Drawing as Semogenic Language. A New Pedagogy

This chapter argues the provenance of drawing as a language, an articulacy with which – visualcy - is the progenitor of literacy and numeracy. It reviews drawing’s social functions beginning in the caves, preserving and sharing knowledge necessitated as our early ancestors’ communities exceeded ‘Dunbar’s number’, the maximum group size (150) beyond which oral and gestural communication breaks down. The notion that today’s digital technology can fulfil all the social and pedagogical functions of drawing is exposed as a ‘category mistake’, conflating technical facilities for image production with the potential of drawing as a means of nurturing and articulating an intelligence of seeing. Such intelligence facilitates the transformation of visual perceptual experiences into shareable, visual communication. Drawing as a language is semogenic in the sense of its ability to produce meaning. A systemic-functional semiotic model of drawing derived from Michael A.K. Halliday’s theory of language is introduced as the basis for a new pedagogy of drawing: an 8-step teaching strategy tested at Swansea College of Art and the Royal College of Art, applied through five themes: 1) Levels of Perception: haptic, distal, proximal. 2) Seeing & Believing: awareness of how cultural beliefs inform ways of seeing and ways of representing space on a 2-D surface. 3) Functions of Drawing: how compositional choices affect viewers’ mood and attitude toward subject-matter represented. 4) Strategies of Visual Communication: metaphor, metonym, and other rhetorical tropes. 5) Drawing as Process of Transformation: from primary to secondary geometry; from cultural values into material form; from mental concept to visual percept.