LINES

Lines are potentially excitingly expressive elements in a painting. Yet a line is more often than not regarded in terms of its ability to describe a contour. A contour line is often an agent of language. We “name” a form and subsequently draw it - or rather delineate it according to our pre-known understanding of its characteristics. Yet, the very element that reveals the form to our eyes - light! - is absent from our considerations. In sight not mind, contours are dissolved in light, forms are unstable in perception. Contours seek to fix and imbue stasis on forms, unless the eye is alert and the mind visually compliant. A renaissance drawing as masterful as it usually is, fixes the forms of the body through an accurate contour line (backed up by tonal variations) and to animate the form, it sets figures into torsion and contortion to create a sense of movement or animation, Yet this is a literalising of movement - against the constraints of the depicted box-space. Fast forward to a line drawing by Matisse from the mid 1930s and we can now see contours moving in and out of light, generating light and inducing movement rather than depicting it. The exciting challenge for abstract art is how to induce movement through line - as one element granted, but a potent one, nevertheless.