This weekend I caught the last day of an exhibition of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci at Southampton Art Gallery. The sketches were beautiful, detailed drawings of anatomy, plants, technology and pictographs. It was mindblowing that they had been drawn over 500 years ago with an ink quill, or chalk. One of the elements of these drawings that interested me most in terms of how they were made was the amount of marks that were being used outside of the key object in the drawing rather than within it.

I really loved that many of these drawings were clearly a method to better understand how different objects (e.g. human bodies) work; while other drawings were using this understanding to design new technologies. Despite the drawings being in one sense very functional they were equally beautiful works of art.

One of the drawings stood out as very different to the rest. This drawing depicted a storm reaping destruction on a landscape. Apparently towards the end of Leonardo da Vinci’s life, he began to use the same techniques that he’d used to understand how objects work to think about death and destruction. I really like this use of drawing to think; not just to explain.