To be absorbed in drawing

Fiona Hingston: Furrow

To be absorbed in what you are doing is a wonderful thing. To be absorbed into something else is another wonderful thing and they are related. When you are lost in the process of making a drawing, you are both absorbed in your own thoughts and absorbed in the drawing. It is as if your physical presence merges with that of the paper and pencils and charcoal and inks and moving hands and applicators. One thing can absorb another, and in doing so it takes in as part of itself some of the qualities and attributes of the other thing. It could be argued that absorption is key to life itself. Bacteria in particular are vital to the absorption of light energy and its conversion into chemical energy. They also help us absorb the food we eat, as well as converting the energy of the sun into a useable resource.  My absorption in drawing is when I am nearest to what Buddhist's would call a state of mindfulness. When we are absorbed we do not worry about what we look like, we have no other needs, our desires are forgotten in the activity of being in the now of doing. This is perhaps the real secret of drawing. It can allow you to become absorbed into the world. By looking intensely at the environment you exist in, you can gradually sink into your perception of it and as you do a new experience takes over, one that is being made as much as it is being perceived. Eventually you cannot separate yourself out from what is being drawn. Frederick Franck had this to say about this process: 'The meaning of life is to see, it is the flash of realisation, of not-twoness, that is both the centre and the endpoint of our human experience'. The not-twoness is important here and it goes to the root of the problem. When we think about ourselves and what is not ourselves we invent 'the other'. The 'other' is though when a product of inductive reason, a stranger to us and we fear strangers. Our fear of 'the other' has led us to forget that we are all connected in a vast web of being and that anything we do has an impact on others, not just on other people, but also on the complex world of both animate and inanimate things. 

However in academic terms to become absorbed in something is often described as being lost. You are recommended to be able to stand outside of your actions in order to become more objective and to watch what you do as if you are capable of turning on some sort of internal CTV camera, so that you can record footage of the process of being engaged. This type of observation is though not one of absorption, which means that you don't actually 'see' anything. It's similar to taking a photograph, you don't 'make' the photograph, so you can't in its development 'absorb' the world that it comes from. The less we see, especially that type of seeing that means that we become absorbed in what we see, the more numbed we become. But there are some very straightforward ways to engage, and one of the best is simply to draw in response to an experience. 

Durer: Large piece of turf

Fiona Hingston's 'Furrow', like Durer's 'large piece of turf' is a drawing of something we pass over every day. Both artists remind us of how exciting it is to just look at what is there. 

Renato Orara draws stuff we often overlook, an old sponge or bit of wire. I like the fact he does his drawings using a biro, a tool so common that we often overlook it. The drawings below are from a series of on-going drawings, '10,000 things that breath', a title that for myself suggests that Orara has an almost animist connection with the objects he draws. It could also be a title chosen to reflect upon that importance of breath control in the meditation process. Each drawing then being for Orara also a meditation on life.

Renato Orara: Untitled biro drawing

Renato Orara: Sponge biro drawing

These drawings respect the things that have been looked at, and if this is all they do, I think that is worthwhile. There are issues related to mimesis in these drawings and it could also be argued that in working so hard to make these drawings so 'realistic' the natural form of the materials used has been ignored, but there can also be what I would call 'an honest response' to a simple situation, and in this we have an alternative approach to some of the issues raised in the post on Object Orientated Ontology. 

Michael Landy: Buttercup

After the conceptually rigorous processes of 'Breakdown', Michael Landy produced a series of etchings of weeds, it was as if he needed to do something very straightforward in order to purge himself of the dense theoretical framework that had been built around his deep critique of consumerism. 

You can of course be absorbed in a drawing in a very different way. Robert Morris in his 'Blind Time Drawings' is totally absorbed in the physical making of the drawings. In some ways he is meditating on the act of drawing itself. How far can he stretch in order to make a mark? How many marks can he make within a certain time period? By drawing in the dark, he is able to focus on the importance of touch when making drawings and he reminds us that all drawings are in some ways a record of the movements made by a body in time.

Robert Morris: Blind time drawing

The important issue here is that when you immerse yourself in what you are doing, when in your thinking you accept that you are inseparable from everything else, you begin to build a very different relationship with the world. If it is part of you then you might consider ‘Life as a Work of Art’, the ‘giving attention’ to one’s experience being all you need to understand. Of course this simplicity is in many ways beyond simplicity, because it embraces everything. As a starting point try to focus on how it feels to hold your pencil or pen. Then focus on how it feels to move your hand, your arm and the rest of your body. As you become more aware of ankles, hips and shoulder movements and the way these translate into your pencil or pen's movement, try to fuse in your awareness both your body sensations and the quality of marks being made. Then begin to focus on your breathing, become one with your body and your breath, let controlled breaths come from the abdomen and then forget about the control and be in it as opposed to outside it and eventually you can reach a state of calmness, of acceptance and absorption in the doing.   

One of my own drawings that emerged out of being absorbed in just making it. 

See also:

To be absorbed by a bicycle is something all the daily bicycle riding policemen in Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman' had to endure and of course their bicycles also endured the same fate, slowly absorbing the atoms and molecules of their riders. There is an extract from this book in my post on Pouring Water, which is always an excellent read, (the extract that is) and it will perhaps induce you to read the full novel, the philosophy of which is perhaps one of the biggest influences on my entire work. 

Drawing and mindfulness 

See also posts on absorption at a subatomic level 

Drawing and quantum theory part one

Drawing and quantum theory part two