Drawing is widely appreciated as a means of knowing, a route to knowledge, as testified to in a wide range of practices, fine art practices as well as such practices as botanical, geological and other scientific drawing, for example. Persistent too, from early modern art education and before, are anxieties regarding the epistemic worth of drawing. These anxieties most commonly relate to drawing as praxis, more specifically the situated, embodied and enactive nature of drawing. The distrust of the body as aid in the attainment of knowledge is audible in some of Plato’s dialogues, just as it is in the disputes of the first Florentine academy. We detect a deep-seated apprehension within theories of disegno proposed by artists and theorists such as Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccaro. They sought to elevate drawing to the status of an overarching principle, ensconced firmly within the theoretical domain, a strategy that both privileged drawing as a paragon, while paradoxically distancing it from lowly association with the crafts and the taint of manual labour. We can detect the same apprehension and distrust in the Duchampian disparagement of skill and retinal art, the retina too is a body part. These phenomena have more recently been diagnosed in terms of deskilling the artist, reflecting a wider societal division; the elevation of symbolic labour over productive labour, reflective of an all too familiar hierarchy. 

Recent research, however, rooted in Phenomenology, American Pragmatism and cognitive science, offers a new perspective, which challenges these apprehensions and hierarchies. Somaesthetics and situated cognition theory assert the essential embodied, extended, enactive and aesthetic (esthetic) dimensions of cognition (the ‘4E model’). Combined, they offer an account of cognition that envisions the practices of drawing not merely as a path to knowledge but perhaps the high road. It is within this context that the following questions are posed. How do we attain knowledge through drawing practices? How do we address and overcome the distrust of the body as an aid to knowledge? How do recent insights regarding the embodied, extended, enactive and aesthetic dimensions of cognition impact our understanding and practice of drawing?
How do disciplines outside the fields of art and design value and assess the knowledge generating potential of embodied and situated drawing practices?

This special issue of DRTP invites contributors to address these questions through the scope of their artistic, pedagogical, technical, or scientific research. We invite authors to criticize, actualize and renew our understanding of the material and conceptual tools related to drawing and knowledge.