Friday 21 March 2014

Writing about Drawing

One of the things as drawing students you will be asked to do is write about your practice and how you can develop a personal understanding of it. So how can a current understanding of drawing’s languages be developed? One way is to take an idea or concept and look at how it can be used to develop an understanding of existing drawings, then once done you can map that understanding onto your own work.

Simply because I’m very interested in the relationship between time and drawing, I shall develop this post around that.

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).

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.

Hopefully as a drawing student you can get an idea of how the interpretation of a single drawing can lead to a way of thinking about much wider issues. I will add other posts about art writing, but you could also send me images of your own drawings and I could look at how a written dialogue could be developed with them too. 

See also:

Drawing and time

Bibliography related to today's post

Drawing Time: 
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (A link to a pdf on Academia dealing with the same subject)


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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