Drawing into the Open

Stepping from time into space...

Lately I’ve taken up drawing again. I’ve always enjoyed making art—or trying to—and eons ago, before the pandemic, I even took a beginning drawing course at a small art studio two blocks away from my home.

For a couple of months, I went to the studio weekly and worked at copying a small image of a man looking into the distance, his cloak billowing in the wind. First I worked at it in pencil, drawing and erasing and redrawing each line. Working slowly and incrementally at reproducing his face, his hair, the shadows of his hair and cloak, the effects produced by the wind.

Some people would probably describe the experience as painstaking, and between the classes, when I was away from it, I felt impatient, even frustrated. But in the studio, doing the work, I felt focused and even soothed. I escaped into the task, as the other students, each focused on their particular project, did. For that hour in the studio each week, my mind stood still, and the ordinary chatter rattling in my brain was silenced.

Now that I’ve returned to drawing, I’ve noticed how different it feels from a narrative, and I’ve been trying to identify how and why. Of course, drawing involves a sequence of steps. I’m working from one of a series of books for drawing human and animal bodies called Morpho: Anatomy for Artists, by Michel Lauricella. Simplified Form, the book in the series I’m currently using, demonstrates ways to visually break the human body into simple shapes that can be combined and layered upon to draw human figures. It presents sketches and detailed descriptions of the parts of a human figure: hands, feet, legs, the head, the torso, the pelvis, arms and legs.

Now, from the sketches I’ve done so far, I could create a story of my practice: examining the image, trying to recreate the shape in the book, drawing, erasing, and redrawing to the correct proportions, etc. But that story wouldn’t really recreate the actual experience. Because the setting down of lines on the paper with my pencil isn’t really the main activity. The work revolves around slowing down to stillness, engaging my focus, looking at the shape I’m drawing over and over, erasing a line then straightening or curving it. Time almost disappears because so much of the work happens when I appear to be doing nothing in particular.

Paradoxically, the act of drawing lines doesn’t feel linear; it feels recursive. I make a line to represent the lower leg, then pause. I examine everything so far, and one part or another feels off. The new line now makes the upper leg look misshapen; it doesn’t fit the hip or makes the foot now appear too small. The thigh looks too narrow, or maybe it takes up too much space. So, I move randomly from piece to piece of the total image. Drawing. Erasing. Realigning. Shading. Erasing the shading. Erasing and redrawing lines in a different part of the body. Staring again at the original image.

In some ways, this reminds me of writing. It involves the same putting down on the page and then revising. But when I write, I feel much more conscious of pointing the text in an overall direction. I’m trying to carry the reader along from point a to point b. Drawing feels more like writing a poem, but even poetry is linear; the words travel from left to right, and the lines move from top to bottom. And when you reach the bottom—as writer or reader—you’re done.

A narrative moves in time, even if the sequence of that time is manipulated by the narrator. We can have flashes forward and back, but the reader’s experience is progressive. I begin at the beginning of the text (book, story, play, film) and pass through it in time until the end; I don’t start at page 67 of a 300 page novel, skip ahead to page 213, bounce back to page 5, and jump to page 100, even if that would mean reading the text in chronological order. The text is only likely to be coherent if I start at page 1 and finish at page 300.

But I don’t experience a drawing in time; I experience it in its two-dimensional space. My eyes can begin wherever they like, and can travel from there to any part of the space I choose. Certainly there are techniques the artist can use to draw my attention to one place or another, ways the artist can emphasize or try to entice me where they want my sight to go. But there’s no narrative as such.

I can create or explore a story—about the artist (whether someone else or myself) and when the drawing was created, about the circumstances of the creation, about the content or images the drawing represents. Or I can create the story of my looking at a drawing purely as a viewer.

But I can experience the painting without any of those narratives; no particular progression commands my encounter. My observation is disconnected from time. I can look at the drawing once, experience an impression, and walk away; I can spend an extended period of time examining it, then never see it again; I can view it one day, then return a week later, then come back to it again and again. Each viewing can be its own encounter. And there’s no syntax or linear structure I have to navigate or employ to evoke a meaningful experience.

Unlike a narrative, the drawing can immediately be encountered whole. I can step back and apprehend all of it in a moment, and that moment can be brief or extended. When I look at a piece of visual art, it annihilates time. In fact, that’s what I struggle with the most when I look at art in a museum, a gallery, even in a book: I want time to stop. I want only to be present in that moment, but I know that the moment is only temporary because the clock time of ordinary life is pursuing me, pushing me to keep moving.

It reminds me how much, for me at least, narratives move toward closure. Not that they can only be read a single way. Not that they can’t be reread, producing a new insight or perspective. But their structure is one of closure, completeness. And again, for me, this separates it from the drawing that do and that I observe. It’s not—in and of itself—discursive. It’s simply present; it simply is.

I am, unquestionably, no artist. It’s something I play with. And I hasten to acknowledge that what I’m saying about drawing or painting or sketching (or making other visual art, for that matter) may not at all match how most real artists conceive of or carry out what they do. I only know that the drawing I’m doing now creates a kind of opening—not just for my drawing potentially for my writing—that fascinates and excites me.