Drawing and Mindfulness: Part Three: Making a drawing

Once you have begun to feel your body responding to your looking, then you are ready to begin using some drawing materials.

I would suggest that you chose one wet and one dry material to start with. So much will of course depend on time available, if you are doing this all day, you might work using ink and brush in the morning and charcoal in the afternoon, but if pressed for time, ink for the first session and charcoal for the next one on another day. All materials require quite different ways of working with them and you need to find which ones you are more sensitive to. By comparing and contrasting materials you also begin the process of absorbing your mind and body into the materiality of your drawing tools. Material thinking is a vital part of this process. 

You have hopefully already chosen what to draw with and are aware that every drawing material is different. Getting to know a chalk and how different it is to natural charcoal and how this differs from compressed charcoal and how that differs to a graphite stick or a soft pencil can only be grasped by exploring these materials and finding out how they operate on different surfaces. This takes time. Hopefully you took time to explore your materials as was suggested in the first exercises related to preparation. Then what you were doing in the previous exercise was making sure that as you look your whole body follows the looking and we need to make sure that as you draw with your art materials the same happens. Instead of walking, climbing or running into the spaces you see, you will make gestural responses and these responses are recorded as the chalk rubs off onto the paper or the pen or brush leaves behind its traces of ink. The point being that this aspect of drawing should not really be any different from walking, climbing or running into the spaces you see, simply a natural extension of what you are attuned to do everyday of your life. 

Before you get to make any marks you need to become attuned to your body again. Your body is the conduit between what you experience of the world and your awareness of your body as the thing doing the experiencing. In order to make sure you accept this paradox, (i. e. you can't really step outside your body to think about this or any other situation) you will need to go through some of the exercises that were introduced in the last post, this time as a way to warm up before drawing and to ensure you are tuned back into body sensitivity.  You need to be aware that what you are doing is both of the world and a channel for experiencing the world. Imagine your whole body as a very delicate seismograph. 

Begin by standing tall and slightly rocking your body, feel how quickly your toes transfer energy to your heels and how your knees begin to take the strain as the rocking motion begins to flow through the body. Move your hips and feel how the movement opens out diagonal and curvature possibilities. Begin to rotate shoulder muscles and get a feel for how rhythmic variation can be brought into your movements and then before you begin to think about your arms and your wrists and hands, begin to incorporate breathing into your movements. Try breathing from your diaphragm, from the bottom of your lungs and begin to slowly synchronise simple body movements with breathing control. Once you begin getting a feel for the connection between breathing and moving then flex your shoulders and begin moving your arms. Stretch them, see how far you can reach, how big a circle can you make, step backwards move again and feel for how far away you are from your drawing's surface and from your subject. Now add in elbow movements, wrist movements and finally finger moves. 



Now begin to look at your subject in more detail. Try and mime the shape of what you are looking at. Feel for it with your body, think into a space as if you could drive into it, mentally feel over a surface as if you had to climb over it, but don't draw anything yet. 


Think big and small, think grand movements and gestures as well a tiny ones. Let your body decide which parts would be needed if you were to dance these over and between objects movements. You are trying to embody the information you have seen by echoing aspects of what is seen with corresponding parts of your body being moved. Seeing involves moving your eyes, so that the things you see are being scanned by you, you are therefore active in the seeing.  Moving is therefore central to both how seeing works and in order to see. It is a process and a system. In this case you don't just move your eyes and head as you follow the ping pong of visual action, you are engaging all of your body. 


Now go back to your toes. Tense them up, tense up your heel muscles and relax. Add in an awareness of your calf muscles, tense them and relax them. Work up your body, knees, thighs, hips, stomach, back, neck, shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, fingers and then breath calmly from the diaphragm and relax again. Hold out the arm you are going to draw with, open your hand and feel for how steady it is. Are you mentally shaking or are you steady? 

At this stage observation and its recording is a much better way of dissolving ourselves into the world than by producing drawings that concentrate on mark making or the construction of abstract figures such as spiral or circles, because it forces us to concentrate on looking at the world, thus forging a relationship between you and the world and as you do so you begin to forget that you are you, and slowly as you look, you in effect become immersed in what you are observing, (the subject) and what you are drawing, and in this immersion you tacitly absorb the concept of material thinking.

