Wayfinding

Truthfully, Alberto Giacometti's work is a bit repulsive when you first happen upon it. The sculptures are heavily distorted, unrefined, coarse and perturbing. It's only when you take the time to understand why his work looks this way that you come to an understanding with them.


While I greatly admire his work in this capacity, my favorite work of Giacometti is a rather small vignette of his œuvre introduced to me in a drawing class: His sketches.


When searching for photos of them, they were commonly called 'organizational lines,' but I think that is a great disservice to what is actually happening. Sketching like this is as much organizational as it is impression. It's where our mind meets paper, where we make our mistakes, but rather than covering them up, you embrace them and use them to your advantage.

I think as artists, it's difficult to see so many finished products and easy to forget how simply they can begin. The gist of Giacometti's sketch is derived not from accuracy, but from its failure. By building upon the lines he gets wrong, we see a more refined, unique image that gives us more than just a drawing, but a window into how he came about seeing it.

I first heard them called 'gestural lines,' and I find this diction more favorable.