The Importance of Drawing (and an invitation to a workshop)
Olive Trees at Montmajour, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
“The very first things that we know were made by human beings on the planet are drawings. They are not writing, they are not buildings, they are drawings….. Learning how to draw is a very important part of becoming a rounded human being.”
Could this activity, sensitive not only to what is happening in the outside world but to what is happening within the drawer-in terms of sensations, thoughts, memories- be a potent method of mindfulness -reconnecting self to the natural world.
Read more ...and to also experience a workshop, “To practice observational drawing as a way of opening internal and external space” by Marika Tyler-Clark student at The Slade, UCL)
Van Gogh called it,“The root of everything,” John Berger said, “for the artist, drawing is discovery” and Andrew Marr described it as an activity far too important to be left to the artist; the act of drawing has accompanied human beings since the beginning of time. Many artists would agree that drawing is the most immediate way to visually express ideas and experiences and has the capacity to connect the drawer with the space outside and/or within themselves. It contains within its experience of making marks, some of the fundamental elements of being alive.
Andrew Marr “I can go back to a drawing ten years ago and remember not only what it looked like, but where I was sitting, what it smelt like and what it was that I was feeling.”(interview with Janet Mc Kenzie, Studio International.) He has drawn for most of his life and although untrained, has turned to it as a daily practice with life enhancing benefits, especially felt when he was recovering from a life -threatening stroke.
The artist Sargy Mann also hailed the importance of drawing, attributing the ability to “see more, see better” as a potential outcome, especially if done by “look(ing) at the real world as intensely and as freely from visual preconceptions as you can and try to record as truthfully as you can what the experience is.”(Perceptual systems, an inexhaustible reservoir of information and the importance of art -Sargy Mann 2016 SP Books.) And this belief was enough to keep him painting all his life, guided by his inner sense of vision, even when he became totally blind.
The great art critic, writer, poet and painter John Berger dedicated a whole book of essays to the almost metaphysical properties of drawing,
“It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation brings you closer to the object, until finally you are as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edges of what you have become.” (Life Drawing/ Berger on Drawing, Occasional Press 2005)
His essay on Van Gogh,“Vincent” is perhaps one of the most moving and reverential pieces of writing about the great artist’s process of documenting his intimate relationship with the Provence landscape.. It acts as an inspiring call to us all - to take the time to connect, to see and make marks that serve the experience of being both human and part of the nature of this world.
“What do we see? Thyme, other shrubs, limestone rocks on a hillside, in the distance a plain, in the sky birds. He dips his pen into brown ink, watches and marks the paper. The gesture comes from his hand, his wrist, arm, shoulder, perhaps even the muscles in his neck, yet the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are not physically his and which only become visible when he draws them. Currents of energy? The energy of a tree’s growth, of a plant’s search for life, of a branch’s need for accommodation with its neighbouring branches, of the roots of thistles and shrubs, of the weights of rocks lodged on a slope, of the sunlight, of the attraction of the shade for whatever is alive and suffers from the heat, of the Mistral from the north which has fashioned the rock strata. My list is arbitrary; what is not arbitrary is the pattern his strokes make on the paper. The pattern is like a fingerprint. Whose?
( Vincent/ Berger on Drawing, Occasional Press 2005 first appeared in Aftonbladet, Stockholm,20th August. Published in Shape of a Pocket by Bloomsbury,2002)
Marika Tyler-Clark, a student at the Slade has offered the following invitation to join her in a drawing workshop.
Here it is as a helpful suggestion of how to enjoy a drawing experience as a way not only to document what we see, but how we feel while we are seeing . It could serve as a useful and powerful way to approach the drawing for the Artivism in response to HS2.
To practice observational drawing as a way of opening internal and external space
This is a very open sharing of a practice and ideas based solely on my own experience of drawing in the landscape, and different strands of reading. I would be interested to see how it resonates with other’s experience and practices!
Observation can create the sense of an opening of our perception that brings us into closer contact with nature.
Painter Sargy Mann talks about how the process of painting/drawing from observation heightens the intensity of our perception, how we can learn to see more.
