BBC - The Secret of Drawing (2005) Part 1 The Line of Enquiry (Drawing in knowledge)

This four part series, presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon, explores how drawing has shaped our lives. Join him to discover the history of drawing and its relevance to the modern world. Once upon a time the ability to draw was seen as the first and most essential skill of any artist, but in the age of the unmade bed and the pickled shark, drawing is widely perceived as an old fashioned activity. Many modern art schools don't even teach it, preferring to arm their students with digital or video cameras. In this four part documentary series Andrew Graham-Dixon, challenges the tedious modern predacious that it is trendy not to draw and that those that do draw are sad reactionaries, stuck in a dead past, for he thinks the exact opposite is true, drawing is the single most fruitful and vital artistic skill at work in the world today. Over four films which cover nature, the mind, storytelling and design, Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals the history of art and the lives and works of great artists with a startling freshness. He shows us how drawing continues to be indispensable to the making of the modern world and how drawing, innate in all of us, can help us see the world and ourselves anew.

Part 1 The Line of Enquiry (Drawing in knowledge)

Andrew looks at artists who have chosen the natural world as their subject matter and explores how drawing has helped man to understand his place in the universe. The programme covers the Rennaissance, the Eastern way, Turner, Constable and contemporary artists Anthony Gormley and Richard Long. The first episode shows the role that drawing plays in the field of science and research. It begins with an example that shows the role of drawing in the work of a surgeon. In fact, a few lines on paper allow a group of surgeons to exchange information much faster and more accurately than words. The episode then shows Leonardo DaVinci's anatomical drawings, which played as much of a role in the development of anatomy as any medical book. Then the drawings of horses, which were made so carefully that they led to the idea of ​​evolutionary development several centuries before Darwin. Andrew Graham-Dixon takes a look at the many ways in which drawing has connected us with the natural world and also how it has helped advance scientific enquiry, from the Italian Renaissance right through to today. In this first edition, he meets a surgeon whose study of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of the heart has led him to develop a radical new form of cardiac operation, uncovers a remarkable 200 year-old series of drawings of the moon, and encounters some of the actual preserved birds drawn by the great American ornithologist John James Audubon.

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