Drawing What the Eye Sees

INDEX

1

Thoughts

About

Drawing

ANDREW LEVINSON

Sepia Conté chalk and pastel on paper. 20″ × 14″ (50.8 × 35.5 cm). 1982.

This drawing, and most of the other dance drawings presented in this book, are taken from the artist’s 1981 one-man exhibition The World of Dance at Coe Kerr Galleries, New York.

ABOUT DEFINING TERMS

What is drawing? At first glance the question seems simple enough to be superfluous; but upon reflection it becomes not only difficult, but perhaps not even definable.

Suppose an answer is given as, Marks on a surface, representing something. Although the first part of that answer doesn’t seem to present any problems, the second part does. Do marks need to represent something in order to be qualified as drawing? Even if within the term something can be included the broadest inferences—such as an idea, a representation of something seen, a mood—it can be argued that the marks need not represent anything, that in their graphism, independent of all association, they constitute drawing. If that definition is accepted, how can drawing be differentiated from any other form of marking? As an extreme instance, can we say that footprints are or are not a form of drawing? I recall seeing an Indian dancer who put a staining agent on the soles of her feet, and during the course of her dance upon a stretched cloth, produced a stylized drawing of a peacock. If that is drawing done by a dance, are footprints a drawing done at a walk? The problem is that any definition seems either too exclusive or inclusive. The term drawing possibly cannot be defined. If it is indeed impossible to define terms, I wonder whether it is necessary to do so. What compels us to define? Is it habit, an approach to thought that urges us to define something before discussing it? If define we must, ought we, on the basis of all the ideas that arise around the subject, allow a definition to suggest itself? But without a definition, how can we know the subject of our speculations, out of which we hope to realize a definition?

These questions may sound sophomoric, but they in fact infest the roots of our thought processes, the relationship between thought and language, and, as I hope will become apparent, the deepest reaches of the process of drawing.

ANTUBHAI VEDYA, AYURVEDIC DOCTOR

Sanguine chalk on gray paper. 10″ × 8″ (25.4 × 20.3 cm). 1953.

When you draw from life, it’s easy to forget that what you’re making is a drawing rather than a recreation of a person on paper.

THE DRAWING IMPULSE

Among the many things it may be, drawing is a trace, a track, a trail—like the leak from an oil-line down a highway or the progress of the worm in the woodwork, the print, the fossilized remains of movement. Even the fish in the ocean, the free bird in the sky, draw an invisible arabesque after themselves. In this sense, drawing is the relic of movement.

Movement, it may be said, is the translation of intent into action. On the origins of intent and desire I will not presume, but surely desire is a cry from the deepest corners of our being. This way of considering drawing creates a linked progression through time. From urge to idea to movement to trace, or drawing. This suggests that everything stands for something anterior and other. But is it just as possible that the drawn stroke is the original urge? Then perhaps everything only, stands for itself. In this context, it is even conceivable that drawing may be the free-standing original impulse that subsequently generates conceptions which then pique to life the sleeping snake of desire. And for those of you who are not passionate partisans of logical systemics, drawing may be all of these coexisting simultaneously. But however much of all these things that drawing may be, it is, as we will see, much more.

LAURIE LEVETTE

Sanguine lead on sand-colored paper. 1979.

Although it seems all to self-evident, drawing only suggests or symbolizes a perceived object; it can never recreate that object.

OUTLINE AND APPEARANCE

Drawing can suggest, represent, or symbolize perceived objects. But how in fact can this be possible? Of foremost importance when examining questions about representational drawing is the fact that the drawing is not and never can be the object it portrays. This appreciation seems so self- evident as to appear unnecessary, but it is honored by draftsmen more often in the breach than in the observance. When engaged with the difficulties of drawing from a model, the artist can easily forget that he is not indeed recreating that model on paper. It seems laughable, incredible that anyone may fail to notice that difference, but experience shows that an absorption in the drawing process can blind people to simple verities. When drawing, any form of blindness is undesirable, and this elementary lack of discrimination produces deformations in drawing.

In fact, I find it much more difficult to imagine how people came to accept line as a representation of perceived forms. It requires a stupendous leap of imagination, and an enormous extension or a gross suspension of belief! By what mechanism of intricate association can we infer any connection between the object we see and the line meant to represent it? I have read theories to the effect that drawing may have originated when early man traced the edges of his left hand as it lay flattened against the wall of his cave, or when he traced around the edges of shadows cast by fire. That may or may not be true; but I wonder what then impelled early humans to define objects against other objects by their outermost edge? One can easily imagine that the center of an object, its supposed core, or even a suggestive or striking feature, might more forcefully symbolize an entity Perhaps there is some innate drawing faculty embedded in man’s nature that accounts for this phenomenon. It is, for instance, hard to imagine that a dog could recognize his kind by an outline. Do animals recognize their own cast shadows?

