Time and Drawing
Paleolithic humans must
have had a sense of time and one could argue that although there is no direct
evidence, their verbal languages would have in one way or another, had to
develop ways in which to reflect upon this. The same of course can be said of
visual languages that would have developed at the same time, however these
would work in a different way, and it’s this difference that is important. Art,
or the use of visual symbols, can be used as a way to trigger responses to
things already stored in the mind. Like verbal language it operates in several
ways at once. A symbol does not have to look like what it represents, but it
might do. (See Mithen: 1996, p.178) This means that a complex set of readings
can be compacted together. For instance a cave wall may hold a lifelike image
of an animal, and next to it may be marks that represent ways of tracking it,
or places to find it. Complex use of symbols cannot only represent objects, but
can represent our relationship to things, such as when or where these things
took place or existed. The complexity of symbolic language usually means that
one symbol may be used to moderate, or adjust or make new meaning by its
relationship with another symbol or symbols. Specific meanings are culturally
encoded and the same image can represent different things at different times
according to context and sophistication of the observer. This is very important
as it allows visual imagery to have the same complexity as verbal language,
however because this complexity is compacted into a simultaneity, i.e. we see
all the information at once, rather than hear it over a period of duration, the
way the language operates is different.
The simultaneous layering
of symbolic information allows any visual artist to operate on several levels
at the same time. The fact that all this information is received simultaneously
is what is unique to the language and what gives it power and mystery.
In order to see how the
language of drawing is constructed and in particular how time can be held within
it and at the same time released, we can begin by looking at a selected drawing and unpicking how it works.
The Flute Player by Watteau
‘The Flute Player’ is a
typical Watteau drawing from the early 18th century. This sketch was
probably done to help him think through the content of one of his paintings. At
first glance the simple reading is given to us by cultural clues, the man’s
hairstyle, clothing etc. all suggest a time of roughly 300 years ago. However
there is a lot more to this drawing. We can start to follow the artist’s focus
and interest by reflecting on the various levels of engagement he has with
differing elements. Some parts of the figure are barely there, ghosted in to
support the main areas of focus, which are the face and the hands. Immediately
we notice this we put ourselves back into the position of the maker, we re-live
the time of the drawing’s making as our eyes re-trace the artist’s movements as
he picks his way around the subject of perception. Finally we realise that one
area in particular has been singled out as being the entry point into the
drawing, the flute player’s left hand. The dark shading under the fingers helps
to also push the space outwards towards the viewer, operating as a type of
atmospheric perspective, (dark marks come forward, softer light marks recede)
and recreating a moment of spatial awareness that would have been part of the
initial experience. Condensed in this one image we have several time based
issues operating simultaneously. The first is one of historical time, (the historical past) the second is a time of reenactment, in language we
sometimes call this the past perfect progressive tense, as in “he had been
drawing”, the third is however the present tense, which is constructed out of
the fact that you are actively looking and your eyes scanning the image now,
the present tense being what makes the drawing important, it is active today as
well as being a record of the past.
So why is this important?
Above all it tells us a lot about the human condition. The image embeds within
itself a record of a period of skilled concentrated looking. The skill involved
here is very important, it takes on average 10,000 hours for a human being to
master a skill of this level. (Sennett, 2009) It is a level of accomplishment
that means that the actions of the maker have become tacit; the hand is
therefore released from the mind’s pressure of having to think about making and
the artist can respond to the moment of perception without any barriers. We are
therefore far closer to the original perceptual experience and we live as it
where, in the same time as the original encounter. This is not the same as the
frozen moment of a photograph, it is a layered time, one that opens out to the
viewer the longer the image is looked at. The drawer’s decisions becoming more
and more transparent to us as we retrace his interest via the changes in focus
and attention to details encoded within the marks. In this way we develop another
engagement, one with the artist himself and his own engagement with his world
and its people. The grammar and syntax of this image are developed by the
materials of its construction. The paper ground has a particular granular
texture, this being essential to the application of the chalks, which rely on a
tough surface on which to pull off tiny fragments of material from the
stone-like core of the solid pastels. The touch of the artist is here vital,
too much pressure and the mark clogs the grain of the paper, not enough and the
trace is too light. The speed of application is also important. Each stroke
becomes a sign for the eyes to follow and we track the artists hand with the
same skill that our ancestors tracked the spore of a deer, being able to read
as much in the differences between mark speed and weight of application, as
between the weight of an animal’s imprint in soft ground and the shape and
relationship of its hoof-prints as it slows down or breaks into a startled run.