Touch will be the opening to your feeling tone, it will be part of the material language that you will be using. Seeing and touching, feeling and observing, they will be your guides as to what you will draw, try not to think. 

You can now begin to draw.


Take up whatever drawing material you have and feel confident that you are going to find even more out about what properties this material has, by applying it to the task in hand, which is to make a drawing that reflects how you are seeing something. The tracing or recording of observation is going to be at the core of achieving this. 

Begin the process of working between looking and drawing. Look and scan, what interests you? Can you 'see' an overall shape for this interest? Look at your paper, is it the right shape for this interest? Change it if not and reattach to its support. Begin to set out the most significant visual interest. (It doesn't matter what this is, it might be a strong abstract composition, it might be that one tiny part of the subject seems to have a vitality that says "draw me first"), your sensitivity will be central to the feeling tone of the image you are making. 

Keep that body awareness going that you worked so had to achieve. Feel for the marks through your body. Step back and mime a way of being with what you have observed and then apply the marks to the paper. Think about how you are holding your drawing implement. Can you hold it in different way? Is the way you are holding your brush, stick of charcoal etc. a way that allows you to have complete control over the marks made? Do you need to change the way you hold your drawing implement each time you make a different type of mark set? 

Begin to fold yourself into the rhythm of looking and drawing, look at the subject, hold the looking in your body, reverse you movements, now look at the drawing, rehearse the movements of drawing and then make the movements a reality by applying your material to the paper surface. This backwards and forwards rhythm lasts as long as it needs to last. Some people can do this all day, others will do this in short spells, it is up to the person doing the drawing, there is no right way. 

Once you begin to feel you are not looking any more, then it's time to stop. 

Now look at the drawing you have made. At this point you either stop and the drawing becomes a record of the eye/body/material dance made so far, or you can take the drawing on to a further stage.

Ask yourself, does the drawing already seem to state something about the experience of looking? Just do this by intuition, you don't need to analyse anything. 

For some people this first stage is enough, but for others it isn't. The second stage is about awareness of the drawing as a thing in itself. It is not just a record of the looking at a subject, it is also a coming into being of a thing with its own life. This 'life' can be fed and nurtured if the drawer is attuned to it as a possibility. 

So now is the time to spend more time looking at the drawing that has been done. You might begin to think of essences: can it be stripped down to what is essential? You might find yourself thinking about rhythm and structure. Can the rhythmic structures that are evolving within this drawing be reinforced? Does that small but vital thing that you saw really operate as the 'punctum' for your image? Does it need repositioning or reinforcing in some way? Are the implications of the materials used being responded to well enough? Do you need to spend more time developing your own material sensibility within this drawing? A dialogue now begins between yourself and the drawing, a backwards and forwards no less intense than the initial one that was set up between yourself, the subject and the drawing. 

Again the amount of time you devote to this is up to you, it could last for days or be something that just lasts for 10 minutes. 

Once again there will be the need for you to stop and look and feel. Is this new drawing beginning to strike a chord with you in some way? If so you could stop. If not it may be worth moving on to another stage. 

The final stage is that of returning to the beginning. Go back and look at the subject, do you see it any differently now? Mime to the differences. Look across at the drawing, can you break back into it? Can you get it to accept what you have just seen in the subject but which isn't in the drawing? Carry these things in your body, feel for the changes you need to make. Make sure you have touched the right body rhythm/drawn rhythm. If not rebuild it. You are like a choreographer and dancer fused into one. At the same time as dancing you are making a special type of dance notation, your drawing is a score for other dancers and well as a record of your own moves. 

Again it is up to you when you stop. 

It is fine to end the process at any point, each decision will result in a different type of drawing and once again your own sensibility is vital to what this is going to be. It needs to 'feel' right. Feeling tone is far more important at this stage than any form of analytical unpicking. 

You can repeat the process over and over again, or run through variations whereby at times you always keep the initial pure visual responses and at others you always move on and work back into the drawings trying to give them a life of their own. 

Once you are happy with this approach it may be that you will want to move on to a further stage, but it takes time to assimilate the needs of your body and your materials, so I would suggest not trying to move on for a few weeks. 

Drawing and Mindfulness: Part one: preparation

Drawing and Mindfulness: Part two: drawing before drawing

Drawing and mindfulness: part four: Material Conversations
Drawing and mindfulness: Part five: Finding yourself