Signatures

There has been so much written about drawing, and how to draw, and what it means when we draw. I have shelves full of these books, and I thumb through them diligently, looking for some clue as to how to improve, or some easy insight. It's as if there may be a missing essential piece of information about drawing, that someone else has, or once had, and could be transferred by reading about it. As a child, like most drawers, I drew alot, and it wasn't necessary to know anything at all- so I can't say what would be different now. I compare it to handwriting, or signing your name. A signature is indelibly the signatory's, and only with great difficulty can it be changed, or, for that matter, copied. A drawing obviously has the same characteristics as a signature, and we certainly read much of the personality of a draftsman in sketches. It takes a Graphologist to interpret a signature, and perhaps not all that accurately. But it does not take a Graphologist too appreciate a signature, or a drawing.

Smudging

This is a charcoal drawing, from sometime last fall.
I use the round sticks of compressed charcoal, and like them best, as they have a great variety and subtlety, and can make a very light line when needed. And white, smoothish cheap paper from a big sketchpad, its a small upgrade from newsprint.
This is a shaded drawing, as most of my drawings are. Shading isn't really drawing, it's painting really, and for me the challenge is trying to define the planes and forms with shadow, and it's pleasing when you get close to even echoing a little bit of the great subtlety of form in a human body. Drawing without shading is a further refinement that is its own thing, and wonderful, but I rarely get there in a longer drawing, as I inevitably want to smear the lines. Its like a life challenge, something bigger than just drawing: how to get beyond the "sketch" and into the meat of art, or anything, and into work that is very serious and sure, with hours of attention, and avoid the feeling that one is building a house of cards, where in the final step, it all tumbles down. Plenty of work I've done feels that way, its not exactly a dying on the vine, but a deadness creeps in, though from what corner is not exactly clear. Plenty of artists refer to this, especially in trying to work in the studio on sketches done in the field, I don't know if it can be quantified. This drawing is about as far as I know how to go with finish at this point, and it is still plenty sketchy.

On Ken, My Artist Friend

Last night there was a no show for the model, and so all the artists sat around looking at the empty model stand for an hour or so, and then went home. No one even took out their pencils. One lady did play with some clay and make a little person. Ken and I loaded up our gear and drove out into the dark Snohomish plain, the windy road along the river, and we continued our conversation about the Catholic faith, Buddhism, and what another economic crash would mean. He said he was born in 1939 in Burien and had a dirt floor in his house. They were very poor, and his father would sometimes get food from the dump. He remembers being 5 and alone in the house when it suddenly filled with flying ants, everywhere, and on everything. But just as suddenly, they disappeared, and when his family returned, no one believed him, except his mother. Whom he described as the most contented person he ever knew, though she lived through some very hard times. He said, in regards to hard times, that he had no advice for younger people, as it was always different each time, and how it would go could not be predicted, though he had tried. He said he lived through 4 economic collapses. He said that yes, he had played a lot of chess in his time, and we could play, but he couldn't recall how all the pieces moved, or what they were called.

Great Drawings, 1951

This is a drawing from the small pocket book Great Drawings, by Paul Sachs, 1951. Its a 14th century drawing by Lucas Van Leyden.

I am actually showing it here not because it is a great drawing, which it is, but to show how I can take a small book with pictures in it, and put my camera on an upside down tripod, and connect it by a cable to my laptop, and shoot the picture, remotely from the computer, and a few minutes later have it published on the internet. A great feat, for me, as it feels fluid, the going from picture to the internet. There is an irony of sorts here, using this technology to share a great drawing, and being fascinated by the technology more than the drawing.

Now there is the talking about the drawing. Mr. Sachs says that it is to be compared with Durer, but that it is more restrained. The background has been re-worked. I see that her right eye seems to be in a different head than her left, and that this adds to the mood. And how can we deny that her great head dress isn't much of the romance of this drawing, that without a model with such a head dress, we modern people cannot hope to demonstrate this level of feeling in our own drawings?

Genetic Dispositions

"Connoissuership" in drawing is developed by spending time with great drawings. Or so I read, and suppose to be true.

That is a difficult thing to understand in art, that those who spend time with art somehow earn the right to evaluate them for the rest of us. More democratic is the feeling that all our perspectives are equally valid, and represent our different backgrounds- in other words, that it is totally subjective.

Even so, it is still a difficult thing to understand what it is that actually develops when we appreciate drawing, and why- what does the appreciation truly reflect? How can lines on paper have any qualities besides what we project onto them, and then, isn't it the projector that is being reflected? Is there such a thing as a great drawing, independent of humans? It doesn't seem like there would be.


In a vacuum- and with sufficient time but no "expert advice", how might a person's appreciation turn out different? We see this in history and in cultures, and we make the assumption that they are all seeking the same things, perhaps with different emphasis, but in the end, the same human search for meaning and expression is demonstrated.

That is as we would expect, because our thinking is that deep human qualities are being expressed, not only cultural ones, but universal ones, though we are hard pressed to say what they are exactly. But why is it so difficult to know? Is it maybe because we are in fact just the security containers for genes, as Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene? And what is it that our genes want us to express, what is it that they want from art?

The Figure

Drawing the human figure is the toughest thing to draw. Why is that? Probably because we empathize so strongly, and so we judge the results so critically. It is easy to see what is "wrong" because we spend our lives looking at people and evaluating them by their appearance. We would not be able to judge the trueness of a drawing of a creature we were not familiar with, though we could judge many other qualities that make up the drawing, but as soon as we really knew the creature, our critical facilities would be on extra alert. Knowing if a drawing of a horse is good or not depends on our knowledge of horses, if, of course, our measure is how accurate it is. How much more so when we draw something we are intimately familiar with.

I have made some prints , and when I look through them I see that there are many levels of seeing that can be communicated and that I find engaging. Part of the excitement of this is in the materials and their textures and colors, part in the subject matter, part in the vigor and skill that we perceive, and part in its apparent "rightness". With the drawing shown here, I like the texture of it, the quickness, the color. I wish it were "righter", more accurate, as then I think it would transform to another level. It is the "rightness" that disturbs me most, the frustration in not getting the form exactly right. How difficult can it be? And yet it proves to be so elusive, always hit and miss, in a way that seems out of proportion to the goal. After all, trying to draw accurately is not so different than tracing, and yet it never works that way. Yet, if you can get the proportions right, the sizes right, so it all fits and feels right, then you've accomplished much.