Drawing as Conversation: Visual Encounters with Strangers

Abstract

This article discusses and illustrates the initial stages of a practice-led doctorate that investigates the potential of collaborative drawing as social encounter. The research is intended to realise drawing practice as both method and subject of inquiry. The article details the tentative beginnings of an emergent strategy. The first-hand account of an artist meeting strangers on trains to generate artwork and data describes a method that captures the subtleties of human interaction in an innovative visual form. Individual drawings and participants' commentary are discussed with specific references to models of dialogue, casual conversation and human computer interaction. The centrality of subjective experience, the interdependence of process and product, and the shift between what is known and what is revealed are characteristic of creative arts research.