I have therefore returned to drawing. I'm also continuing to write about drawing and have got the first chapter underway about language and time. This is quite helpful as I'm kept very aware of what drawing means as a communication tool when I'm working. I've written a lot about the way drawing can compress different information into the same space and release it simultaneously, so it makes sense for me to be looking at this as part of the research. I've taken the images I have been working on, the fires and mountains and have started to combine them in drawings. See below.
The studies are useful to my main practice as I'm including this image in the top section of a new drawing, which will hopefully be finished for a show in mid-September. The aspect of compaction I'm looking at here is one artists like Cozens or Dali used. The fact that an image can be either one thing or another. It's an old trick, but it still works to energise an image because the viewer has to engage with their own perceptions and be aware of possible alternatives. The problem is though that you need to give clues if a reading is not balanced, in this case the mountain is outweighing the fire, so I am including camp fires in the foreground of the final large drawing.
To give an idea of what I'm writing at the moment the selection below is an extract from a chapter entitled; 'Drawing as a record of perception'. I've moved on now to look at Zen Buddhist drawings and making notes on how calligraphic brush drawings embed time in a different way.
The extract is a reflection on a particular Watteau drawing, the Flute Player.
‘The Flute Player’ is a typical Watteau drawing from the early 18th century. This sketch was probably done to help him think through the content of one of his paintings. At first glance the simple reading is given to us by cultural clues, the man’s hairstyle, clothing etc. all suggest a time of roughly 300 years ago. However there is a lot more to this drawing. We can start to follow the artist’s focus and interest by reflecting on the various levels of engagement he has with differing elements. Some parts of the figure are barely there, ghosted in to support the main areas of focus, which are the face and the hands. Immediately we notice this we put ourselves back into the position of the maker, we re-live the time of the drawing’s making as our eyes re-trace the artist’s movements as he picks his way around the subject of perception. Finally we realise that one area in particular has been singled out as being the entry point into the drawing, the flute player’s left hand. The dark shading under the fingers helps to also push the space outwards towards the viewer, operating as a type of atmospheric perspective, (dark marks come forward, softer light marks recede) and recreating a moment of spatial awareness that would have been part of the initial experience. Condensed in this one image we have several time based issues operating simultaneously. The first is one of historical time, (the historical past) the second is a time of reenactment, in language we sometimes call this the past perfect progressive tense, as in “he had been drawing”, the third is however the present tense, which is constructed out of the fact that you are actively looking and your eyes scanning the image now, the present tense being what makes the drawing important, it is active today as well as being a record of the past.
So why is this
important? Above all it tells us a lot about the human condition. The image
embeds within itself a record of a period of skilled concentrated looking. The
skill involved here is very important, it takes on average 10,000 hours for a
human being to master a skill of this level. (Sennett, 2009) It is a level of
accomplishment that means that the actions of the maker have become tacit; the
hand is therefore released from the mind’s pressure of having to think about
making and the artist can respond to the moment of perception without any
barriers. We are therefore far closer to the original perceptual experience and
we live as it where, in the same time as the original encounter. This is not
the same as the frozen moment of a photograph, it is a layered time, one that
opens out to the viewer the longer the image is looked at. The drawer’s
decisions becoming more and more transparent to us as we retrace his interest
via the changes in focus and attention to details encoded within the marks. In
this way we develop another engagement, one with the artist himself and his own
engagement with his world and its people. The grammar and syntax of this image
are developed by the materials of its construction. The paper ground has a
particular granular texture, this being essential to the application of the
chalks, which rely on a tough surface on which to pull off tiny fragments of
material from the stone-like core of the solid pastels. The touch of the artist
is here vital, too much pressure and the mark clogs the grain of the paper, not
enough and the trace is too light. The speed of application is also important.
Each stroke becomes a sign for the eyes to follow and we track the artists hand
with the same skill that our ancestors tracked the spore of a deer, being able
to read as much in the differences between mark speed and weight of
application, as between the weight of an animal’s imprint in soft ground and
the shape and relationship of its hoof-prints as it slows down or breaks into a
startled run.
Learning to read the
marks that construct a drawing is something that itself takes time. A young
hunter would spend several years being instructed how to read the signs of an
animal’s track, in the same way a young artist needs to look at many drawings
and take time to unravel the story that is frozen in the marks of their making.
