on site review 37 : drawings

After getting On Site review 36: our material future out the door last winter all I wanted to do was look at drawings and paintings, and I wrote the call for submissions hoping everyone else was similarly tired of slippery, complicated, dissimulating text where every word invites interrogation. Drawings, even complex and layered ones, speak straight.

The call for submissions had asked people to choose a drawing that had set them on a different path, or had been significant in some way, either as thinking or as literally the way the drawing was made. This issue is the result and range from loose sketches —notes made, to digital drawings. There is drafting, there is messiness, there is precision. Some drawings are sly, some complex, some very simple.

The sequence in which the drawings appear is not random, but also not linear. As with all On Site review layouts, there are conversations between articles, in this case between drawings. These discussions might be calm, they could be acrimonious, but there are conversations. You are part of these ongoing debates about why and how we draw.

There are things you can see in a drawing on paper that just don’t seem the same on the screen. You can place an order for the print version: 9 x 13”, full colour, beautiful paper, high resolution images — a significant material object — through the paypal button below:

Other notes about drawings, from the On Site review daily journal that ran from 2007-2017, here.