Intuition

Intuition isn’t innately dumb or smart, and it can be educated. The process is a combination of constructive critical analysis and attentive and persistent doing. Throughout the process, you have to talk to the drawing and about the drawing. Each next set of marks and choices becomes smaller, but the cycle continues and the process must always be active, alert, and vital.

More than you think

It’s easy to think you know what drawing is until you ask it to solve problems posed by the imagination, the unseen, the mysterious, the complexity of reality, the connective tissue of the human and natural worlds, the depth of the human experience, the sound of eyes freshly opened. Then it becomes a language capable of grappling with a world constantly bubbling up new universes. Its flexibility, nuances, capacities, potentials, universality and persistence get called upon. It’s an act that, by its nature, draws out aspects of the human experience that do not as easily emerge through the act of forming meaning through words.

Drawing, like writing...

Drawing, like writing, is not something you learn to do but something you keep learning to do.

Draw!

You want to draw? Draw! It doesn't matter what it looks like. It only matters what act draws out of you.

Drawing the figure

Commonly, a figure drawing is expected to demonstrate technical proficiency and an understanding of the form, volume and surface of the figure as revealed by light, bone, musculature and position. But this is the figure seen in its physical form.

Seeing the figure in its social, psychological, emotional or spiritual form is another story. Seeking this, the drawing language often changes as it does in the work of Kathe Kollwitz, William Kentridge,       Pablo Picasso, Mauricio Lasinsky, George Grosz, Ralph Steadman, Alberto Giacometti and more.

For such artists the task is to bring their inner life into synch with the inner lives of the figures. From recognition to empathy to expression the figure emerges in its fullness.

Drawing the figure

In teaching students to draw the figure, I often think that they forget they actually have a body, too. They accept proportions and shapes in their drawings that make no visual sense. So it becomes important to me to remind them of this wonderful thing they have. I encourage them to be conscious of their bodies, how they move, when they reach their limits, how they encase and exhibit feelings. Pay attention to their bodies when then walk and when they shower.

I will also ask the model to take a physically demanding pose, hold it for a minute or two, then ask the students to take the same pose. This gives them some empathy for the model and some awareness of the feelings that result form the pose.

I will also ask the model to take a physically demanding pose and ask the students to draw, not the figure, but the tensions, stresses and internal dynamics of the pose. All is an attempt to go beyond seeing the figure to also feeling the figure, from looking at the outside to thinking from the inside.

No need to draw?

Though everyone draws as a child, many remain content to resolve the beautiful and complex human form (their own form) in a few struggling lines and shapes. So the question is: If we all begin naturally to draw, and there are many powerful reasons to draw, then why don’t we continue to draw? Why do we build an educational system that essentially emphasizes the word to the exclusion of the mark? A system that lets drawing’s natural introduction to visual language stop at the stick figure? That allows this language, universal and common to all, to simply wither for all but a very few?

A good drawing

A good drawing is an organic thing. It refuses to have its future planned for it. It has a life of its own. It asks questions of the artist, who’d best listen. It provokes a healthy struggle with the artist. It wants to be open to possibilities. It sometimes even wants the chance to fail.

What is a drawing?

A drawing can be many things; and, in some ways, it’s not unfair to expect all things from a good drawing: craft, substance, character, integrity, evidence of a smart and sensitive hand. But each drawing has its own purpose; and while it will always reveal something about its maker and act as a mirror to the artist’s self, it can be measured honestly in relation to its own intent.

How?

How can we have faith in the possibilities of drawing, of images, ideas, narratives, experiences being “drawn out” simply by the accumulation of marks? Simply, such faith is affirmed by histories of marks on surfaces made by greater and lesser artists alike, grappling with problems and reaching powerful conclusions, often using less than a thimbleful of graphite, a puddle of ink or a few inches of burnt stick. Images on the walls of caves, carvings on rocks, markings on papyrus all still speak to us.  

Drawing as research

What results if we think of drawing as a tool for research? We expect to get at something, open it up, fine tune it, probe it in a way we could never do without thinking of drawing in this way. We expect that we can solve problems we couldn’t without it. We anticipate problems posed and solved will generate new problems. We discover that the problems solved give us new facility with the tool and new possibilities for seeing.