Pure Drawing
Looking into the mind of the late Thomas Burleson
by Lyle Rexer
Is there such a thing as pure drawing? Auguste Rodin thought so, and so did the artists of the expressionist group Die Brucke (the Bridge) in the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing for them was a somatic process, the royal road to the unconscious—if only the conscious mind could be got out of the way. And yet, isn’t this dichotomy a false one? Hasn’t contemporary art, long since released from the burden of depicting, shown us that even so basic a process as drawing is a negotiation between conceptualizing and extemporizing?