Research point

So many drawings to choose from, but what is contemporary? Paul Cezannes drawing Madame Cezane with Hortensias (1885) is the piece of art I would buy if I ever became rich. The lightness of touch with the pencil, the softness of the drawing, so restrained, just a little green paint for the leaves. Maybe its too old to be considered contemporary but to me it seems a very loving, caring drawing.




















I had to look at the work of Julie Brixey-Williams after the recommendation in the course notes. Of the work I saw I like Cloud Dance 2 best for the natural way that she represents fluid movement. In my research I stumbled across the Reportager website which has some pretty heartfelt drawings from the likes of Oliver Kugler and Dan Archer who are trying to deal with social issues through drawings.
I'm a long term follower of the urbansketchers website and particularly admire the work of Melanie Reim which has an urgency and liveliness, capturing a scene or a situation without putting every little detail in.
Going off track slightly Phil Sylvester has written an interesting essay on how drawing and mark making can be representative without being slavish copies.
Andy Mercer captures the slightly menacing claustrophobic feeling of being in a foreign city at night 
in this drawing and I can feel the urgency to capture a fleeting moment in Jason Gathorne-Hardy's drawings of birds 
Again not contemporary but Henri Toulouse Lautrec captures a feeling of wretchedness and discomfort in "A Montrouge"–Rosa La Rouge

I think that we are visual creatures wired to interpret what we see and extrapolate from it. I don't know how an adult that had never seen drawings or paintings would interpret them but we are bombarded with images and we are all trained to decode them and read certain triggers in the same way. The more you look at art the more you probably read into an image. I don't think we separate the image from the medium when we view art and I don't think we are usually aware in the first instance of the act that created the art, that follows if we are sufficiently interested to consider the work in more depth or read up about it. There is a danger that because we see so many images we stop really looking at them. An artist then needs to work to grab our attention very quickly and we may miss more subtle aspects of a piece of work but we tend to pick up on the emotion because reading emotions quickly is an important part of our survival mechanism

So what is the difference between expressive and expressionist? Before looking it up I feel that anyone who relaxes and lets themselves be honest with what they produce can be expressive. Its not a contrived self conscious state. Expressionist feels more self concious, for the benefit of others or to impress or influence them. Lets look for a dictionary.......

The Longland Top Pocket English Dictionary says;


Expressive - showing feelings
Expressionism - a style of art which attempts to depict the artist's subjective emotions rather than eternal reality

of Expressionism;

DK Eyewitness Companion Art says;
Style conveying heightened sensibility through distortion of colour, drawing, space, scale, form or intense subject matter or a combination of these. 

Wikipedia says;
Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.

Maybe expressionism is not necessarily showing the artist's own true feelings but may be contrived for artistic effect.

How can I answer the question?

so how might (drawing) act as an emotional conduit between artist and viewer?
Is it the image, the medium or the act that brought the art work into being that makes it‘expressive’ or ‘expressionist’? 

 I think that interpretation of art is a very subjective thing that is bound up in past influences and experiences. We understand and bond with some works because we can identify with the mindset of the artist that produced them. Its easier to be expressive with a medium that doesn't require a lot of preparation which is why drawings and sketchbooks are so attractive. The presence of "errors" allow a liveliness in work that makes it expressive. So I guess my short answer to the question above is all three and it would take an essay, or even a book, to fully explore this concept.