BBC - The Secret of Drawing (2005) Part 3 All in the Mind (Drawing in our minds)

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 3 All in the Mind (Drawing in our minds))

Andrew investigates drawing as a primal human instinct and a learned discipline, looking at the earliest cave drawings and the work of David Hockney and Picasso. The programme uses the latest developments in cognitive science to examine why we draw the way we do. The episode deals with the question “Why do we draw this way (the way we draw)?” The comments of drawing teachers, the opinion of physiological scientists who scan the brain and eye movements while drawing. For a long time it was believed that the history of the entire civilization does not exceed 6 thousand years (according to written sources). The ancient hunters were primitive creatures guided by instincts. But in the depths of the Altamira cave, drawings were found that were more than 15 thousand years old with excellent quality of execution. Then the drawings of a 5-year-old girl are shown, in which a similar manner of depicting animals is also visible. The episode moves from children's drawings to drawings by Picasso. Both have a lot in common. According to Picasso himself, when he was 5 years old, he dreamed of learning to draw like Raphael. But then he had to spend his whole life learning to draw again the way he could at 5 years old. Andrew Graham-Dixon examines the variety of ways in which drawing intimately expresses the creative mind, from the very beginnings of art, the drawings on the ceiling of the Altamira caves in Spain, to the remarkable works made by autistic twins William and Richard Tyler. He also visits one of the rarest masterpieces of the Renaissance, a vast series of pictures uncovered as a result of World War II bombing in Pisa and shows how Picasso influenced a whole generation of artists.

Full Version Available Upon Request