The line is an artist’s simplest tool. It’s the first thing to appear on paper, and what remains once you take away color, shading, and subject. In the 20th century, several artists made the line itself something to think about. Their ideas are worth reading for anyone who draws with a free line today.
Here are four artists and four ways of looking at the line.
Wassily Kandinsky: point and line
Wassily Kandinsky was one of the first painters to arrive at abstraction. While teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany, he published Point and Line to Plane in 1926.
A few of his ideas:
- the point is the simplest element, where everything begins;
- the line is the track of a moving point: a force pushes the point out of rest, and a line appears;
- a straight line comes from one force acting on the point, a curved one from two acting at once;
- different lines, in Kandinsky’s view, have different characters: the horizontal is “cold” and at rest, the vertical “warm” and active.
You don’t have to share his feelings about them, but the idea that a line has movement and character is close to transformational drawing: every free line is the trace of your hand’s movement.
Paul Klee: the line on a walk
Paul Klee, Kandinsky’s colleague at the Bauhaus, published his Pedagogical Sketchbook in 1925. In it he described the “active line” — one that walks freely, without a goal, for the walk’s own sake. That’s where the famous phrase often attributed to Klee comes from: a line is a dot that went for a walk.
Klee’s drawings are full of such lines: they wander the page, cross one another, and form figures and faces. A line that moves without a destination known in advance is almost exactly how transformational drawing begins.
Joan Miró: lines, dots, constellations
The Catalan painter Joan Miró built his pictures from thin lines, dots, stars, and rounded forms. The best-known example is his Constellations series (1940–1941): sheets densely filled with small figures joined by fine lines, like a night sky.
In Miró’s work the line ties separate forms into one whole — just as, in transformational drawing, lines connect shapes to the rest of the page.
Sol LeWitt: drawing by instruction
Starting in 1968, the American artist Sol LeWitt made wall drawings that, for the most part, he didn’t draw himself. He wrote instructions — which lines to draw, and in what order — and other people carried them out. The same work looks a little different in different museums, because different hands draw it.
It’s an interesting parallel to the algorithms in transformational drawing: the sequence of steps is fixed, but everyone who follows it ends up with their own drawing, because a free line can’t be repeated.
What to take from it
- Watch the line move, like Kandinsky: where it’s straight, where it bends, where it turns sharply.
- Let the line go for a walk, as Klee suggested: without a goal, for the movement itself.
- Tie forms together with lines, like Miró.
- Follow the steps, LeWitt-style, and see how different the drawings from one algorithm turn out.
What comes next
Where the idea of drawing without a plan comes from is in Automatic Drawing, and how algorithms work is in What a Drawing Algorithm Is. The first module of the Neurojournal course is open without an account — start there.
