Drawing - MORE than you may even want to know!

Drawing is the 'bones' of art. You have to be able to walk before you can run.

Dion Archibald
 

To flex my drawing muscles, I drew some 'bones' today at the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center. I started sketching a bison skull, collected as evidence near Fountain Paint Pots in Yellowstone National Park. A very interesting skull with loads of intrigue for a pencil sketch...

Bison skull in the collection of the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center

 

Evidence tag on the bison skull.

 

The start of my pencil sketch - 25 " x 25" graphite on board

 

Good drawing forms the 'bones' on which a strong painting hangs.

Chris Bingle

We started the discussion on ‘back to basics’ on my last post, because drawing is a building block for much of art.

However, I know that for many, drawing is NOT basic! It can seem very difficult and elusive. With a degree in Art and Education, I have heard much angst associated with drawing. I’ve read many books on the subject of drawing and learning to draw and thought I’d post some excerpts - an interesting topic to look at a little deeper....

Drawing isn’t learned quickly. Some people regard it as chiefly a matter of coordinating hand and eye, but probably the manual dexterity required is already developed by the age at which you want to be able to depict precise and detailed things.  Others talk of drawing as a matter merely of sharpening the eye, but that, too, is a simplification. 

Semir Zeki, professor of psychology at the University College London, points out that one sees not with the eye, but with the cerebral cortex – of which the eye itself is merely an extension.  Seeing, perceiving form and depth and texture, and translating what you see into line segments and tones, then directing the hand to make even tiny line segments, requires one to communicate all these things to various parts of the brain.  It is a complicated and challenging complex of behaviors, requiring one to perfect and coordinate a wide array of different mental skills, and then to perform a variety of difficult tasks simultaneously, or at least in precise and rapid sequence.

Simply focusing on right-brain/left-brain dominance probably leaves us with an inadequate picture of what goes on when we draw. Probably both hemispheres are working simultaneously – the left being more oriented to detail, breaking the visual configuration into more convenient parts, while the right looks at the whole pattern of the configuration. John Gabrieli, a Stanford University neurophysiologist, thinks the brain is too complex to be purely right– or left– hemisphere oriented. He believes there are more connections and interplay between hemispheres and that in drawing; interplay between front- and rear-brain areas may be just as important.

Drawing at least requires the ability to separate a figure or subject from its ground or setting and the abilities to detect shapes, forms, sizes and orientation.  It requires some mechanism for storing that information on a short-term basis and for passing it on to other parts of the brain that will translate it into line or shape or value, or all three. The impulses must forward to parts of the brain that allow you to judge whether you have placed the line or shape appropriately.  Other parts of the brain will probably judge whether you have drawn it too large or too small.

When drawing, one is also processing impulses through areas of the brain that have to do with intentionality and self-control, areas that keep one focused on the purpose and feeling of one’s work. One is also processing impulses through areas that direct arm and wrist and finger movements.  The visual areas are at the rear of the brain, the areas that keep one focused on a task at the front.  Areas that have to do with perception of spatial relationships are largely in the right side of the brain, while areas that have to do with naming things are largely in the left side.  When you are drawing, your body is still, but your brain is crackling with alarms and errands.

Learning to draw is learning to control these alarms and errands.  And that is not a matter of knowing but a matter of practice.

Drawing seems to provide an extra measure of engagement. Especially the kind of drawing that pulls you out of yourself, and even off the page, into contemplation of something outside you.  It’s almost as though, while drawing, we generate a sort of psychic camouflage, becoming still like the surface of a pond when the wind dies down. There is something in the world that is pleased when we do that, which steals up behind us then.  We feel it as an increased clarity, as a hush, a kind of music.

Matisse said he drew “to liberate grace and character” and saw the work as “that of understanding myself”.

So get out that pencil and exercise your brain - AND liberate your grace and character! Drawing is a good place to start....

 

(Excerpts from The Undressed Art by Peter Steinhart and A Trail Through Leaves by Hannah Hinchman)