Here’s a beautiful section from his essay Perceptual Systems, An Inexhaustible Reservoir of Information and The Importance of Art, on Rembrandt’s painting:
‘There is a portrait by Rembrandt, a portrait of an old woman sitting in a rather severe armchair. We look at it and say- yes, brilliant, this is how she would look- but this is nothing, small beer, loose change. What that painting contains is an experience of more, arrived at by one of the greatest painters of all time through thousands of hours of drawing and painting. What Rembrandt saw when he looked at a fellow human being- only a few feet from him- brush in hand- was something of such richness and depth; he saw it with such comprehension of human feeling as to be quite unintelligible to us; except to some extent, through our comprehension of his painting. He saw and felt the space separating him and Margarita’s head he saw and felt and understood the structure of that skull and the spare muscles and flesh that encased it, he saw and felt and understood and was deeply moved by the intelligence within that skull which animated its appearance. And all of this without words, importantly, without words. It came through looking and touching, with paint, the canvas.’
Goethe reflects on the capacity to train and develop one’s level of perception, and parallel to this, he speaks of an opening inward.
"Each phenomenon in nature, rightly observed, wakens in us a new organ of inner understanding."
(He)argued that it is not enough to train only the outer senses and the intellect. He maintained that, as a person's abilities to see outwardly improve, so do his or her inner recognitions and perceptions become more sensitive:
‘ As philosopher L. L. Whyte writes, Goethe's central ambition "...was nothing less than to see all nature as one, to discover an objective principle of continuity running through the whole, from the geological rocks to the processes of aesthetic creation. Moreover, this discovery of the unity of nature implies the simultaneous self-discovery of man, since man could thereby come to understand himself better."(from Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, editors. Albany, NY:State University of New York press, 1988)
For me, the beauty of drawing is that it is the physical meeting place/ threshold between this inner and outer space. The practice allows nature to enter, to be drawn into one’s being, whilst the internal nature is also awakened, and drawn out.
‘The same space spreads through all existences:
World-inner-space. Through us, tranquilly,
Birds fly unswerving. O, I who would grow
Look outward, and within me grows the tree’ (Rilke ‘Plaint ‘)
Preparations
You will need either a sketch book or paper firmly taped to a board and a personal choice of drawing implements eg. a range of graphite pencils, charcoal or conteI stick or pencil form, pastel, pen(reed, quill or fountain). A good rubber is a handy tool too, not only for correcting but for putting in areas of light. If you are using charcoal of any kind, try and choose a paper with a tooth. Pen and ink can be especially successful on watercolour paper.
Sometimes, defining the edges of the drawing is a helpful place to start. Everything within the borders you choose will have something to relate to in terms of space.
Drawing within the Landscape
Take time before beginning to draw, just simply to look.
Instead of trying to focus your vision on a specific point, straining to look outward, try to soften your vision, focus on the sense of the light entering your eyes, entering your skin.
Feel the space you are in, and the space between your own body and the object.
Sargy Mann explains that our field of vision is split between seeing with our macular ‘The small disc… which only sees about as much as your two thumbs side by side at arm's length’, which has a much higher resolution and sees in more detail’ than the rest of our vision, and the periphery, which for most people remains almost ‘entirely unconscious’. (Perceptual Systems, An Inexhaustible Reservoir of Information and The Importance of Art, Sargy Mann2016 SPBooks)
To try to expand and work more consciously from your peripheral vision, brings your awareness to the essential forms and underlying rhythms, to the entirety of the space and the relationship between the object and yourself within it. Again it can feel like dropping into a different mental state that is both softened and heightened, allowing the subject to enter your perception more deeply.
In beginning to draw ask yourself ,does this way of looking stimulate an impulse to make particular marks? Play with this rather than trying to just create an exact representation of what you see. Do lots of quick drawings without looking at the paper, but just feeling the marks. Take the focus away from the end result of the drawing you are doing, and instead see it as a form action that is stimulating a conversation with what you are observing.
‘A carving, like a song, is not a thing, it is an action. When you feel the song within you, you sing it. When you sense a form emerging from the ivory, you release it’. (Image making in Arctic Art, in Sign, Image, Symbol E. Carpenter 1966 )
Try drawing using your left (or non-dominant) hand. I find this can allow you to break away from habitual mark making. It can also create fragility and intensify the risk in your mark making. You might also want to use both hands to draw at once, or explore the difference in the feeling and sensitivity of marks of the marks you create. (Marika Tyler- Clark, workshop in drawing for the Joseph Beuys group, UCL )