Drawing : John Ruskin and the Elements of Drawing

Ruskin's first drawing of grass

Ruskin: drawing of oak leaves

Ruskin: drawing of leaves forming a pattern

I first read Ruskin when I was at school. I went through his ‘Elements of Drawing’ and tried to follow the steps that he laid out for those beginning to draw. I still remember his advice on how to draw individual elements and then to move on to masses, such as the shape of one leaf and then the form of a cluster of leaves as they hung from a branch.

Ruskin: drawing of a leaf

His drawing of a leaf above, helps me to think about our close relationship with other living organisms, I am reminded of our own bi-lateral symmetry and how we ourselves have a system of veins that fan out from our centre to our edges. Ruskin likes moving from the particular to the general. The process was one that he believed could be extended into a design principle. A particular observation, such as the shape of a leaf could be generalised to stand for nature itself. When I was doing my Pre-Diploma course at Wolverhampton in the late 1960s, my personal tutor was a textile designer and she used to show me her flower drawings and explain how she was interested in exploring nature and applying what she saw to her designs. At the time I was into Pop Art and tended to dismiss her ideas as either too design orientated or simply old fashioned, but I now think of her as representing an old approach that is becoming more relevant again, and one that has an importance that goes beyond the fine art / design divide.

Ruskin: drawing of a strawberry leaf

Close observation can reveal how mathematical order underlies everything. A drawing of something as basic as a leaf on a branch stem could therefore be linked to a vision of nature’s underlying structures. Formal principles arising from this understanding could be then applied to art, architecture and design and they could be used to critique forms used in art and design.

The way leaves are ordered around a stem

Curve 'a' is a segment of a circle, curve 'b' is based on the stem above

Ruskin would argue that curve 'b' is aesthetically more powerful because it is varied and its form links back to an observation from nature. We have looked at issues like this before. In particular why the Bezier Curve is so important in both car design and graphic design and Hogarth's 'Line of Beauty'. A curve that moves between one type and another will always be visually active and is more organic, i.e. it has 'life'. But for Ruskin the importance of the more organic curve is that it holds within it a 'memory' of nature, a memory that should be built into the things we make; and when we do so, we demonstrate our love of nature and the importance of our relationship with it.

Later I would read ‘the Stones of Venice’ and began to see that his ideas about visual interconnectedness could be applied to society. In particular he lamented the class divide and the separation between labour and management. In his chapter on 'the Nature of Gothic' he had this to say, “We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.” (Ruskin, 1890) Just as a separation from nature impoverishes both us and nature, a division of human beings into one class and another also impoverishes both classes.

Over time Ruskin’s political relevance became more important to me and because his name was mentioned several times in Bristol at the recent symposium on teaching drawing, I thought it timely to post my own reflections on his influence, especially during a period of intense political debate about the future direction of the country.

If you begin your philosophy by stressing the importance of looking at a leaf and drawing it, that philosophy will no doubt argue for a close relationship between humans and nature. Look closely at a leaf and you will see things that entangle you as the observer back into the nature from which the observation began. Knots of mathematical, analogical, material and ecological entanglements are created as observations are made; for instance both trees and people at one point or another were on parallel evolutionary paths, in particular the need to move fluids around from one place to another was essential to both, the tree’s dendritic system of branching pathways extending right down into every leaf, being very similar to a human cardio vascular system, which is itself described as ‘dendritic’ or tree like in its branching structures. As we see similarities between ourselves and a leaf, we hopefully establish grounds for empathy between plant and human lives. It is the beautiful chemistry of photo-synthesis that captures energy from the sun in a plant’s leaves and this is taken up and distributed in a not too dissimilar way to how the human digestive system works, which then releases the sun’s energy into our own cells and gives us life. We are totally interconnected and that is Ruskin’s point. He believed that making, owning and sharing were not separate things, they had only become so under capitalist structures, but in earlier forms of society, ownership and production of art and craft were integrated and not separated out into a buying class, a class that gives critical value, a making class and an intellectual class. This separation of culture into different roles within different classes in society, Ruskin believed, resulted in a fracturing of art into high and low forms. For an upper ownership class, it became more about art for art's sake, validated by a class of specialist critics and specialist intellectual artists who did not want to think about their productions as craft, because craft was what the labouring classes occupied themselves with. The lower classes, often craftspeople who made things with their hands, had different values, their handicrafts and their culture came to be seen as of 'low' value or kitsch by the upper classes. Out of this milieu arose an idea of the artist as an outsider and the concept of the avant-garde or advance guard whereby the artist’s sensibility was out in front of ‘ordinary people’, sensing out the new and the different. This became part of the logic of capitalism, because new things are always needed if you are to get people to consume and therefore 'innovation' became more important as a commercial value. Ruskin saw that this sort of approach to art would eventually lead to a total separation between those that understood the site of production because they worked hard to make things and those that only valued the site of exchange or the transaction that saw value only in monetary profit. As he put it, neither will be content with their lot, "the one envying, the other despising".

Ruskin is a wonderful example of how something as basic as giving importance to looking at a leaf, could eventually if you follow it's implications, lead to an idea about how society should be constructed.

The artist is seen as someone who can make observations that might help others grasp the wonders of nature. Drawing is seen as a very democratic tool that all people can use and although some might be better at using it than others, its practice will help everyone reach a better understanding of what is there to be seen. Gradually drawn observations will lead to a recognition of a 'bigger picture' whereby the principles seen in particular observations could be understood as belonging to certain patterns, patterns that relate to deep underlying principles such as mathematical order. Ruskin believed that a separation between humans and nature will occur if we don't spend time reflecting on the fact that we are both part of nature and able to observe it; he also pointed out at the time that manufacturing was already despoiling the natural world and that we were avoiding our responsibility for the world around us. As the potter needs to understand the clay, so the weaver needs to understand the properties of cloth and the metal worker understand how iron can be worked. Making and conserving are close neighbours; someone that understands the hard won nature of individual production, will waste less and consume less. Someone removed from the site of production has no empathy with both the people and the various materials of production and will therefore find it easy to make decisions that lead to pollution and the ravaging of natural resources. Ruskin's observations still ring true and his ideas still effect the way artists think about the world.

Images taken from the elements of drawing

Without Ruskin in many ways we would never have had the moral conviction that lies behind Michael Landy's 'Breakdown'. Ruskin would have hated consumerism and would have seen it for what it is, a phycological endgame designed to trap people in a loop of want which they feel is really 'need'. We bloat ourselves on things and come to believe that we need them. Landy decided to make a piece of work whereby he got rid of all his possessions, a task that was far more difficult than you might imagine. He in effect had to develop a factory large enough to cope with the task. Finally after getting rid of all his belongings, Landy was left with a need to start again and the first work he did was to create a series of etched drawings of weeds. It was as if he had to start at the bottom again and to look for a subject matter that reminded him and us of what art was always about, noticing things and looking at them for what they are. By making drawings of "wild plants growing where they are not wanted and often in competition with cultivated plants", Landy reminds us of the need to include 'all' animal, vegetable and mineral forms in our interconnected and entangled eco systems and not just the cultivated ones that we humans think of as being important to us. In doing so he reminds us yet again of the continuing importance of Ruskin's thinking and of a vital lesson when it comes to making art, often the most simple direct approach is the most powerful and this approach when supported by a strong ethical framework can be of great service to us all.