Back to Basics: Rethinking what Drawing is

Back to Basics is a recurring drawing course at Look & Draw, and one that shifts slightly each time it’s taught. At its core is a simple, persistent question: what do we think drawing is supposed to be? Each time I teach it, the course becomes a way of unpicking those assumptions and making space for different ways of looking and working. For many people, drawing arrives loaded with expectation: a particular kind of mark, a recognisable outcome, a sense of right and wrong.

Rather than reinforcing those ideas, the course sets out to loosen them. Drawing is approached through indirect and sometimes unfamiliar routes — mark-making with tools and objects, tactile drawing, tearing drawings apart and reassembling them, drawing without looking at the page, and drawing through movement. These methods aren’t used as tricks, but as ways of interrupting habits and creating space for different kinds of attention.

What emerges over the weeks is a growing understanding that drawing doesn’t need to begin with representation. Instead, it can start with a line made in response to looking — a way of sensing the subject through touch, texture, weight, and form. Space becomes something rhythmic rather than fixed, and the figure is understood through movement rather than outline.

Our subject matter, whether still life, the figure, or portraiture is approached in the same spirit. Still life becomes a way of thinking about the spaces between things: connections, overlaps, and relationships, rather than treating objects as separately placed. Portraiture is explored through the idea of sculpting the head and finding a sense of volume on the page, shifting attention away from likeness and towards presence and form.

By moving between materials — ink, charcoal, collage — and by reworking existing drawings, participants are able to return to the same ideas from different angles, rather than abandoning them in favour of something new. One of the most noticeable shifts is how long people are willing to stay with a drawing. Through layering, rubbing back, and repeated adjustment, drawings are allowed to remain unresolved for longer than expected and carry ghost lines and traces of previous decisions. . This extended engagement makes space for uncertainty, and with it a quieter confidence not through mastery, but through familiarity and return.

Back to Basics expands participants’ visual vocabulary, strengthening and reinforcing it not through a set of rules, but through an approach: drawing as an exploratory practice, built through repetition, attentiveness, and a willingness to work without a fixed endpoint. On reflection, I guess when I say Back to Basics, I’m referring to going back to the openness and curiosity we had as children in order to find a more playful, fun way forward.