Learning to read the
marks that construct a drawing is something that itself takes time. A young
hunter would spend several years being instructed how to read the signs of an
animal’s track, in the same way a young artist needs to look at many drawings
and take time to unravel the story that is frozen in the marks of their making.
The more you look the more you see. Look at these marks more closely and you
will see that some of them are applied with chalks that have been sharpened so
that more fine detail can be picked out and other chalks are used on their
sides so that broad areas can be touched in quickly. You start to realise that
as the artist’s attention and focus moves his hands follow by choosing
different tools or by using the same tool in a different way. When we read poetry
we listen for how rhythm changes to reflect mood, or the way particular words
are chosen to make us more aware of the complexity of content and how this is
reflected in the sound structure of the poem. In the same way the draftsman can
vary mood and contextual understanding by these changes in application and the
way the ground is manipulated into becoming a space for action. The construction of visual rhythm is vital as
it on the one hand creates life, by giving a visual heartbeat to the work, and at
the same time operates as a guidance system for the eyes, pushing vision
quickly over certain areas and slowing it down when necessary point of focus
are needed. The dark points of shadow under the left hand of the flute player
in some ways operating as full stops as well as spatial indicators.
The full stop in a sentence gives us time to breath and get ready to move on, but it also signals that a particular piece of information has been summed up or concluded. These points are vital to the language structure as they indicate a certain closure, the left hand being perhaps what Barthes would term the ‘punctum’ of the image, or as he helpfully put it, that which 'pierces the viewer'. (Barthes, 1993).
The full stop in a sentence gives us time to breath and get ready to move on, but it also signals that a particular piece of information has been summed up or concluded. These points are vital to the language structure as they indicate a certain closure, the left hand being perhaps what Barthes would term the ‘punctum’ of the image, or as he helpfully put it, that which 'pierces the viewer'. (Barthes, 1993).
A further
aspect of language of course is that it can create subtlety and nuance by the
use of adverbs and adjectives. These are conditioning and modifying tools and
in the case of drawing the choice of implement is vital to this. Chalks have a
certain softness in their application, something we can understand if we
contrast chalk with other materials. Imagine this drawing done in pen and ink,
it would be too harsh, too firm in its tone. Chalk can caress the surface and
yet still be controlled well enough to suggest an underlying firmness, the
musician’s head clearly has a firm bone structure beneath it. However chalk
handled in this way, also suggests a fragility, a gentle light touch, the
rapidity of its application further suggesting the rapid passing of time. This
brings us to a further, deeper realization of time within the drawing. These
fleeting glimpses of a man playing a flute are also a metaphor for the
fragility of all our lives. As the man plays he is playing a forgotten tune,
one that will drift off and quickly fade away. The drawing’s lightness of touch
being one that reminds us of smoke forms drifting through a room or clouds
making momentary images as they shape-shift across the sky. Watteau catches a
brief moment and holds it for us, but as we bring this moment back into the
present through our engagement with it, we are also affected by the realisation
of its import. Behind the membrane of the paper surface lays an intuition of
the world of the dead and their spirits and for brief moment as we look at this
drawing, we can perhaps in our minds touch the surface of the Paleolithic cave
wall and from behind it feel the trembling hearts of our long dead ancestors.
In some ways every drawing reenacts all the other drawings that have been done
since humans first made them over 30,000 years ago. We are still the same
species and still have the same short lifespan within which to experience,
birth, growing up, maturity, old age and death. The tools we developed to help
us get through life were honed to perfection a long time ago, and as part of our
realisation of what it is to be alive now, we should celebrate this.
Bibliography
related to today's post
Bhabha, H.
(1994). The location of culture. Nueva York, NY EE. UU.: Routledge.
Barthes, R
(1993) Camera Lucida London: Vintage
Bressloff, Paul C.;
Cowan, Jack D.; Golubitsky, Martin; Thomas, Peter J.; Weiner, Matthew C. (March
2002). What Geometric Visual
Hallucinations Tell Us About the Visual Cortex Neural Computation (The MIT
Press) 14 (3): 473–491. Available from: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/089976602317250861
Johnson, M & Lakoff, G
(1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought London: Basic
Lakoff, G (1981) Metaphors we live by London: University
of Chicago Press
Lewis-Williams, D (2004) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the
Origins of Art London: Thames and Hudson
Mithen, S (1996) The Prehistory of the mind London:
Phoenix
Sennett, R (2009) The Craftsman London: Penguin
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