Drawing is all about interpretation.
That is: - drawing what we see - what we think about - and our depiction of what words have to say.
When we are drawing something that is in front of us we try to make sense of what we can see, and convey this graphically on a flat surface for others to see.
When we draw from our imagination we try to interpret something that lurks inside our head and transmit this into an image on paper.
And when we are illustrating from a text we are turning words into pictures.
To put it another way, we are changing something ‘from one thing to another’; a kind of metamorphosis.
What I am mainly talking about today is an attempt to explain how I have personally tried to interpret a number of texts that I have illustrated over the years. |