Why do I draw?

Terracotta container in the form of a boat used for the ritual of charcoal making

I have often been ‘accused’ of being an illustrator rather than a fine artist. This is a criticism I have had to shoulder at various times and I have tended to just shrug it off and get on with what I was doing. But there has to be something in this accusation because it has been a recurring issue.

So what is it that is the problem for other people? I think it’s to do with words. We have as a species developed a particular form of communication based on words. The thing about words is that they have to stand for other things that are not themselves. The word apple has to stand for all the types of real apples that there are, red ones, green ones, old ones, eaten ones, Korbinian ones or the ones in my garden. A word operates like a trouser press, it smooths out all the wrinkles and gets rid of that lived in feel that trousers have developed by the end of the day. Words like 'illustration' are like that. Some drawings are made to correspond exactly to a word; at this most basic level you will find a child’s alphabet poster. A is for Apple, will be illustrated (I’ve now used the illustration word) by a drawing of an apple. This drawing may be very simplified, in fact it needs to be a sort of general apple, because this is what the child is learning, the word apple is an umbrella term for all the various types of apples that the child will encounter during their lifetime of language use. The thing about this sort of drawing is that it reinforces the idea of the word by also being an umbrella drawing, but there are myriads of other drawings of apples that don't relate to words in such a direct way, just think of Cezanne's.  I have worked as an illustrator and the client does at times want an exact correspondence with words; "do what I say", I have been told, and "show me what I am thinking about" and when I have done that, yes I would agree that that is an illustration, but even that isn't as straightforward as you might think. Some of my illustration work was done when I was working as an industrial interior designer. Although I was working for a variety of clients, I was also clearly problem solving. My drawings were used both to show possibilities and to think about solutions. Which is what I am still doing. But instead of using drawing to think about how to get people to use space in more productive ways, I'm using it to get both myself and hopefully others to think about what it is to confront the problem of being human in a time of great uncertainty, both politically and ecologically. It is perhaps here that the 'illustration' issue lies. I see my work not as an end in itself, but as part of an overall task which is how to live a 'good' life. How do I as an artist responsibly act in relation to the world around me? My drawings therefore 'illustrate' my intent. This is directly in opposition to what my old art teacher told me. He said I was never to be didactic, never to tell a story, never to use art to do anything that took art outside of itself. An exploration of the formal properties of art and its making was what I should always be concerned with. My answer at the time was to read Ernst Fischer's 'The Necessity of Art'.  Fischer believed that it was the rise of a class society that broke the previous unity of all things, and that before the advent of capitalism, animals, humans, plants and minerals were all one interconnected experience, the division of labour and the advent of private property causing an alienation that was now the central issue that art had to confront. Therefore the function of art was to help restore a sense of unity with the world. His thoughts still ring bells for me. 

Communication systems shape what can be communicated, (McLuhan’s the medium is the message), and words tend to clean up communication. The more we as humans use words, the less we use other forms of communication. For instance, many entities use chemical communication systems, think of how the soil will communicate with a tree and of how we ourselves have the potential to communicate by smell far more than we actually now do. Words also restrict and determine the boundaries of things; they are not very good at fuzzy edges. I believe that everything in this universe is interconnected and all things are constantly changing their relationships within this interconnectedness. So what was once part of a star might now be part of my fingernail, what was once an apple in my garden; is now a pip lodged in a vast fatberg somewhere under Leeds. Because of the way words operate I don’t normally think about my body as an interconnected fuzzy integration of bacteria and cells, I think of it as a discrete whole, something I call my human body. Because this wholeness isn’t an interconnected knot of hazy undifferentiated connections, as soon as the word 'body' has been uttered, there is a sort of out of sight out of mind trick. Because the word for human being doesn’t include the words ‘defecated pip’, I don’t very often think about the trip down the sewer system. But if I was at the centre of a series of chemical interactions I may well be much more aware of what we as humans call smell and perhaps be more able to detect certain types of changing relationships. Not all of them of course but certainly different ones to the ones words can cope with. Think of when you are cooking in the kitchen, the smells combine so that you become aware of various amounts of different spices and other ingredients, but you can also at the same time appreciate the smell of a vase of flowers on the window sill, all in one sniff. But now think of how a dog might understand the world, and how it does this without any words.

Making a drawing or an object can be more like a fuzzy, unclear, non-boundary type of situation. The moving of materials around becomes a hand/eye/substance engagement. As the substance is moved it both reveals itself to the mover and in turn shapes the mover’s movements. A hand can only move within a particular set of directions and a stick of charcoal will only allow itself to be gripped in certain ways and it will only break off when applied at certain pressures and when rubbed against certain surfaces. (Try drawing with charcoal on a sheet of smooth glass). The coming together of the mechanics of the human body with outside of the body materials, is something that communicates things but in not quite so precise a way as words and that is why I’m writing this as a way to explain why I draw.  I may be very clumsy in my word use, but I can try to at least get some aspect of an idea communicated within a system that tends to prioritise words. However what drawing or making as communication systems lose in preciseness they gain in offering different types of communication, ones that accept fuzziness; ones that don’t need hard boundaries, ones that aren’t about definitions and above all ones that are always about interconnectedness. The things I make in clay are as much about clay as my arthritic fingers and as much about my somehow surviving to be this age, as the fact that as this solar system stabilised the third mass from the sun, this enabled a magnetic core to rotate at a certain speed and this supported the maintenance of average temperatures that kept water unfrozen for a large part of the time. My various interactions with lumps of clay or with paper and ink communicate things about which words are totally inadequate to communicate; and that of course is the point. 

