Kimon Nicolaïdes and the natural way to draw

Because I have been involved in teaching art for so many years, every now and again I like to look at how other art teachers have framed up the process, especially when it comes to the traditional elements of drawing, such as working from the figure. Kimon Nicolaïdes is someone who still has a lasting legacy and if you have attended evening classes in life drawing, or have attended some sort of preparatory course such as a foundation or access program, I'm pretty sure you will have been asked to do at least one of the exercises he introduced. 

The 'natural' way to draw is an interesting phrase in itself, it suggests that there is an unnatural way to draw. As we are all creatures of nature, I find it impossible to imagine a way of drawing that wasn't natural. I suspect he really means 'more in tune with' or 'working with and alongside your materials' or 'allowing your feelings to direct your actions'. 

Gesture drawing and contour drawing are seen as the two main planks on which Nicolaïdes' reputation as a teacher rests. He also felt that drawing well had nothing to do with technique or an understanding of aesthetics.  It was he said all to do with: "a right observation of the world".

He insisted that students had to discover what right observation was by themselves, and that the art teacher’s job was to teach them not how to draw...but how to learn to draw.

If you break Nicoliades' approach to drawing down there are three basic areas and as you work your way through his exercises, what I'm sure he was aiming for was to enable his students to gradually synthesise these three approaches. Contour, gesture and weight are the three elements that he uses to enable a student of life drawing to tackle energy, mass and surface. But it has been pointed out that the weight drawing exercise is often under used, this of course leaves the contour and gesture drawings without gravity and mass, people going for the excitement of surface energy, without coming to terms with the need for presence, solidity and gravitas.  Like everything else, a proper approach to an understanding of the figure requires an awareness of the entanglement of approaches available. You will always find contour in gesture drawings, gesture in drawings exploring weight, and weight in the development of drawings about gesture. I have touched upon some of these issues in my post on cross contour drawings, but mass is also something you can deal with tonally as well as by using certain very low points of view. 

Set out below is Nicoliades' first exercise: You can work your way though all of the exercises by using this link.  (Start at the post dated16th Jan 2011) The link is to a blog by someone working their way through as many approaches to learning to draw as they can, and is a very honest account of their own progress. 

EXERCISE 1: CONTOUR DRAWING

Materials: Use a 3B (medium soft) drawing pencil with a very fine point (sharpened on sandpaper) and a piece of cream-colored manila wrapping paper about fifteen by twenty inches in size. Manila paper usually comes in large sheets which may be cut into four pieces of that size. You may use, also, the kind sold as ‘shelf paper’ provided it is not glazed. Fasten the paper with large paper clips to a piece of prestwood or a stiff piece of cardboard. Wear an eyeshade. Do not use an eraser until you come to Exercise 28.

Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point — any point will do — along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.

Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means that you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model. Exactly coordinate the pencil with the eye. Your eye may be tempted at first to move faster than your pencil, but do not let it get ahead. Consider only the point that you are working on at the moment with no regard for any other part of the figure.

Often you will find that the contour you are drawing will leave the edge of the figure and turn inside, coming eventually to an apparent end. When this happens, glance down at the paper in order to locate a new starting point. This new starting point should pick up at that point on the edge where the contour turned inward.

Thus, you will glance down at the paper several times during the course of one study, but do not draw while you are looking at the paper. As in the beginning, place the pencil point on the paper, fix your eyes on the model, and wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching the model before you draw. Not all of the contours lie along the outer edge of the figure. For example, if you have a front view of the face, you will see definite contours along the nose and the mouth which have no apparent connection with the contours at the edge. As far as the time for your study permits, draw these ‘inside contours’ exactly as you draw the outside ones.

Draw anything that your pencil can rest on and be guided along. Develop the absolute conviction that you are touching the model.

Student Contour Drawing: Let the lines sprawl all over the paper

This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look. If in the time allowed you get only halfway around the figure, it doesn’t matter. So much the better! But if you finish long before the time is up, the chances are that you are not approaching the study in the right way. A contour drawing is like climbing a mountain as contrasted with flying over it in an airplane. It is not a quick glance at the mountain from far away, but a slow, painstaking climb over it, step by step.

Student Contour Drawing

Draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model

Do not worry about the ‘proportions’ of the figure. That problem will take care of itself in time. And do not be misled by shadows. When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow. Your pencil moves, not on the edge of a shadow, but on the edge of the actual form. At first, no matter how hard you try, you may find it difficult to break the habit of looking at the paper while you draw. You may even look down without knowing it. Ask a friend to check up on you for a few minutes by calling out to you every time you look at the paper. Then you will find out whether you looked too often and whether you made the mistake of drawing while you were looking.

