BBC - The Secret of Drawing (2005) Part 2 Storylines (Drawing in the story)

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 2 Storylines (Drawing in the story)

Drawing has always been an essential tool for the telling of stories. Andrew looks at the satire of Gillray, Goya and Hogarth and its influence on photojournalism, American comics, Japanese Manga and Hollywood storyboards today. The episode touches upon a function of drawing such as the transfer of a storyline. Starting with drawings by artists, which depicted not just one object or even one moment in time, but an entire plot, and ending with comics and storyboards in Hollywood production. One of the themes is the unique capabilities of drawing in shifting the content of the picture. An example is a Holocaust-themed comic. At first glance, this topic is generally impossible to imagine in this genre. But the author replaces the figures of Nazis with cats, and the figures of prisoners with mice. The content takes on a new, unusual form, preserving the drama of Schindler's List and the comic style of Tom and Jerry. Andrew Graham-Dixon examines the variety of ways in which drawing has been used throughout the centuries to tell narrative stories, many of them dark or satirical, from animation to Japanese manga books. Political cartoonist Martin Rowson explains how his savage commentaries on contemporary politicians are influenced by 19th century masters Hogarth and Gillray, and in a rare interview the American comic strip artist Daniel Clowes talks about what inspired his celebrated graphic novel Ghost World.

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