Marking Time, Moving Images: Drawing and Film

This essay examines the diverse ways in which artists over the last hundred years or so have explored the relationship between drawing and film. Analyzing the work of a range of artists, from modernist masters such as Henri Matisse to contemporary practitioners Oscar Muñoz, Susan Morris and Vivienne Koorland, I engage with a number of the facets of this relationship: the way in which the sequential arrival of drawn marks itself has taken on a ‘cinematic’ aspect; the translation of photographic and filmic source images into the language of drawing; the use of the moving image to record the process of making; and modes of ‘direct animation’ that involve celluloid being used as a physical support for drawn, scratched and otherwise inscribed marks. Such practices foreground the relationship between the drawing and duration, affording new ways to articulate both the time of the artwork, the nature of the artist’s work, and the structure and quality of the viewer’s experience. The essay brings together artistic practices from different geographical locations and historical circumstances to suggest some of the ways in which the modern medium of film impacted the identity of drawing to extend its range of concerns in formal, structural and thematic respects.