William Kentridge Six Drawing Lessons. William Kentridge
In English. Hardcover, 208 pages, 146 x 237 x 21 mm. Harvard University Press, September 2014.
Over the past three decades, visual artist William Kentridge has gained international recognition for his work in different media, including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge's thoughts on art, artistic creation, and studio work.
Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply complement the real world and cannot be understood purely in rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial place for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal, and the paper become themselves guides to creativity.
Drawing has the potential to educate us on the most complex issues of our time. This is the true meaning of "drawing lessons". Incorporating graphic design elements and varying freely between discussions of Plato's cave, the role of the Enlightenment in colonial oppression, and the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is a printed illustration of the thesis of how art creates knowledge. By highlighting the processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms--and deceptions--through which we construct meaning in the world.