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There are lots of interesting issues that emerge from Nicoliades' approach, for instance the relationship between touch and sight. As he points out, "When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow". However I might argue that we only begin to realise what we see when we can verify  perception by linking touch to sight. Also where is that edge of the actual form? The surface of a human body is one continuous topology and it has no edges. Lots of interesting questions about how we perceive arise as soon as you try to unpick what he is trying to do. However what he provides is a framework within which you can work and this is perhaps the most important thing. I personally find his way of working far more engaging and life affirming than the realism or constructional approaches to life drawing.

The approaches to life drawing that emphasise realism often use the Charles Bargue Drawing Course, which was devised in the 19th century and which guides students on how to copy from plaster casts, how to study and work from great master drawings and which finally gives instruction on how to draw from the life model. These three areas of study are usually blended in with other methods taken directly from French Academy teaching materials. There is an emphasis on training how to see. (Note not questioning it, but giving ways to shape what you see, for instance you are taught that by copying shadows you can arrive at a much more satisfactory observation of a figure, than by filling in outlines.) These courses emphasise technical mastery of traditional art materials and aim for success in 'realism', i.e. skin tone should be accurate, proportion correct etc. Most of the drawing is taught sight size, i.e. one to one size correspondence which leads to accuracy in measurement. 

The approaches that emphasise constructional methods use more sculptural drawing techniques. There is an emphasis on three dimensional awareness and how to use this to construct figure drawings. For instance tonal analysis using cross hatch techniques, planar construction or the simplification of continuously moving organic forms, so that they can be rendered more clearly within various perspectives. This system often works in layers. For instance in the first stage you make perspective boxes of say the pelvic girdle and trunk of the body, then on top of that you place drawings of bone structure and musculature, and then on top of that the formal distribution of human body shapes as understood from models. The classic textbook that sets out the constructional method is George Bridgman's 'Constructive Anatomy'. It is still available, try the Dover Anatomy for Artists' paperback. 

Lots of guides exist which you can use if you want to take on board these systems. My own approach is very post-Cezanne, which is basically to become lost in the puzzle of looking, but of course when I was a student I used several of the approaches set out above, each one helping to gradually build up a series of philosophical positions which for myself became intriguing entries into image making.  

See also

Life drawing Some reflections on what was to be the last of the life drawing sessions I was ever to teach at the Leeds College of Art.

Is drawing a language?

Cross contour drawing

Just do it A plea to get involved in the making. 

A very good 'how to' video that uses gesture as a key aspect

Drawing and philosophy part one This earlier post also covers similar ground and links to art schools still teaching the above methods. 

Hans Hoffman and his approach to life drawing

The practice and science of drawing by Harold Speed

Using tone

Texture

Drawing and mindfulness 

Drawing exercises

Drawing it all together

Mike Croft: Observation of Perception, Part 2

Observation of Perception, Part 2 

When writing this I’m thinking of drawing as a form of visual thinking. By such thinking, I mean considerations of mind, body and cognition variously channelled through the filter of vision. (Philosophically, this could take one in the direction of Embodiment theory.) What makes drawing as visual thinking particular in the context of art and design is intentionality, and it is the latter of which I try to be specific and that registers in and as the result. This said, a lot happens in drawing concerning the relatively autonomous behaviour of the medium that defies one’s intentions, and intentions are not necessarily always recognisable. However, on this occasion I’m trying to show through and as the drawing, ways in which one might observe perception. For this reason I’ve been recording the drawing process and my spoken thoughts while drawing as videos, specifically through an action camera attached to the front of clear plastic goggles worn over my glasses, Figure 1.

Figure 1: To show goggles, inside and outside, and action camera 

both separate from and attached to the goggles. 

This does also make the methodology more sharable, and anyone interested in it might take up the process and adapt it as needed. 
The action cam, however, appears as a thin blurred black rectangle imploded in front of and perpendicular to my vision, Figure 2.

Figure 2: Screenshots from Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing, video clip 26:52 min, 2019. 

