Real Drawing features full page artwork of Dick Davison. Real Drawing  is intended to serve as an “art book disguised as a text book”. It’s purpose is to celebrate drawing in an age that is rapidly loosing touch with the sense of what drawing can actually do as a thought medium.

You can purchase  Real Drawing here, courtesy of Blurb.

“This book began as a collection of drawings that were, in effect, classroom examples for the courses that I have taught to design students (mostly freshmen) for many years.  For a time the examples varied in size from small items that could be passed around the room, to drawings large enough to pin to the wall, visible from the back of the class.  In the late 90’s I ran across a book on J.M.W. Turner called “Turner as Professor” by Maurice Davies.  The book described Turner’s experience as instructor of perspective at the Royal Academy in the early 1800’s.  It is a slightly amusing tale about Turner, who, being anything but eloquent began supplementing his lectures with his own artwork to perhaps make up for his deficiencies in locution as well as to more efficiently make his points.  Attendance at his lectures rose dramatically as a result.  I have long admired Turner, feeling a kindred spirit to an artist who loved architecture and perspective drawing, but who’s heart was finally with the purely visual world.   To my knowledge, and prior to the above-mentioned book’s production, Turner’s “classroom examples” were never intended for exhibition and, never published. 

I should say that, like any creative activity, like any design that progresses, as it should, this project largely developed itself.  Or rather, the ideas were allowed to develop as they presented themselves in the creative process.  So for example, I might begin to make a drawing that is intended to be an example of a particular drawing principle, say, two-point perspective.  The drawing is in fact a two-point perspective, initially, but becomes more interesting to me because of the way a tension is developing between the line quality and the color, or, perhaps at a certain point it seemed appropriate to introduce some collage elements.  So it goes; not so much the path of least resistance as the path of greatest intrigue.  And several drawings may develop out of a particular path. The initial drawing may have still been useful to the book project, but in a different capacity.  And so this went on for a decade or more; I would mean to work in a particular direction or on a particular topic, but the drawing, the muse if you will, often had other plans. 

The integration of the text and images in most of the pages is an important feature, quite naturally as one would expect in a book, but not only for the purpose of continuing a train of thought, but also because I enjoy the words as images in themselves.  A number of larger single works have been produced as a result of ideas that developed while producing this book.”

— Dick Davison