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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