The whole basis of linear representation is surprising in view of the fact, as frequently noted through the ages by artists, that lines as such do not exist—nor do contours. The outermost visible limits of one object against another are certainly not linear. The ocean’s horizon is where the sea more or less stops and the sky begins, but it is in no way a line.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. EUSTAGHE AND THE FORUM, PARIS

Pastel over Conté and pencil. 14″ × 11″ (35.5 × 27.9 cm). 1980.

CHINESE PUZZLE

4B pencil. 12″ × 10″ (30.4 × 25.4 cm). 1985.

Lines and contours do not exist in nature.

To be precise, nothing has absolutely fixed outer limits. The objects we perceive intermingle at their edges. Besides, whatever auric emanations they emit, light is very irregularly refracted from the surfaces of forms; and all forms are very irregularly surfaced. It would require an immense technological deployment to create even a relatively unbroken outer edge between two objects. The surfaces would need to be machine-smoothed to an extreme precision, the light refracted from them at all points isometrically, and all traces of atmosphere removed from the premises. The eye of the beholder of all this would also need to be some nonhuman bionic device.

If one takes the trouble to examine the limits of seen objects, they appear more like the interreactive, intermingling edges of floating clouds of colored gases. Nothing within our field of vision exists in isolation. All is mutual interaction: reflection and counter-reflection, radiances interpenetrating.

Even beyond these considerations, it is important to remember that the act of sight is a living process. As such, it vibrates with the rhythms of our being, humming and fluttering all the time! Sight itself is certainly not rigid, fixed, or motionless; sight is motion looking at motion. Out of all this turbulent agitation, where does the wire-like rigidity of outline come from?

LINE AND THE SENSE OF TOUCH

My own theory is that linearity does not originate with the sense of sight, but in fact arises out of the sense of touch. It can be argued that when two surfaces touch, there is again contact between two palpitating entities; and that if the contact is examined very minutely, it will probably resemble that same old process of interpenetration. However, I think it is easy not to notice that when one grasps something there is no truly definable limit between the surfaces of one’s hand and the grasped object. Perhaps the sense of touch seems more specific in our consciousness than visual apprehension. When we look, there is always the field of view surrounding and attached to the object we have focused upon; but when one grasps a desired object, the attention is more centered on the object itself and thus distracted from the generalized peripheral sensations of touch. The hand’s facility for gripping and holding is very specialized because the hand and fingers must accommodate very precisely to the shape of the grasped object. The focus of sight seems to be more diffuse or roving. The eye, I believe, functions best isotropically, that it is to say it takes in the total environment. But when one grasps something, there is the doubtless illusory sense that one possesses it. I don’t understand exactly why we should feel less a sense of ownership through sight, but in most instances I think this observation is true.

I think then that the idea of an object being defined by delineation goes, if I may express it so, hand in hand with the sense of touch. Although it may seem that we are far from the subject of drawing; I believe that we are now in the heart of its historical development.

45-MINUTE STUDIES

Sepia lead and pencil. 14″ × 20″ (35.5 × 50.8 cm).

Linearity arises not from sight, but from touch.

THE TACTILE AND OPTICAL APPROACH TO FORM

It has always appeared to me that human graphic art is divisible into two fundamental lines of development: the tactile and the optical. The tactile is essentially a means of representing forms based upon information received through the sense of touch. The optical, or visual, is a technique for representing either what is perceived by the eye or the process of perception itself. The tactile tries to represent the model on the basis of how we think it feels, the optical according to what it looks like. These approaches produce completely dissimilar results.

One is tempted to categorize the tactile as physical and the optical as mental, or even as material and spiritual. Mystic revelation usually discovers that one exists in the form of the other. It is important to examine the distinctions between these two methods of perception and their transcription into art. Otherwise, we may unknowingly use one when our intention is to draw from the other.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC REHEARSAL

Sepia lead on sepia-toned paper. 19″ × 20″ (48.2 × 50.8 cm). 1978.

The sense of touch is more focused and specific than the more diffuse sense of sight.

SOME CURIOUS ASPECTS OF PERCEPTION

Before describing the characteristics of the tactile and optical approaches, I would like to present some speculations upon the nature of visual perception. It is not the place here to debate the question, but as a point of interest that may be relevant, certain claims have been made on the basis of experiment that the human eye not only receives light reflected from the objects it perceives but also emits a sort of beam, or ray