The question, “Why Draw?” is probably best answered by the question, “Why Not?” But on Monday night, landscape architect Diana Balmori and illustrator Jorge Colombo took the question by the horns in an entertaining presentation at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan branch "Author at the Library" series. 

Ms. Balmori offered a capsule history of the art of landscape design through an artist’s perspective, saying that this discipline grew out of landscape painting, whose foundations are, of course, drawing. From the 17th century of Le Nôtre, designer of the gardens of Versailles (whose father and grandfather were gardeners), to the creation of the great parks of 19th-century Paris, landscape designers sought to create a visual unit out of a series of disconnected objects—through drawing.

When the Modernist movement banished landscape design from the table of the arts during the Bauhaus years, said Ms. Balmori, it became a branch of science, industry and horticulture. Only in the last few decades has it become one of the arts of our time, and in the process, has initiated the search for a new vocabulary of expression. 

Botanical Research Institute of Texas; Balmori Associates.

Ms. Balmori showed examples from her own visual research, which she conducts through keen observation and quick on-site sketches in her notebooks. Using a 6B mechanical pencil, she studies, organizes and expresses her felt observations through drawing. 

Drawing, she says, is key to her design process because it the most truthful representation of her ideas. While she generally gives herself a 10-minute limit for sketching, she often takes quite a bit longer than that for observation. Her advice is to store the memory of the scene in front of you; capture the truth of the moment quickly, forgetting the unimportant details.

In addition to her own lively sketchbook pages, she showed examples of drawings and presentations by noted colleagues, from the Modernist designer Lawrence Halperin to her contemporary, Stig Andersson. The search for a new vocabulary for presentation drawings in the digital age was evident in images of the land reformed through imagination and rendered in a free-form style that seems to portray a felt atmosphere as much as the objects in the designs, and their statistical components, evident in the image above.

Jorge Colombo, Vinalhaven, ME

Jorge Colombo, widely known for his New Yorker magazine covers, showed his evolution as an artist, starting with early sketches of the urban landscape, to his current drawings created in his iPad. While he often draws people for his assignment work, left to his own devices, he said, it is the landscape the fascinates him. “You understand best the place where you are," he said, "by translating it into an abstraction of lines, shapes and shadows.”

Earlier in his career, when drawing people, he often sketched on the subway or in the streets of his neighborhood. He would then take his sketches back to the studio and make precisely rendered watercolors of his subjects—people he saw from day to day who caught his interest for their style and vibe. But, he said, if he made a mistake, the entire painting was ruined.

Flash forward to the iPhone, which in 2009 replaced his laptop as a communication device and enabled him to permanently leave the studio behind. He quickly took up the Brushes app, which he said at first seemed to give results that looked "as if I were “drawing with my elbow.” 

He showed one of the first iPhone drawing he had made, which was a series of brushy streaks that more or less defined a figure. But in a matter of months he was on his way, making drawings of New York City, San Francisco, Berlin, and Rome that have gradually become highly detailed and atmospheric at the same time. 

One of the great pleasures of drawing on the iPhone [now the iPad], he says, is that you can draw anywhere, at any time of day or night—and many of his drawings capture the spirit of place under the magic of a night-time sky.

So the question now becomes how to draw in the digital age—and the answer, the two artists agreed, is simple. Use whatever is at hand and try everything at your disposal. Pens, brushes, paint, iPhone, iPad, computer—they are all tools that, with practice, become an extension of your hand.

Diana Balmori is the author of Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (AD Primer, 2014).

Jorge Colombo is the author of New York Finger Paintings (Chronicle, 2011). Jorge Colombo in DART.