Drawing Distinctions

"If our procedure is to work steadily in the direction of drawing as fine art, rather than (as we so often find) beginning from examples of such art, where shall we begin? One attractive possibility is to begin at the beginning—not the beginning in...

Patrick Maynard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography, also from Cornell.

Drawing Distinctions is about drawing, very comprehensively conceived, from children's drawing to the map of the London Underground, and engineering diagrams to drawing by Dürer and Michaelangelo.... It is a remarkable book of great breadth and refined argument.... It should be part of the 'tool-kit' of any art historian or philosopher of art; it should also be obligatory reading for anyone in an art school teaching drawing.

David Hills, Stanford University:

Patrick Maynard maintains that drawing is a tool kit, an open-ended family of relatively autonomous techniques for controlling the marks we humans have the power to make on various available surfaces—techniques we deploy in endless combinations and permutations, in the service of countless different aims and projects. He proceeds to assemble a remarkably rich and versatile array of graphic concepts, instructing us in the proper use of each as he adds it to our stock. Maynard loves his subject and studies it with a rare and welcome patience.