What Is Mark Making in Art ?
Many artists will say that all drawing and painting involves some form of mark making. A general viewpoint is that as soon as your brush (or whatever tool you use) touches your canvas or paper, you are making a mark! Marks can be lines, scribbles, scratches, smudges, dots, dashes, patterns, textures. All different types of artists use a variety of mark making approaches in their work. Artists may use expressive and intuitive marks in non-objective work, meaning that the work does not represent anything in the natural world. Or perhaps an abstract artist using a dry brush technique might make short, fast lines suggestive of blades of grass even though that association was not intended. The viewer has attributed their own meaning to the lines. On the other hand, the Impressionists used mark making in the form of dabs, hatching and cross hatching to add movement, texture, light and life to the scenes they depicted in their paintings. Marks can be soft and subtle and barely noticeable in some work or they can be bold and intense, occupying a sense of grandness in a work.