This is therefore both a tool to record the drawing process and one of two objects or motifs to observe. While the action-cam itself picks up sound, I record my speech, what I term a voice-over, into a separate audio device. The second tool, also an object or motif, is the goggles. Both of these may be said to operate as tools because, being very close to my face, they’re almost an extension of my eyes. In this sense I’m observing perception, in other words looking at looking. This point is debatably another example of the medium’s defiance, but what I want is a situation where, as nearly as possible, there is nothing in front of my vision. 
The tools, neither of which you the viewer can see in the videos except in the terms that the drawing presents them, are each responsible for a pair of faculties of visual perception. One of the tools is the action cam, with its wide-angle lens, which records visual content both central and peripheral to my vision, without of course distinguishing between either. I provide such distinction through my speech. The other tool is the goggles that register eye and head movement in coordination with the head. (The camera won’t record eye movements made independently of head movements, of which there are two possibilities; eye movements while the head is still, and less often eye movements in different directions to movement of the head.) Both sets of faculties I register as drawn marks and shapes, which provide the accumulative visual/material interest that gradually makes the drawing, Figure 3.

Figure 3: The two stages of the drawing recorded as the video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing and Observation… Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing. Dermatograph pencils, black ink, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 

109 x 79cm. 2019. 

In the first blog entry (link), through reference to the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus’s non-digital eye-scanning device circa 1960s’, and the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon-Battista Alberti’s net or gridded frame to enable the plotting of observed coordinates, I try to explain that to my mind the mediation between perception and observation falls somewhere between the observer and that which is observed. The eye-scanning device is useful in this respect because it shows how one’s eyes scan across space, and Alberti’s frame because it can represent a material mid-way for consideration of life questions; questions of being. By substituting minimal objects, better conceived as tools of perception, for more tangible three-dimensional objects at obviously more distant positions in front of one, then what gets presented on and in the drawing is the mid-way, the mediator of sources of reference that are before it, as nearly as possible extensions of perception itself.
In circumstances where I’m drawing only, without using the action-cam, I have only my glasses to which to refer. If, as in the following example, I still record my speech, it seems appropriate to write at least some of the observations onto and progressively into the drawing, Figure 4.

Figure 4: Drawing of reading glasses drawing viewed from inside the frames while being worn. Dermatograph pencils, coloured inks on white laminated cardboard, 

109 x 79cm. 2019. 

This might also be a key point in general about the experience of drawing: it’s an activity that starts on a surface and gradually, through its development, opens up the surface as space. My own drawing method however, which is mainly concerned with conveying information about its self-same process, does tend to prioritise the surface. 
Explained another way, I’m setting up an inversion of the circumstances whereby the observed object that’s usually positioned somewhere in the space beyond oneself and the drawing is immediately in front of one, in this case the glasses. There is no source of reference that’s logically in front the drawing, and in fact the drawing, that should be the mediator between perception and what’s observed, is further beyond the object in the positions drawer/agent – glasses – drawing, as suggested in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Drawing of reading glasses viewed from inside the frames while being worn + the actual glasses now suspended in front of the drawing to fit their drawn size 

according to distance when seen from behind. 

What’s now interesting about the circumstances so installed is that the actual space between the object, the glasses, and their mediator between perception and observation, the drawing, can be the space of a narrative, a story of whatever else could be taking place in and as a different criterion of perception, Figure 6.

Figure 6: Showing the photo of Figure 5, above, and a view of the actual space existing between glasses and drawing. 

Artists often use the medium of drawing to rehearse and research narratives, or use drawing as the sole medium for this purpose – to name but one example, the contemporary artist William Kentridge. 
This leads me towards another kind of theory, which is the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981). I’d thought of mentioning Lacan in the first blog entry in the context of the glance, but since I reference the glance specifically in the video, Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing (see Figure 3, above), and hadn’t completed that at the time of writing the first entry, it now seems a better moment for further explanation. Lacan’s theorisation of the glance occurs in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). This paper is particularly interesting from the point of view of inter-subjective use of time. While the scenario that provides the context for Lacan’s discussion concerns three human individuals, I’m adapting this to the kind of dialogue that can occur between a drawer/agent and a drawing.
Lacan explains that within the time frame of trying to make a decision or reach a conclusion about something, an initial hypothesis concerning that something is first put to the test of doubt. The period of doubt, which in decision-making need be no more than an instant, but an instant that can be of variable length, is in effect the glance. According to Lacan (2006: 168): ‘The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending’. What I like so much about this quote is the suggestion that the glance concerns uncertainty. The engagement with drawing, or more precisely the dis-engagement with other modes of thought during and as drawing, can be an extended time frame of the glance; the holding of decision-making in abeyance as uncertainty. In the following drawing of the action cam and goggles – from which I also made a video – I later superimposed the glasses, seen as before from the narrow space between my face and the glasses lodged on my nose, Figure 7.

Figure 7: Single-layer state of a drawing of an action-cam worn over goggles and the goggles viewed from the inside while being worn, and a second-layer state of the drawing showing the same drawing with orange glasses superimposed, viewed from inside the frames. Dermatograph pencils, black ink and coloured inks, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 109 x 79cm. 2019.

