The Art of Drawing

A lesson unlike anything taught in class

The Big Maker

The Big maker Catalogue Of Essential Skills For Post-Civilised Beginners

I could have named this weighty imaginary book the music of making. Which is very distinct from the making of music. I have been running around with this project in the back of my head for a decade or so. Way too long. High time to let it fly. Throw those seeds and see where they land. This is the first entry.

To kick it off I chose the queen of all maker skills to sketch you a life changing ability. One that is killing us. A lesson in drawing unlike anything taught in class.

Warning: this might involve real life paper and pencil. I know, utterly scary, but I will be gentle.

Ugly and Impotent

Like the catwalk model thinks herself ugly, so do many people think themselves incapable of drawing. And they are right. Both model and modern human are in some sense ugly and incompetent. But both (ugliness and the impotence) are also an intricate part of drawing. Anyone saying the art of drawing demands you to jot down a lifelike pretty cat, a perfect tree or cockeyed girlfriend has not yet discovered what we are heading for.

Drawing is a strange word. It has several hundred meanings. You can draw a gun, a sail, a crowd. Draw to a close. You can own a drawing, have a draw (in a lottery, or straw pulling activity), you could be drawn into all kinds of things. I could go on an on. It is not about wordplay we are looking for the big indescribable underneath. Drawing the Good Old Deity without naming. Drawing is the primary cultural activity. The day we made the first doodle on the cave wall we became human.

What we now call manipulation (the word originates in the chemists lab) is a weird inversion of the older word drawing. It draws from you. It replaces ‘the undrawn’ original with an artificial lookalike but sells it to you as the real thing. More pretty, more important, more slick. A bad trade. The shiny titbits are fake. Manipulation and drawing stand opposite on a very wide scale. If you, yes you personally, are unable to find your way back to the undrawn¹, the scale will tip. It has already. And not in your favour. No pressure, just saying.

How to draw?

It involves you. That’s why it scares you. It strengthens the relation of what is out there with whoever is that illusive you, the observer. This activity draws from the world and adds it to you. See? Weird huh? It is an energy transfer. The transactions go unnoticed because they are micro shifts. They are very real though. The accumulated effect of being manipulated needs countering by the skill of drawing.

Now find an object.

A tree or a chair or a house, not something nervously moving like a friend or a dog. It is not important what, as long as it doesn’t change a lot short term. Got it?

No, seriously don’t imagine a chair. Find a real one. That’s essential. Now sit and look at the damn thing.

Input mode

If it took less than a few seconds to see the object, you’ve failed the exercise. Move your eyes back and look again. If your mind objects, tell it to shut up. We’re not interested in what the brain has seen before, in what the lobes already know. We are switching to slow mode. Input mode. If, on the other hand, you have noticed something, anything, you never had noticed before, you’ve found the entrance. Entrance, beautiful word. Let it entrance you further until the familiar thing shifts into the strange unfamiliar reality out there.

It was there all the time so it won’t bite you. But it can feel a bit scary to notice this falling sensation. A sort of reality vertigo. You just opened a window and leaned out to look at the wider reality. It means you are on your way to becoming a draftsman. Draftsperson. A seer. A drawing being, experiencing energetic gain, spiritual growth, wiggle room, some fresh air. It is just a first step. A speck of spirit dust. A baby discovering it can sit up. You will fall over again. But now you know the entrance. It is just one of many, many doors.

Next. With your eyes you ever so slowly, as slow as you can bare, follow the contour of the thing you chose as your object. Look at where the thing ends and the rest of the world begins and notice whatever there is to notice. But keep moving. Slide along. Register details, colour changes, changes in direction, places where you loose the contour or can’t see it. Anything goes. Soft edges, hard edges, shininess, light bouncing frivolously. Stitch after stitch you sew the object to its surroundings.

You have followed an imaginary ‘line’ (that wasn’t a line at all) around some thing. A contour. And you ran into a thousand choices about that contour. How much detail is enough? Include the shadow? Use both eyes to see or just one? Can I move my head to reveal the fourth leg? Should I take away the pile of books on the seat or ignore it?

Any choice made is fine. It is about becoming aware of you constantly making all those tiny decisions. You decide while you follow the contour. And you make this following as complex or as simple as you wish. You lead the eye along the thing as much as the thing leads your eye.

Now, to conclude todays lesson, we will do the opposite. On a bit of paper with a pen or a pencil.

Output mode

You know what a pencil does. Make a mark. You do not yet know what it can do. A mark-making tool can create objects. Or to be precise the illusion of an object. Which is not different from what your eye does, or your mind. The pencil makes visible what the eye and the mind do to it, add to it, change it into. Makes is the important word in that last sentence. It makes something that wasn’t here before. Nothing huge, but still. This the the basic magic of the pen.

Here’s the secret to how. The first act is unblanking the surface. You leaving a trace is a powerful act. Making a point makes all the difference. Bertus was here it says. No, stupid. Fill in your own name. You! You are doing this. Savour this ritual moment regularly.

The next massive step is drawing a line. Dividing the world into two is a divine act of creation. And an evil deed of destruction. You decide. Here lies this and there lies that. The line slices reality as you see it. If done convincingly people will believe you really did. They will respect the line. You will learn pretty soon it is not true. It is just a line. The ability to draw lines defines humans and it got us into the trouble we are in. You need to learn to draw to discern between imposed lines and lines that are part of the fabric. Learn to see through the artificial lines. To see them for what they are. Tools to make us a picture. The straight road is an act of severe aggression. It cuts the weave. It replaces a million connections with one ugly line. Rulers have no place in this act of drawing. It needs to be freehand and straight from ‘nature’, do not use a representation as input, do not replace the simplest mark-making tool with anything more complex.

Now the actual practice.

Draw a line that ends up where you started without ever —seven days of harsh punishment if you break this rule— ever crossing the line.

This is the contour of a thing. You just made a thing, an nice ugly object. The outline of something has been pulled into being.

Now respect the thing created and draw another contour. Still never ever crossing a line. You can bounce against, go behind the ‘object’ by lifting your pencil to make it appear again wherever it surfaces after the ugly thing. You create an illusion of objects when you do not break the illusion by disrespecting its contour.

Congratulations. Now you can draw a thing. And I never, never again want to hear you deny this skill or forget this entrance.

Combine

When input mode and output mode are active with just you in between the internal rightness indicator needle moves to the region called pleasure. Also known as flow.

The art of drawing is present in many other activities. Writing for one. Politicians know how to draw. You can draw with your ears, with whatever body you have available. The simple act of sketching teaches the underlying energetics the clearest.

An ugly sketch a day, keeps the chemists at bay………. ow shut up Bertus, just go draw something….

1. The Undrawn is often called ‘nature’. A very confusing word by now. People think of green stuff. I think asking if it has been ‘drawn’ or not is a better indicator of the quality of the source. The amount of unnatural most of us swim around in is staggering. This drawing exercise is a simple and brutally honest teacher in finding back your way to the authentic.