Compositional Objectives of Academic Drawing

Abstract

Teaching of drawing at the art department of VGIK has its own specific aspects, due to the objective of preparing students for their future work at a film studio, where, in contact with the director and cameraman, they will create the visual image of the film. In the classroom students, especially junior year students, tend to replicate the model in front of them, diligently copying the light and shadows, focusing mainly on the proportions and the characteristic features and mood of the model, but paying no attention to the lay-out or composition.
However, a proper academic drawing is not a mere copy or projection of a model set-up onto the plane of the sheet, but rather an image that is constructed and laid-out in a specific way, an image that appears to copy the model only at first superficial glance, but in fact it carries all the characteristics of an independent creative composition. There is a well-known saying: “Nature creates the reality, the artist shows how it is perceived”.
This article also discusses the main objectives of drawing: the unity of contrasts, the rendering of movement and time, the unity of plane and space, and the combination of reasoning and intuition. For a long time, artists have allocated a special role to contrasts. The famous Soviet graphic artist E.A. Kibrik considered the problem of contrasts to be of high importance. He wrote that contrasts can be considered to be not only a law of composition, but a law of art in general. The educational task therefore includes the search for and the integration into a holistic form of plastic opposites: the broken and broad rhythms of chiaroscuro, soft and angular lines, large and small surfaces, etc. When creating graphic images, it is necessary to address the problems of plane and space, not only resorting to the rational analysis, but also applying intuition, without which the image invariably lacks interest and vitality.