On Drawing
Roger Winter’sOn Drawingprobes the mystery of one of the greatest gifts of humanity, the urge to express oneself through images, in a word an innate need to communicate through design rather than language or sound. The widespread appreciation for the intrinsic quality of cartoons, comics, and on occasion even graffiti and advertising as a form of art underlies Winter’s broad understanding of the pervasive role of drawing today. The author’s full exposition of drawing’s importance as a means of visual expression from prehistoric times to the present, with its proliferation of digital and other media and a nonhierarchical pluralism of competing styles, is as lucid and accessible as it is insightful. Anyone who has ever uttered the word beautiful (or ugly), much less doodled his or her thoughts on a pad of paper, will be enriched by the words of this influential mentor of a generation of leading artists. (Edmund P. Pillsbury, Ph.D., director of the Kimbell Art Museum (1980-98))