LEON FERRARI

Let’s start the week off with this consideration of  this great quote from Leon Ferrari:

“I draw silent handwritten words, which tell things, with lines that recall voices. And I write drawings that recite memories that words cannot say.”

Ferrari was an Argentinian artist who was concerned, among many other things, about meaning, drawing and writing.

These pages continue to develop an understanding of the conflation of drawing and writing.  See, for example, DRAWING CONTINUUM.  Or even a recent page titled ISLAMIC POLLOCK.  As with anything, the more you read, the more you realize what you don’t know.  Which in this case is that there have been many attempts in the 20th C to get at the similarities of drawing and writing.

I just really like Ferrari’s second sentence.  They write drawings.  They write so as to recall memories.  They write so as to record what words cannot say.  It’s a great thought to write (draw) what words cannot say.

It just seems so unfortunate that our culture maintains the artificial binary between what should be done with a pencil and a piece of paper.  At grammar school, we are either taught that you can produce writing or you can produce a drawing.  And it is pounded into our heads that it is either or.

If, from the very beginning, we were allowed to apply non binary understandings to what is permitted to do with a pencil and a piece of paper, there is no telling what increased understanding and deeper levels of communication would be realized.

The fusion of both halves of our brains would unleash previously unknown power and insight in a blinding flash of penetrating comprehension.

1. Ferrari, quoted in Gary Garrels Drawing From the Modern, 1945-1975. p. 48