"The Overlooked Role of the Grip in Histories of Drawing and Writing from the Victorians to Today"

This lecture examines learned conventions of drawing in the West by looking at the grip—the ways in which the hand can hold the drawing implement. Handwriting skills imparted during childhood produce the "dynamic tripod" which privileges precision, the flexor capacity of the fingers, and wrist stabilization on a horizontal or tilted surface. Drawing from the shoulder aligns the thumb with the wrist and elbow, enabling large-scale drawing as well as hand-writing on vertical surfaces. Dr. MacNamidhe offers a tour of drawing from the shoulder via historically disparate examples, from 19th-century virtuosos (Alphonse Legros) to works squarely in a 20th-century mainstream (Jasper Johns’s *Diver* [1962-3]). She acknowledges the effect thinkers from Marcel Mauss to Lambros Malafouris have exerted on tightly framed boundaries between persons and things before concluding with observations on the ongoing revival of drawing in international contemporary art.
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Margaret MacNamidhe (pronounced McNamee, she, hers, her) teaches in Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was educated at the National College of Art and Design Ireland, SAIC, and the Johns Hopkins University. She's following up her monograph on Delacroix (I.B. Tauris, 2015) with a forthcoming book on drawing (the University of Chicago Press) from which this lecture is taken.