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On Drawing a Man Reading a Newspaper

This practitioner’s essay was published in Visual Communication, an international peer-reviewed journal. It sets out to make a contribution to the field of pedagogy and drawing by testing in a series of drawing experiments what it is possible to learn about the form and content of a drawing by redrawing it. The essay explores the value of transcription as a means of learning to make and ' read' drawings. It tracks Farthing’s twenty-five interrogative transcriptions from the charcoal drawing 'Man Reading a Newspaper' made in 1950 by the modernist painter Jean Hélion.

The research that enabled this essay began in 2006 , when the author was Principal Investigator in ‘Drawing from Turner’ a collaborative project situated in Tate Britain‘s print room funded by the Rootstein Hopkins foundation and Tate Gallery. This project explored the value of transcription in teaching and learning, and was published by Tate Britain in 2006 as an exhibition (and at http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate- britain/exhibition/drawing-turner/drawing-turner-drawings). The Tate Project led to the author being invited to become Visiting Artist at Monash University, Melbourne in 2007, where he was keynote speaker at the ‘Transcription’ conference and exhibited the 25 drawings made from Jean Hélion’s ‘Man Reading a Newspaper’.