Cadernos de Desenho
Drawing is the most immediate style registered by our eyes. Through it, we’re able to comprehend what we see and what we feel and establish our relation to the world. Through it, differentiating things, we learn how to love them. It is where the artist’s thought materialize, organize, express and builds itself. Drawing as a means of knowledge, appropriation, commune. It is about this vital and necessary act: one which expresses the birth of shapes as meaning, as definition and function. It is part of an unconscious desire to express something unspeakable, from the sensible manifestation of ideas. It is the image of desire.
Sketchbooks have accompanied artists throughout history, and they gather little-known aspects of their production. Those are unique moments of intimacy and complicity, almost never disclosed and most times remaining in the studio’s corner, usually only accessible to the eyes of the artist. Starting from these notes, usually devoid of pretention, we are able to register the essence of our visual thought. Its consequent use, as a notepad, travel booklets or journals, provides the possibility to reveal the constructive thought that guides the creation and the image construction processes.
During the last thirty plus years, teaching, mentoring and research activities have been a big part of my life. My artistic production aims to follow the structural axes of these activities in an academic context, which handicaps the activity produced in the studio, one that demands an almost exclusive dedication. As a strategy of visual thought construction and an attempt to maintain my ongoing artistic investigations, I, then, start to use sketchbooks as an extension of the studio. In them I organize my thoughts, write in ideas and sensations, plan my classes and find an endless space for the manifestation of drawing and my inquiries on the questions of representation. The more intense my activity was in college, the more my use of sketchbooks grew, getting, at some periods, to fill up to two or three in a month.
The sketchbooks became a crucial tool: with them I started to conduct my classes, to organize my work as an artist and as a researcher. Through them I began to connect the visual language, the technical procedures and my main theoretical references, all this subjected to poetical intent, which is its driving force. I understand this territory as a structure of my life experiences, a place where I can explore space with senses – where the color and the look prevails, where I can measure the distance and comprehend the limits and where I stand, mark the territory and build my map.
Lygia Arcuri Eluf
