Outlines: The Beauty of Mark Making

Draw (v.) c. 1200, spelling alteration of Old English dragan “to drag, to draw, protract” (class VI strong verb; past tense drog, past participle dragen), from Proto-Germanic *dragan “to draw, pull” (source also of Old Norse draga “to draw,” Old Saxon dragan, Old Frisian draga, Middle Dutch draghen, Old High German tragen, German tragen “to carry, bear”)

I had my sketchbook stolen. In the weeks since this event, in an attempt to lighten such a keen loss, I have been thinking a lot about drawing. And so I have been redefining it to myself as a process, the importance being the action rather than the end result. It’s like running, you know, we don’t grieve the ground we cover.

So what is drawing in its active sense? It is the action of gaining the essential qualities from an object. To draw water from a well, to draw a conclusion or to draw up a legal document. All three examples show drawing being used to extract necessity from chaos (interestingly this is only true in the English language, more often the term when referring to art sways closer to design).

In art too, I would argue that figurative mark making shows us drawing out the truth of something. As a process, it forces us to study both the external and the internal with a much deeper focus. It gives us, I think, a hypersensitivity in our visual reality. Everyone should be drawing, or at least looking, looking more. Looking with greater depth and richness. Drawing from life allows us to explore and understand what is in front of us. And when drawing from the imagination, we draw out something from our subconscious. Through the act of drawing, we create a reality from something entirely abstract- the image coming directly from the imagined.

The creation of the figurative from the abstract could show us that drawing is in a sense, freer than language. Is it, in fact, the only universal language? Drawing is the original form of communication. Humans learn the language of the line before any legible words. Babies scrape fingers through upturned bowls of food, dragging lines through the mess; tiny children scribble down on paper almost illegible depictions of ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and ‘house’. To push this idea further, the language of the line can be seen not only as the language we all learn in our earliest development, but in fact, the oldest existing language. It is the only ancient language still with practical use in our modern times.

It is writing before writing.

These two means of communication, drawing and writing, are inextricably intertwined. We use them both as a way of relaying our personal interpretations, fictions or truths to those around us. Often both are used as a way of extracting something internal, even the very act can make us feel lighter. This ability to displace the three-dimensional onto the two-dimensional is man’s greatest invention (that walking deity with pencil in hand). He created a dimension allowing us to create other worlds within our own, such a multitude we will never be able to occupy.

And if drawing is the original form of communication, then writing as we now know it is a direct evolution from it. The written word has drawing deep-rooted in its ancestry. How fascinating a family tree. Rothko being related to Shelley, Giovanni Bellini sharing the lineage of a whole shelf of Hemingways. Yes, we read words, but for so long too we have been reading paintings.

But then there is something so hopelessly intimate about drawings, I am far from discrediting them as objects entirely. This is where my theory falls. I love drawings, I love all of mine and I love everyone else’s, I love the failures as much as I adore the ones that are right. I love them as much as I love people. Both are fragile, impermanent, vulnerable- easily torn, broken, rubbed out or washed away.

Drawings are a time capsule of our individual natures. When we follow the mark makers movements across the page we learn so much. We see the strength of their hand, the tension in their shoulder perhaps brought about by a stressful day, a heavy bag, an early morning stiffness before the studio has warmed up (the chill wind blowing through the window off an Amsterdam canal).

As a practice, drawing allows an artist to work through their difficulties, he or she will leave this process behind on paper. A visceral reminder of a difficult point in time. A fucked-up attempt at foreshortening like a swear word recorded four hundred years ago.

For this reason, drawings shatter the illusion of genius. Michelangelo is known to have destroyed his experiments, lest it came to be known that he had to go through a multitude of failures before the creation of his masterpieces. Sprezzetura, translated as a careless perfection, an ability without really having to try; a Renaissance Italian ideal. In the words of Vasari, Michelangelo burned his drawings, “so that no one should see the labours he endured and the ways he tested his genius, and lest he should appear less than perfect.” Why is it that we see Michelangelo’s destroyed drawings as a loss? Well for a multitude of reasons but in my case because they would have allowed us to become closer to him as an artist. The artist can hide nothing in their drawing. Fragility exists here in so many forms.

My own drawings are trash now I’m sure (perhaps they always were), in a landfill somewhere, or, more optimistically, all pulped up and ready for their metamorphosis. From blank page to head spill to recyclable straw? To coffee cup? To new bleached pages of new empty sketchbook? Drawing is a process. Drawing is an act. Draw always, draw more.