October 28, 2009

I'm thinking about what drawing is, and if you can learn to draw.

One thing it is not: and that's a trick of the fingers or even of the hand. It's an energy originating in the solar plexus that gains momentum in the chest, traveling through the arm and out, making the charcoal or pencil or pen an extension of the arm. That's why you might not be able to learn it. One dances with the line and feels its lyricism, a pulsing flow of energy from the heart. The line should look like this, and I think that's why we fall in love with it.

Maybe you can learn to do this, not by instruction, but by lots of practice. You can try to call up the energy in your body, recognize it, and encourage more of it. Soft brown butcher paper with anything that makes a mark will serve you well, especially if you don't focus on trying to draw something. Which brings us to this:

Why do we represent objects by using line, when there are no lines around anything in nature(except the "edge of a shadowed plane," as I was told in classes)? If you set out to draw a face or a tree or a Bartlett pear, you drag the pencil around to enclose a shape. Then you put in smudges for shadows and depth. We might do this because we were brought up to draw this way; we might do it because we are really in love with line and don't know. Artists know it. Artists know it well.

PW