The more you look the more you see. Look at these marks more closely and you
will see that some of them are applied with chalks that have been sharpened so
that more fine detail can be picked out and other chalks are used on their
sides so that broad areas can be touched in quickly. You start to realise that
as the artist’s attention and focus moves his hands follow by choosing
different tools or by using the same tool in a different way. When we read
poetry we listen for how rhythm changes to reflect mood, or the way particular
words are chosen to make us more aware of the complexity of content and how
this is reflected in the sound structure of the poem. In the same way the
draftsman can vary mood and contextual understanding by these changes in
application and the way the ground is manipulated into becoming a space for
action. The construction of visual
rhythm is vital as it on the one hand creates life, by giving a visual
heartbeat to the work, and at the same time operates as a guidance system for
the eyes, pushing vision quickly over certain areas and slowing it down when
necessary point of focus are needed. The dark points of shadow under the left
hand of the flute player in some ways operating as full stops as well as
spatial indicators. The full stop in a sentence gives us time to breath and get
ready to move on, but it also signals that a particular piece of information
has been summed up or concluded. These points are vital to the language
structure as they indicate a certain closure, the left hand being perhaps what
Barthes would term the ‘punctum’ of the image, or as he helpfully put it, that which 'pierces the viewer'. (Barthes, 1993).
All of these marks are of course made by
one material rubbing off onto another. In this case chalk is the material that
is eroded and broken off by the paper. Chalk is one of our softest rocks, and
one that has been used as a drawing material for thousands of years. Pastel is
a man made variant of the naturally occurring chalk, powdered chalk being bound
back together with coloured pigments using various binders, including in
Watteau’s time, oatmeal and honey. The fact that this soft rock can also
represent flesh and clothing, that it can be read as other than what it is, is
something that every artist is acutely aware of. In particular artists working
in Christian Catholic countries were aware of the importance of transubstantiation, that moment in the Mass when, “that wonderful and
singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of
the whole substance of the wine into the Blood…”9 of Christ occurs. The
still magical moment when marks and lines of a drawing suddenly appear to be
something else, is a singular moment that pops into being every time someone
looks at a representational drawing. The moment of transformation being given
more power the closer the drawing achieves a balancing act between a clear
presentation of its reality, (in this case chalk marks scraped off onto a rough
paper surface) and the way its marks are grouped together to suggest the
appearance of something. Too much ‘photographic’ detail can inhibit this moment
as the mind has no work to do in recognising what it is possible to see and
uncontrolled distortion or weak observation on the part of the artist can
result in a failure of the audience to recognise what is being represented. In
effect a failure to control the use of the artist’s language.
A further aspect of language of course
is that it can create subtlety and nuance by the use of adverbs and adjectives.
These are conditioning and modifying tools and in the case of drawing the
choice of implement is vital to this. Chalks have a certain softness in their
application, something we can understand if we contrast chalk with other
materials. Imagine this drawing done in pen and ink, it would be too harsh, too
firm in its tone. Chalk can caress the surface and yet still be controlled well
enough to suggest an underlying firmness, the musician’s head clearly has a
firm bone structure beneath it. However chalk handled in this way, also
suggests a fragility, a gentle light touch, the rapidity of its application
further suggesting the rapid passing of time. This brings us to a further,
deeper realization of time within the drawing. These fleeting glimpses of a man
playing a flute are also a metaphor for the fragility of all our lives. As the
man plays he is playing a forgotten tune, one that will drift off and quickly
fade away. The drawing’s lightness of touch being one that reminds us of smoke
forms drifting through a room or clouds making momentary images as they
shape-shift across the sky.
The composition and overall formal
relationships are used to fuse the elements together and organise our reception
of them. Again rhythm is vital to this and the swirling movement of the body
and soft curves of the clothes and hair echo the sound of music coming from the
flute, which itself is the only straight line in the composition, a diagonal
linking hands with mouth and giving the eyes a moment of rest. Watteau catches
a brief moment and holds it for us, but as we bring this moment back into the
present through our engagement with it, we are also affected by the realisation
of its import. Behind the membrane of the paper surface lies an intuition of the
world of the dead and their spirits and for brief moment as we look at this
drawing, we can perhaps in our minds touch the surface of the Paleolithic cave
wall and from behind it feel the trembling hearts of our long dead ancestors.
In some ways every drawing reenacts all the other drawings that have been done
since humans first made them over 30,000 years ago. We are still the same
species and still have the same short lifespan within which to experience,
birth, growing up, maturity, old age and death. The tools we developed to help
us get through were honed to perfection a long time ago, and as part of our
realisation of what it is to be alive now, we should celebrate this.
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