Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing
Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing | Art and design | The Guardian.
For me, the drawing is the process of arriving at this image. This process is usually very fast to begin with. I work with charcoal and charcoal dust, and within the first minute, the large expanse of white paper can be turned into a dirty grey. I’ll put lines across it, finding vague geographies of where things will go, and then the process of drawing is the remaining hours or days it takes to work through the drawing. The art is to try to finish at the same speed you begin with – to not let the drawing become more and more cramped, to try to keep a looseness and an open-endedness right to the end.
Often, the finished drawing is different from what I had in my head when I started off, and the better ones are those that don’t look anything like I thought they would. The ideas are not the driving force in drawing, nor is meaning. The need to make an image is the driving force. It isn’t like a writer who has a story they have to tell, and so they write a novel. It isn’t as if I have an image the world has to see. Rather I have a need to be making marks on paper. Drawing isn’t a decision, it is a need.
