Wednesday, June 24, 2015

As the language of drawing develops

A mark and a scribble become shapes expanding, bumping and layering. These struggle to mean a little something as they become simple shapes and stick figures. With effort these gain character and dimensionality, which feed fantasy, imagination and personal engagement. Like athletic skill, drawing skill becomes a sign of “prowess.” What has happened, step-by-step, is drawing opening eyes to the complicated and complex, both without and within.

Then formal education intrudes. The energy of youth is bound up and applied to bowls of fruit, shoes and “the portrait.” After years of neglect, the young artist, left to plug away hit or miss, struggles to attain a higher level of “coloring inside the lines.” Uber-muscled men, buxom, attenuated women, robots and imaginary beasts live side-by-side with apples, pears, teapots and mugs. Drawing is representational drawing, making a convincing graphical representation of a thing to gain control of the thing—becomes an important task in adolescence.

The ability to make an accurately observed, convincing representation of a chunk of the real world is a traditional and established aim of the drawing process. Approached correctly, this is a challenge to look carefully, to understand the correct relationship between surface and underlying structure, to draw in a methodical and disciplined way and to exercise patience and persistence. Many who draw build a career on this approach using a range of techniques and decisions to maintain the integrity and life of their images: manipulation of light and shadow, composition, viewpoint, selection of subject matter.

As with any approach, a disciplined, representational one can sabotage itself if it hides behind the seduction of pure technique. When skilled practitioners of this approach “let go,” the discipline and control are in harmonious balance with marks that are alive and vital. This can be seen in the drawing of the French artist Ingres, for example.

Some mastery of this more “academic” approach to drawing is essential for any serious practitioner. It builds confidence, brings the real world under control, disciplines seeing and clarifies the intent and value of self-imposed limitations.

Moving beyond any comfortable limitations of this approach requires faith, trust, inner demands of expression or conception, permission to risk and even the ability to trick oneself. But the advantages are rewarding, even if confusion and disappointment are part of the process. The object is unburdened from its “thingness” and becomes trigger, metaphor, place-holder for emotion, narrative or memory; motive for abstraction; or pure aesthetic pleasure. Reality acts as the armature for sustained investigation in any of these modes.

Of course, drawing is not so rigid a discipline that in practice it must be defined through any single approach. The academic and the experimental, the representational and the abstract, the figurative and the non-objective, the densely layered and the sparsely minimal, any combination of modes, even contradictory ones, is possible.

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 drawing. We expect we can solve problems we couldn’t as easily without it. We anticipate problems posed and solved to generate new problems. We discover that the problems solved give us new facility with the tool and new possibilities for its use.

And this is, in fact, what happens. In a mind, an imagination, a head packed and struggling with ideas, the marks that accumulate into a sketch or study crystallize images, make them tangible, identify limitations, generate new possibilities. In this dialogue between potentiality and actuality, drawing is a powerful tool.

Drawing, which begins for everyone as raw, naked and instinctive, ends for those who conscientiously pursue it as pervading the body, a part of the self, driving curiosity and problem solving. What happens along the way is a consequence of how talent, education, predilection, persistence and obsession catalyze each other as each individual “collides” with the world.



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