I’ve posted before on how important drawing is for me (HERE, and HERE). It’s an exercise, what a pianist might do when no one is listening. Sometimes I’ll set a drawing aside, as something worth keeping, but mostly, I put the sketch books on a shelf when they’re full, or in a portfolio in a closet. Seldom look at them again.
It’s not about “representation;” they are exercises in seeing: in double vision–seeing what is there, and seeing, and translating that to what I see within. It’s what I see within that matters. I like to draw things with textures: tree bark, rocks, broken pavement. Here is a photo of some things I found on a walk yesterday, and a drawing I made from them. The scanner did a poor job of catching the detail; pencil doesn’t take as well as ink. When I’m working with crow-quill, or a new Sacura .01 ultrafine pen, … I can spend hours at this… like meditation.
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Tag: drawing
#392
Drawing the thread, stitching the world together, a line at a time.
Drawing calms me. It’s very physical; I don’t need the muscular strength of throwing pottery on a wheel (something I did full time for almost 10 years)–but requires every bit the control and coordination. There’s always an element of drawing in my painting–even in the most abstract pieces, and when I get away from that, something is lost in the finished work.
Even the trash assemblages are a form of drawing, not with marks on a flat surface–but in three dimensions, creating lines, geometric or chaotic forms, tonal variations.
My need for this–to return to drawing, day after day without breaks, has progressed–gradually at first, when I returned to making art in July of 2012, to the point now that if I go two or three days without drawing my level of physical anxiety increases and my thoughts spiral toward patterns of depression.
At the end of a day of shopping, cooking, preparing a canvas, taking care of this business or that–I may be exhausted, but I have to take the time–even if only a half an hour sketching figures from an anatomy book.
I didn’t realize until recently–how important this was for my emotional and physical health. It’s that integration of interior and exterior perception… stitching together the fabric of reality.
The metaphor calls to mind, my mother, who was deeply skilled at both drawing–and a seamstress/tailor. I stitch together those ancient bonds, as well, memories and the present. As with poetry. Word by word. Line by line.
Love affair with Crow Quill pens
I have a love affair with crow quill pens. The finest nib… #102. with its barrel shaft, it holds ink longer than any other point–no dipping in and out in and out. Gives you time to enter what you’re working on. Delicate, flexible–draw dynamic lines… from the finest to bold, spattering static electric stutters.
Once, the instrument of choice for cartoonists. Can’t imagine Walt Kelly’s Pogo…or Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes, without a crow quill nib in their pen holder. Been nothing to compare with the quality of their drawings in cartoons since cartoonists went digital.
Stippling is mediation for me.
Who else out there loves the crow quill?
See: Example
Drawing is the Mother of All Visual Arts
I sit in the El. I look at the man in the seat across the aisle. I see lines, mass… shadows. He leaves at the next station. A young women takes his seat. I watch, but from the reflection in the window. I don’t want her to think I’m leering at her.
It’s what I do when I’m drawing—working intensely at learning, doing studies from photos, coming back from figure drawing classes at Fleishers.
It becomes a mode of seeing. Seeing. Not representation. Seeing, and process. Like Chinese brush work.
Though most of my finished work is abstract, I think of drawing as the mother of all visual art. Nothing else schools you, trains you—molds your very brain to a way of SEEING… to an attention to vision, like drawing. Nothing.
I’m getting better. I’ve said this before. It’s an obsession with me. How 40 years ago or more, I gave up on being a visual artist. Because, I thought… I couldn’t draw. Not well enough. Not with the apparent ease of my mother, my uncle. I thought it was.. just ‘talent.’… and I didn’t have it.
I didn’t understand.. it was about work. Practice. Drawing bones. Learning anatomy. and just drawing… everything.
Looking back—I had the “talent” thing. But talent.. whatever the fuck that is, might be the difference between commercial skill, and “art”… whatever the fuck that is… but there’s no way to avoid the work. A musician… you have to train your fingers, your voice, learn scales—even if you don’t know the words for music theory.
I do constructions. From found objects. Nothing to do with drawing that you might imagine… but it does. It’s not different, but as one medium differs from another, as charcoal differs from pencil from pastel from pen and ink.. from paint.
Drawing is the mother of all the visual arts—because nothing, nothing so intensely trains the eye to attention, to see…. to see… to see
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 