A common statement from artists is that drawing is central to their practice. Few elaborate on what they mean by drawing. On the other hand, the general population will often state that they cannot draw at all. Are they talking about the same thing? A quick look around the life drawing class I sometimes attend reinforces the commonest definition.
‘The art or technique of representing an object’
‘A study to prepare for a final piece’
‘Copying nature as accurately as possible’
‘A visual art form that involves using tools to create images on a surface’
On the other side of the equation though is the quasi mystical.
‘Drawing is a way to express creativity’
‘Drawing is means of personal expression’
But do any of these definitions actually tell us what drawing is or isn’t beyond a teachable physical process let alone why people say that they cannot draw? As an artist, I have always accepted that drawing is active, selective seeing. By this I mean that when I draw, I am not simply copying but choosing to explore a specific aspect of the subject such as recognising the pattern quality of a landscape or understanding that marks on a surface have a personal, innate structural character or are extensions of the motions of my hand and arm that characterise my handwriting.
Seeing though, comes with its own problems. Science tells that ‘seeing’ is the brain’s best guess. The blue of the sky, the ground beneath your feet, the reality you take for granted are essentially an elaborate construction of the mind. Over time the brain builds a compendium of data with which to assess the world and the agglomeration of such data is used to assess and compare new information. We like to think that everyone agrees with the identification of objects and the names given to them, but the fact is that certainty is challenged continually and as history shows, understanding waxes and wanes with each generation. Several centuries ago, the earth was deemed to be the centre of the universe – it was obvious, you could see it. The earth stood still and everything moved around it. This kind of conditioning plagues human history. Whether this is constructional apraxia or a misperception of the object, it suggests the reason why people say they cannot draw. It isn’t a question of drawing technique but a profound inability to make sense of the world. The ‘best guess’ turns out to be just that, a guess. Ask any adult to draw a face and inevitably the results will be proportionally disappointing. I have often heard my fellow life drawers bemoan having to draw faces, feet or hands and yet the process of seeing is no different to drawing the rest of the body. The process of observation, interpretation, and creation through lines and shapes can become a way to explore and understand complex concepts, often relating to the nature of reality, perception, and existence.
Does any of this tell us what drawing is though? We all understand the processes and techniques of drawing and accept that it’s just like any other skill such as playing a musical instrument or learning a sport. Although drawings can resemble images, they frequently contradict many of the properties attributed to images. In one sense drawings reveal the conceptions of things and not just the perception of things or imaginings. They are always interpretations and to a greater or lesser extent, abstractions. Drawings then, are representations of reality, not presentations of reality. Drawings can do whatever they want without constraint in omitting things, ‘distorting’ things, and adding whatever information is deemed necessary. They don’t need a consistent point of view or a point of view at all.
Picasso among others recognised that the drawings of small children were, conceptualisations and when he wrote about spending a lifetime as an artist trying to return to seeing the world through the eyes of a child, he recognised that children are free from the constraints of learned perspective, the Renaissance window onto the world and the ‘right’ way to do things. Using overlapping viewpoints was not something dreamed up by the Cubists but a natural state that was gradually, and often forcefully, driven out by contact with the adult world. To return to this way of ‘seeing’ is improbable but any drawer who limits himself or herself to copying the world isn’t being an artist so much as a practised technician and those Abstract artists who boast about not drawing at all are simply wallowing in the visceral. As for all of those people who simply cannot make sense of the visual world and say that they cannot draw, they could at least learn to copy using the endless tutorials on you tube.
This all begs the question though of the value of drawing in this day and age. When McLuhan wrote that the medium was the message back in the 60s he also noted that we were still using the ideas of the mechanical age to evaluate the present. Linear perspective obviously falls into that category as does tonal rendering in a throwback to the Renaissance. Given how many artists and the general public still use these measures to evaluate the worth of art you have to wonder if anything has changed in the half century since McLuhan. Is drawing as a concept a universal norm, a learned technique or something else?