What’s interesting here is that there’s conceptually a space between the two layers of mark making and cursory imagery that I leave alone. The several apparent positions of the glasses do seem to be increasingly in front of the placements of the narrow band of the action cam, but I mean a conceptual space that’s to do with my lack of conscious concern to integrate the two sets of imagery. However, the two sets waver in a kind of relationship that’s, in a sense, up to them.
While the word uncertainty often has a negative connotation, drawing and other forms of creative practice stand a good chance of manifesting uncertainty positively, no matter what one’s disposition. Debatably, if art works, it’s imbued with affirmation, even if its content and the invested feelings are opposite. Insofar as an uncertain disposition would be to hang back, and a decisive one would be to push onwards – hesitancy versus boldness – I personally like the idea of time conducting a kind of backwards rotation as part of its movement forward, where it picks up the past and draws it through. This also seems like drawing; where each decision is consequential on the next, and the next one is in acknowledgement of some previous decision. There are moments in the video-recordings of the drawing as shown in two states in Figure 3, above, however, where such consequential decisions break down, and in the video particularly of the second state I appear to be searching around for something to do next. While this often happens in drawing, I’d much prefer a drawing to roll on as a continuum of action, Figure 8.

Figure 8: Screenshots 40:42min and 41:27min, with 1st voice-over, and interventions of a 2nd voice-over between the timespan of the two screenshots, of the 44:35min video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing, 2019.

What’s interesting with the strategy of intervening in the first voice-over that’s spoken spontaneously while drawing, is that the intervention is squeezed into available moments of silence where I’m drawing only, which seems like a textual equivalent of re-working and revising the drawing. I show this also, in Figure 8, to indicate how the drawing and the voice-over are mutually both cooperative and distractive.
A second point of Lacanian theory conveniently links the first blog entry’s reference to Alberti’s frame with the idea of a potential narrative space. Lacan adapted the idea of a mid-way in the optical pyramid to his own idea, in the psychical context, of an opaque screen, more like a ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’, that muddies vision, altering and affecting what we assume to be the objectivity of vision. (This is my simple interpretation of very complex theory. For more thorough explanation you might refer for instance to Harari, 2004: 119-40) Suffice it to say that the metaphor of muddied vision may relate to the more subjective aspect of perception: the fact that one often imposes personal interpretation on otherwise objective and sharable visual-material content.
I’m intending to offer this question to a small group of fine art students as a contribution to their seminar class on Embodiment. After a drawing exercise that follows closely in the method of the above-described work, I’ll ask them to define the space that their glasses frame, or the frame of sunglasses, in terms of a narrative of their own choosing. Whether physically in whatever medium in the space as shown in Figure 6, right-hand photo, above, or as further development of the drawing, the only stipulation will be that the drawing should be seen to physically morph into the story. A colleague wrote me a comment on the proposed idea: ‘I see action through big drawing (space), glasses in some way combining a self to a field, which could be expanded space of imagination and place of vision. Physically and symbolically this is interesting, with the use of interpretative words and objects and also the context of subject and thing. I think the content analyses time, space, place, and will involve the students naturally in self related content.’
The idea of framing in one way or another is always important in the more instructive level of creative teaching, and in the above-described project I’ve been doing this for myself. The intention of the drawings is to explore a hypothesis that one can observe perception and visualise it as an observation. As in some instances of drawing – though not all – one hopes that the result conveys a degree of clarity of intentions. However, in the process, things may happen that cause one to become involved in other areas of research. I’ve given some indication of my own interests, and of how things can occur by chance in the course of drawing. If research is an additional direction, then through one’s practice a third and more integral possibility can emerge that alters one’s perspective, but in a sense, because it’s within the work instead of clearly declaring itself, it waits to be discovered. This other integral possibility may shift and challenge one’s determination to achieve clarity.

References 

Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other Press 
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (First published 2002) New York, NY; London: W. W. Norton & Company

Thanks to Mike for a fascinating insight into the work he is doing. 

It might be interesting for you to contextualise Mike's post by reading my own thoughts on that 'uncertain certainty' an attitude that lies at the core of most ventures into trying to record perceptual activity. His glasses are another drawing device or apparatus and therefore it might also be useful for you to think about how these devices have become integral parts of other drawing processes. 

Mike has sent a sharable file for those interested in more detail. He has extracted a 'voice' from one of his videos and given an account of how his spoken interjections are woven into the narrative of drawing making. 

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 your 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