When Thomas Micchelli, artist, writer and curator of the Visual Resources Collection at our library, and Stephen Talasnik, adjunct faculty member in drawing, first came to see me to propose an exhibition about the process of drawing across disciplines, I knew it was a show we had to do at Cooper Union. The college, with its School of Art, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and Albert Nerken School of Engineering, is an appropriate place to explore the interrelationships between these three fields through the creative act of idea notation.

It has always seemed to me that the process of mark making as a system of communicating a thought was a far more universal act than drawing to describe an object. Yet that initial mark/idea is often seen as preparatory and can lead one to yearn for a realization of the thought into another form that is more tangible, real, tactile and made from a plastic material.

Drawing is a conversation: private, personal, introspective, exploratory, descriptive and elucidating. We begin by talking to ourselves, for ourselves, and then take a chance on sharing these visually noted thoughts and images with another. This new dialogue then leads us to emotional, intellectual, spiritual and sometimes even physical arenas in response to what we have learned from ourselves and others in the process. A picture can indeed be worth more than words in its inherent ability to evoke unpredictable interpretation and response.

The described point, line, plane and/or volume are deciphered and uncoded by the eye and mind of the beholder in an attempt to make intellectual and perceptual sense of this visual information.

Drawing at the School of Art is taught as a discreet discipline, yet remains inseparable from other discipline areas of the school. It is sometimes explored as preparatory for painting, printmaking, sculpture, design, animation and even photography, film and video. Other drawings, when done, are done. There is no other intention or need to transform the drawn image into another form or material. I believe this is true in architecture, too, and when I walk across Astor Place to visit and observe my colleagues and their students studying science or engineering, I am struck by their ever-present need to communicate through symbols and charts and graphs and other referential marks. We all drew before we wrote, and we always knew what we were saying even when our language eluded others. We all want to leave our mark.

About the same time that Tom and Steve were beginning to formulate their proposal (later, Steve's professional commitments in Japan and Austria prevented him from continuing on the project, but Tom then invited Steve to participate by exhibiting his own work), the college was presented with a remarkable gift that created an opportunity of great importance and convergence.

When I studied drawing more than thirty years ago at Cooper Union, one name, one man, Robert Gwathmey, rang throughout the school as a defining master of the medium. He could draw. His students learned to draw. There was no mistaking it for anything else. Now, his son Charles Gwathmey, architect and trustee of the college, has donated funds to Cooper Union to endow a professorship in drawing to be shared by the School of Art and the School of Architecture. I began a discussion with John Hejduk, Dean of the School of Architecture, and with the faculty about what this professorship could bring to the college and who should be the first person to hold this honor. We agreed to invite Frank Stella.

This fall 1997, as we present Stung by Splendor to students and colleagues at Cooper Union and beyond, Frank Stella will be in residence lecturing, leading discussions, critiquing student work and showing his own drawings in the exhibition. We also asked Charles Gwathmey to exhibit his drawings in the show. It is a remarkable convergence of people and ideas that we hope will focus our creative community of artists, architects, designers, engineers and scientists on drawings: how they are created, why they are created, how they work and what they mean to the creators and, now, to us.

We have brought together a collection of creative minds that will prove to us the ability of drawing to transcend discipline-specific definitions of the creative moment.

Karen Bausman, Leslie Gill, Charles Gwathmey, Chuck Hoberman, Jenny Holzer, Russell Hulse, Hillary Leone, Maya Lin, Jennifer Macdonald, David Rabinowitch, Robert Siegel, Frank Stella and Steve Talasnik all draw. As Tom and I and our invaluable assistant, Patrick Grenier, visited their homes, studios, offices or galleries, we were struck by both the differences and the similarities in their creative process. Tom's remarkable curatorial vision for the show started with this list of people and a familiarity with their work. The specific drawings we included were discovered, then chosen through the process of meeting these artists and mining to uncover moments when they were stung and in turn stung us. The exhibition is about this work but also about Tom Micchelli's desire and ability to curate a collection of coherent and divergent, yet sympathetic, working drawings, most of which have never been exhibited before or thought of by the artist as created for exhibition. He has brought together a group of well- known visionaries who have agreed to let us into their creative process by allowing us to exhibit work of theirs from the back room, the bottom drawer, the notebook, the sketchbook or the drawing table.

This project could not have been realized without steadfast support from members of The Cooper Union community, including Camilla Brooks, Patrick Grenier, Jay Iselin, Patrick Keeffe, Mindy Lang, Brett Snyder, Roger Tooze and Barbara White.

This catalog and the exhibition are testimony to the artists and to Tom Micchelli's ability to lead us into both familiar and unknown visual territory. We are indebted to him for this vision and his ability to pull out the new, the old, the first, the beginning thoughts and notations of some of the most productive, provocative and influential creative minds of our time for our illuminating review.

These artists kept these drawings for reasons known only to themselves. Now we have the opportunity to share in these creative working moments in all their splendor.