The Drawing Spirit
Sample Pages
First page of the Preface
All young children draw.
They do it naturally and they do it with marvellous, uninhibited freedom,
without instruction and with limited knowledge.
And so it is reasonable to state that drawing is a natural act;
something which all humans do, and have done since time immemorial.
The earliest surviving drawings are those which adorn prehistoric caves
and which date back for many thousands of years.
Those drawings retain their magic, and their mystery, to this day,
still looking unforced, spontaneous, and truly authentic.
Indeed it is those very qualities that, for me, characterise all good drawings.
It is through drawings that artists first explore and articulate their visual ideas,
responding to things seen or imagined. And through such drawings,
things that are almost always made by artists for themselves,
we are most likely to get closest to the true spirit of the artist.
Drawings are made using tools held in the hand;
real artists are intensely practical people.
Everyone knows that in order to use any tool well
there is a need to learn how to use it.
This will likely involve some sort of instruction from someone
who already knows how to use it,
and will certainly involve practice and experience before its use is mastered.
When a tool is used well we talk of skill and craftsmanship, and even artistry.
The road to such mastery involves discipline, concentration, patience and practice.
There are no shortcuts to the mastery of drawing.
It takes time, something that many people seem unwilling
to accept in an era of instant gratification.
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First page of the Introduction
Where should we begin?
Perhaps by saying that the only way we learn to draw is by drawing.
Since you drew naturally and freely as a young child why is it that
drawing may seem difficult to you now?
What happened? Why do you feel inhibited or frustrated about drawing?
What did you forget? What do you need to know about it now and
what do you need to do, either to get started,
or to take your drawings to a new and more exciting place?
And what about the Drawing Spirit, that certain extra something which
I believe to be truly the Creative Source? What's all that about?
These are some of the questions that I shall be addressing in this book.
Let's look at the first matter; the fact that children draw naturally
and then, quite suddenly for most of them, stop drawing,
usually at around the age of 10 or so.
It seems likely that there are various reasons.
Our Western culture has not generally either understood or encouraged
activities in the visual arts, preferring to emphasise words and numbers
in the educational system, though that now, happily, shows signs of
changing as we become more aware of different ways
of thinking and learning, of different intelligences,
and are recognizing the fact that a huge part of our thinking is visual.
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First page on Visual Perception
Vision has been described as the richest of our senses, and with good reason,
for most of our perception, and thus thinking, is visual.
The old adage that 'a picture is worth a thousand words'
is a very serious underestimate.
How strange then, in the light of these facts, that, as we noted earlier,
much of our educational curricula are word- and number-based,
and that the rich visual imagery which is so apparent from a child's
drawing and painting, becomes repressed in favour of literacy and numeracy.
And how difficult it is for many adults to retrieve this visual freedom
and lack of inhibition which was present in all of us in our childhoods.
Educational methods in the 21st. century will likely become
ever-increasingly visually-based, as they have become in more
enlightened quarters already; not least because of the development
of visual computer interfaces and the ubiquitous
dissemination of information via television, film and the Internet.
And Howard Gardner's work, referred to earlier, has already yielded benefit
in recognizing and catering to different forms of intelligence.
Visual perception is an enormous subject, and a very complicated one,
but there are aspects of it which seem to me to be very important to anyone concerned
with the pictorial elements and the compositional principles,
and thus anyone who wants to draw, and draw well,
and so properly claim to be an artist.
And for that reason we ignore them at our peril.
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First page on the Physiology and Ergonomics of Drawing
In previous chapters on vision and visual perception
some of the important processes going on centrally,
in other words in the eyes and in the brain, were described.
We noted that all of us have the same basic looking equipment,
but the central interpretation of what we look at,
which takes place in the brain, works differently for different people,
for many and complex reasons, and so we see differently.
You will recall that, at the end of the chapter on Visual Perception,
I described evidence that shows that artists process visual information differently
from non-artists whilst they are actually drawing and painting.
Here I am going to focus on how that central processing comes
to be connected to our limbs, the periphery.
In other words how we actually move our drawing and painting tools about.
And again it should be noted that we all have the same basic equipment.
The same designs of bones, joints, muscles, tendons, nerves and skin.
It must be the case then that it is basically the central control system
that makes our individual art marks, works and designs look different, and individual.
However there is no question in my mind that certain postures
and modes of holding instruments, and using them, facilitate some
ways of working, whilst inhibiting others.
So, to that extent, some aspects of the physiology of drawing can be
influenced by the ergonomics of drawing,
and that will in turn effect certain aspects of the form of the finished work.
By ergonomics is meant those aspects of body posture which affect the way we work.
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First page on Line
Drawings generally are made using Line, Tone and Mark.
I will discuss Tone and Mark separately, but here let's look at Line.
Forced to choose only one pictorial element there is
only one real choice to make and that is line.
It is the most immediate and versatile of the pictorial elements.
Colourists might squeal at that, but colour lacks the versatility
and individuality of line. It is likely too that line is the most instinctive
and primordial of the pictorial elements.
Ever since a human drew a line in the sand with a stick there has been line.
And line, which may be coloured, also has the ability to produce all the other
elements of shape, texture, value and volume.
In that sense line can be thought of as a primary pictorial element.
And so it's really not surprising that drawing,
which Ingres described as being the probity,
or honest basis, of art should mostly be concerned with line.
Line forms the basis of most of our knowledge, since language,
particularly Western language, is based on line.
And even the Chinese alphabet is nothing
if it is not calligraphic, which implies line.
Moreover it is in line, in the form of handwriting,
that we form the basis for most of our early practical visual work.
As young children it really starts before that with uncontrolled
and uninhibited marks on paper, which do not, at that stage,
generally warrant the description of line,
which tends to imply something altogether more purposive.
Design, Images and Text © Neil Watson 2006