This graphite wash drawing is how I feel about the current political and ecological climate after listening to the news

Things change. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was formalism that was the dominant western aesthetic. But as Tom Wolfe so clearly pointed out in ‘The Painted Word’, what had begun to happen by the 1970s was that artists had by that time had access to a fast expanding verbal and written vocabulary that was now able to ‘talk about’ aspects of the art making process that had before been wordless. (Wolfe had been researching the effect of Greenberg and other theorists on the development of contemporary art) This growth of theoretical frameworks predicated both the advent of conceptual art and a new post-modernist approach to art making that saw a return to abstraction via changes in definition. Artist writers such as Peter Halley redefined abstractionism in the 1980s so that for instance geometric abstraction became an opportunity to express something about the modern human condition. This was where I felt illustration was now going, hiding itself in plain sight within the theoretical core of fine art as a way of shoring up the importance of words and once again avoiding the messy fuzzy logic of objects that simply were, things that slipped back into the world and simply existed alongside all the other messy things around them. My work often starts with me listening to a story, but as I walk about and sniff the air it also is about breathing, about eating and commingling with everything else. It isn’t special, it is just part of the messiness of trying to navigate existence amongst lots of other things. 

A drawing made using pencil crayons after I heard about the falling number of plant species left on the Earth when talking with a gardener

I suppose these things are becoming more important to me because part of my living is supported by the wage I earn from working at the Leeds Arts University. My role there includes both teaching and research and research is quantified by measurable outputs. So for instance if I write a journal article that is peer reviewed, this is a measurable output. Words as I have just pointed out work like a trouser press. Therefore a journal article I have written will have smoothed out the creases and made whatever it was I decided to pick out as the main issue for communication, something that works well in words. But, aaaagh, by the very doing of this I am skewing the meaning of my work into directions that fit structures that have been developed because of the way words work.

Like 'Catch 22', I am trapped. This is how the 'abstract' of one of my articles reads:

Drawing Research Theory Practice: Volume 3 Issue 1 April 2018: Garry Barker: Drawing and the street texts of Chapeltown

Abstract
"This paper is a meditation on a field text that explores the concept of the sentient street. The graffitied walls of Chapeltown, a multi-cultural area of Leeds, a Northern English city, talk to an artist embedded within its community and these street texts give rise to drawings that embody that experience. Chapeltown has been a home to various and shifting populations over the last 100 years and during this time its walls have often been a support for the words of street poets, especially those that have messages that go beyond the traditional graffiti tag. Walking through these streets as he draws, an artist meets people and talks to them and their stories become additional texts that can be used to provide narratives to support the development of post-situ drawings. The streets themselves have their own voice and it is this voice that gives the artist’s post-situ drawings their charge, a voice that gives poetic shape to the drawn image. This article seeks to follow these street texts and their affect. Nancy’s concept that a drawing does not become information, but a sense, is used as a guide and as a series of interjections as to the way textual information becomes embedded into the feeling tone of a drawing".
Notice how a certain type of language is used, for example, 'post-situ drawings', instead of drawings done back in the studio, 'textual information' instead of 'reading', a 'field text' instead of some writing responding to lived experience. Not only is my communication twisted by words, it is further distorted by the types of words used because I am writing in an academic context. As I pointed out, the thing about words is that they have to stand for other things that are not themselves. So what is it about a drawing, isn't this the same problem, isn't this the same problem for a perfume? Is all communication simply various approaches to metaphor, does one thing always have to stand for another?

An allegorical drawing of Chapeltown using pen, ink and wash

Charcoal drawing using charcoal I made myself

I made some charcoal and I used it to make a drawing. As the drawing arrived there was a moment when it began to remind me of something, a certain type of space, a certain type of atmosphere and at some point I left it there in this becoming. Notice the coming into being impression of a feeling or imprecision of communication here. The intent is not clear. But then the world is not clear, I don't know what the weather will mean to me today. Will it uplift my spirits or just be a background against which I will get on with my work? This image was for a brief period in my life important, but like the weather, I can't focus on it for too long because I have other things to do.  But I do still carry on making these things called drawings and just as the weather carries on weathering, I for some reason seem to carry on drawing. It has over the years become just something I do. Of course I also write about it, a lot, (and make much more solid things, such as ceramics). But the writing is partly because it is hard for other people to accept my drawings as a serious form of communication without the presence of words, hence the exhibition catalogue, art magazines, journals, art books and the writings of art critics. So...why do I draw? Because as well as looking, I also smell, hear, taste and touch things and find these simple acts of great comfort to me. Drawing has over the years become a sixth sense and is also a comfort to me; it calms me down, eases my anxiety and offers me a way of communicating that is more like a crumpled pair of well worn trousers. 

Further reading
Ernst Fischer: The Necessity of Art

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

Tom Wolfe: The Painted Word

Peter Halley: Notes on Abstraction

Published in Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. 61, June/Summer 1987
Nancy, JL. (2013) The Pleasure in Drawing New York: Fordham University Press

See also:

Drawing as thinking

Why it matters