What We Do When We Draw

"We should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches." Goethe 

"The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing... should be taught to every child just as writing is..." Ruskin

I've just returned from teaching a drawing course at Dillington House, so I thought I'd take a look at what acknowledged masters and art experts have to say about the subject. What I found was a wealth of quotes, stressing drawing's importance that were vehement in their praise of drawing almost to the point of dogmatism. From Berger to De Botton, Degas to Dali, all the comments I found pointed to drawing's honesty and directness; its value as a discipline and as an aid to comprehension. And the general consensus of opinion was "Won't draw? Can't paint'!

"I can see it," a student once complained to me, "so why can't I draw it?"

"Because you don't fully understand it," I replied.

But when we look at a person, a pot or a pear, exactly what is it that we don't understand?

The kind of seeing we habitually engage in is a kind of glib exercise in orientation. It's our way of reassuring ourselves that everything is just the way it normally is. Our over-loaded brains reduce everyday visual stimuli to a series of symbols that we are all too quick to discard. Like a sight-seer on a tour bus, we click the shutter and move on.
               


But this facile way of using the gift of sight is nothing new:

"Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees... and that's all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the causes of beauty, and penetrate the minutest loveliness... Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane." Ruskin

The full quote is on my post for 26 November 2009.

                The purpose of drawing, then, is not to make a pretty picture but to become more intimate with your subject than mere looking allows. Drawing requires that you slow the pace of your life to a more manageable speed. It requires that you contemplate and think about the world around you. It also requires that you think about what you want.

"Unlike painting and sculpture [drawing] is the process by which the artist makes clear to himself, and not to the spectator, what he is doing." Ayrton

And dictionary definitions of the word 'draw' are manifold. It appears that when you draw, you might also be pulling out or dragging forth.

Like it or not, when you sit down in front of that person, pot or pear, you could also be on the point of revealing yourself to yourself.

"It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well." Clark

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Providence And The Failure of Eccentricity

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."  Goethe

I love this quote. Whenever I share it with those who are unfamiliar with it, I sense they have an instant feeling of kinship with it and a keen hope that it might, in fact, be true. But what does Goethe mean by Providence moving? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Providence as: the protective care of God or Nature as a spiritual power. That's a bit of a fuzzy notion for a rational, skeptical 21st Century human being, isn't it? Given that it will rain on your washing and toast always lands buttered side down, how can the whole universe get going just because you've made a decison? - a very dubious notion indeed, when you consider that there are now supposed to be more than 7 billion of us all trying to get God and Nature to dance the way we want them to.

My own explanation is a little less grandiose and based on recent findings in neuroscience about cognitive disinhibiton. According to Harvard University psychologist, Shelley Carson, 'cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival' and artists, apparently, have it in spades. Put simply, because artists are distracted neither by the rain on their washing or carpet fluff on their toast, their brains are free to concentrate on other stuff; stuff that other brains are filtering out: colours, textures, relationships, the strangeness of the familiar, the beauty of the banal and most importantly, new ways of doing things. Cognitive disinhibition also explains why so many arty types and geniuses are just that little bit eccentric.

If you want examples of the way the brain filters out 'irrelevancies', check out The Monkey Business Illusion or think about the last time you drove a new car and then noticed, as if for the first time, how many others just like yours were on the road.

I visited my oldest daughter in Manchester recently and we took in the Ford Madox Brown 
exhibtion at the fantastic Manchester City Art Gallery. When Harriet got home, she realised that FMB's The Last Of England, was on the cover of a book she's been reading for quite some time. 'I must walk around with my eyes shut,' she lamented. Not really. Ford Madox Brown's masterful evocation of the great emigrating movement of the 1850s just wasn't important to her.

Now it is.

Providence moving? It's been moving all along. I think what Goethe was talking about was giving ourselves a chance to catch up with it...