by what I am struggling to summarize in 500 or so words.  Or if anybody needs something to do or is looking for a project, start a blog titled The Drawing Continuum.

And notice that I left out representational drawing.  I did that because of the strong art and cultural baggage that are implied with a representational drawing.   A representational drawing is non character based.

Whether you agree with my distribution is of little concern.  The most important concept is that writing is a form of drawing.  The application of strings of letters to a piece of paper is a drawing.  And this writing / drawing is on a continuum with all drawing.

And as I hope that the above at least roughly demonstrates, there are amazing communicative uses of a pencil and a piece of paper.