Drawing and the Ideology of Industrialization

Line and Colour in The Band Concert

“…Such uniform industrial practice of drawing emerged from naval dockyards into the expanding fields of technical drawing required by the industrial revolution, and were rapidly adapted for 'the technical constraints of designing motifs and patterns capable of production by mechanical means', notably a 'simplification of drawing and the abandonment of shading' (p. 61). The resulting flatness, an abstraction from natural form towards geometric simplicity, remained in fashion in the design schools even when, as with chromolithography, the technical constraints no longer demanded them, prompting one historian to observe 'the new machine-produced patterns can be seen, anthropologically, as the sign language of a people changing from a predominantly rural to an increasingly urban culture' (Greysmith, 1980, cited in Brett, 1995[1986: 61). Its conformity to constraints of reproducibility, simplicity, flatness and abstraction made the industrialized forms associated with the pencil a central tool in the transition to an industrial culture.…”

“…Codes for hardness and blackness, 'HH for engineers, H for architects, F for sketching, and B for shading', were standardized by 1830, the year that also saw the introduction of T-squares and protractors, and the widespread adoption of complex, telescopic and proportional compasses and dividers. Brett (1995Brett ( [1986) observes that 'The combination of drawing instrument and hard pencil was devised to provide exactly the determinate line that the drawing manuals demanded, and mechanical drawing required ' (pp. 59-60, n.1).…”