Drawing a line

All good drawing – with the exception of that done from memory – should be explorative. In other words, an exercise in close looking. Watch a serious artist drawing, and you will see that the time devoted to looking will in all probability be greater than that devoted to drawing. Further – given the difficulty of accurately holding in your mind what you have observed – one minute is too long to spend on the drawing. Watch students making drawings of art works in galleries, and you will see that many of them spend far more time ‘drawing’ that they do looking at their subject. I have seen a student spend four to five minutes drawing without so much as a glance at the painting she was supposed to be learning from. What was she doing? In all probability she was trying to make her drawing look good or nice according to some preconceived notion of what it is that constitutes a good drawing. Manifestly she was wasting her time, and learning nothing.

None of the above is to say that drawing is not selective. It has to be: otherwise it will be deadened by minutiae; choked by detail. The salient features are what matter, and in some drawings nothing is included except lines, which in the hands of a fine draughtsman will indicate form without the use of shading (our minds being well equipped to supply what is excluded). The Rembrandt drawing illustrated below is one of the finest examples of the expressiveness of line, as well as being a drawing of exquisite delight.

Rembrandt. Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk.
Red chalk. C. 1640 

Some time ago, thinking how essential it is to pay the closest attention to the subject of a drawing, I tried an experiment in looking and drawing simultaneously. A near impossibility, as I supposed, and yet it turned out to be not quite that. It was possible because, although I did not stop my hand from moving, I looked rapidly between the subject and the drawing, and I can remember how the two tended to meld as I worked. However, if this gives rise to the thought that the result was somehow a facsimile or copy of what was in front of me, then nothing could be further from the truth (as is evident from the drawing in question, Dead plane leaves, illustrated below). What the eyes see, and the imaginative mind comprehends, is transformed by hand, wrist, and arm into something that is different from the subject of the drawing, while retaining its integral form. (I hope that that does not sound pretentious, but I cannot find a better way of describing the process whereby a thing in the world becomes a drawing on paper.)

Dead Plane Leaves, Conte crayon and pen and ink 

There is then the question of ‘movement’ in a drawing, which – even when related to  physical movement in the world – remains inherently static as a graphic representation (or interpretation) on the flat surface of paper. Dead Plane Leaves has movement, even though it was drawn indoors, and completely undisturbed by wind or draught. So it is that the movement is integral to the lines; and the carefulness with which they were drawn seems only to have enhanced their liveliness. This seems paradoxical; but only if we persist in believing that the achievement of movement in a drawing can only come about as a result of free and fast drawing. (It can if you are a Picasso, but such are in short supply!)

This brings me to Ruskin, and a passage from The Cestus of Aglaia. He writes:

All freedom is error. Every line you lay down is either right or wrong ... If right, it most assuredly is not a ‘free’ line, but an intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as ‘free’ as the hand of a first–rate surgeon in a critical incision. [Chapter IV, §72]

This is of course highly prescriptive and persuasive, and we might wonder if any artist not possessed of the genius of a Raphael could ever lay down a ‘right’ line. Yet if Ruskin sets the bar too high, it remains true that any artist who sets out to make their drawing look ‘good’ rather than truly explorative, then they are not drawing. “Take the commonest, closest, most familiar thing, and strive to draw it verily as you see it. Be sure of this last fact, for otherwise you will find yourself continually drawing not what you see, but what you know.” It happens from time to time that an artist develops a ‘technique’ or a ‘way of doing things’ that charms and fools a great many people. Yet, look at such works with a critical eye and they will fall apart in front of you: just like a spent firework falling out of the sky!