Private acts and public objects
Cherish the images that pop into your head, they are messages from your visual imagination, your deepest well of creativity. It has promiscuously dropped a seed and given you the hard work of birthing your next painting while it wanders on to savor other delights. Ignoring these images is denying your own creativity. There are people who paint, and deny their own creativity, but they usually paint things such as houses and boats.
Your imagination inhabits a magical world, but your hand must struggle with the material reality of craft: paper surfaces that are too soft and absorbent, or too hard and slick; pencil leads that are too thin and cutting, or too thick and smudgy; brushes that work with best with wet paint, others that are better with dry paint, and so on. These are all craft contingencies that spring from the moment of creation (I reached for the red paint - I don't know why - but the paper was too smooth for that type of paint and I didn't expect to get that smear, but isn't it wonderful?) Artistic self discovery, an important part of your life-long voyage of self discovery, occurs when you create a virtuous circle between your imagination and the physical world. There is no more holy act.
Those burdened with self doubt, and who seek the reassuring applause of society, will lament: I can't draw, I can see images in my head, but I can't draw! Drawing with a pencil or brush (or using a graphics software program) transforms the imagined to the real. This is a leap into the unknown that has the potential of revealing some ugly embarrassment both to yourself and anyone looking over your shoulder. The despairing cry: I can't draw is really the defensive complaint: Why can't I draw safely, predictably and in a socially acceptable or even admired fashion?
Self acceptance is the emotional threshold of original drawing. Once you step through the doorway of self acceptance you enter the domain of craft materials and skill mechanics where you may be frustrated at not getting it right or surprised at having no idea that it would turn out this way. The answer to the question why can't I draw safely, predictably and in a socially acceptable or admired fashion is that original drawing is, by definition "original", which means not safe, not predictable, or perhaps not even socially acceptable.
Why is it so difficult to pick up a pencil and immediately draw in a manner that provokes your audience to hail you as Michelangelo come again? There are several reasons why drawing is both mechanically and conceptually difficult.
Drawings are done by unique people. The architecture of your physical being influences your drawing: muscles, nerves, tendons of the hand and so on, as well as the physics of vision in your eye. Human physicality is unique: Fingerprints differ, DNA profiles differ, your hand and my hand differ, both of our hands differ from the hand of Botticelli and neither of our hands are 35 mm cameras. Making images by hand forces you to recognize your own physicality.
As I age, my hand shakes with involuntary tremors. This is frightening because I fear that I will lose my ability to draw, but then I realize that I will simply draw in a new and different manner and the anticipation of future artistic novelty is delightful. Imagine how lucky I am to have a progressively shaky hand that will create marvels of drawing that will surprise me.
Recognizing the physical aspect of drawing, and making a virtue of it, is not as quixotic as it may seem. A common art school exercise illustrates the link between drawing and the draftsman's physicality by denying the draftsman's critical vision. That is, blind drawing. Without the critical feedback of vision, your drawing is unlikely to resemble the model. I did this exercise when I attended classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and I produced what looked like a disorganized mess of lines. Nevertheless I taped it to my kitchen door and every time I walked past I saw interesting relationships that suggested all sorts of paintings. My landlady, who appreciated only connected lines, wasn't impressed.
You can buy a book that illustrates the secrets of drawing like a Disney cartoonist (the first circle is Mickey's head and now draw another circle for Mickey's nose), but this is substituting somebody else's creativity for your creativity. Buying a digital image editor for your computer doesn't shield you from the challenges of personal growth because downloading somebody else's images (click here to download this image!) is substituting somebody else's images for your images. Relying on a standard transformation such as a Gaussian filter to create an artsy effect is commanding somebody else's algorithm to be creative for you. You can be tricky in manipulating the filter parameters, and even orchestrate numerous simultaneous filters, but this doesn't negate the fact that somebody else's algorithms are being creative for you.
The fundamental reason you can't draw like Botticelli is that you are not Botticelli. All you can do is copy Botticelli, an activity that makes you a Botticelli copiest, not Botticelli. You are not Botticelli, I am not Botticelli, only Botticelli is Botticelli. Consider this great truth: Each one of us is condemned to be an original.
In your hand is a craft tool. The more sophisticated your knowledge of craft materials, the easier it will be to approximate your vision. For example, if your vision requires a thin, wet black line, you will probably be frustrated applying a bulky chunk of charcoal. With time and experience your craft knowledge becomes sophisticated enough to permit you to predict results. I stand before a striking landscape and convene a strategy session with myself about craft methods: The sky will be a single blue wash that I can do with a wide soft brush. The dark trees in silhouette, however, would look best done in a heavy impasto and that insight pushes me towards my palette knife. A palette knife will mean thick paint applied with vertical strokes, which in turn suggests a solid horizontal placed below the trees of contrasting color and so on.
Deepening your knowledge of craft materials, however, is usually interpreted to mean buying lots of art gear. The art marketplace promotes the idea that successful drawing is contingent on using some product they vend. I once attended a workshop illustrating how to paint with a 49 cent brush; the workshop leader came supplied with boxes of brushes to sell. Bob Ross, a popular television painting evangelist, has a website advertising "Alizarin Crimson (firm 5 oz) - for landscapes" and "Alizarin Crimson (soft 1.25oz) - for florals". While it is true that some oil paint is manufactured dryer, and therefore firmer than others, a little medium will make it as soft as you like. I'm willing to bet that Professor Shepy didn't know that there is a "landscape" Alizarin Crimson and a "floral" Alizarin Crimson. Question: Would I use both tubes of Alizarin Crimson if my subject were a landscape of flowers? Second question: How about a flower that looked like a landscape? Final question: Is this the art marketplace vacuuming up the dollars of the innocent? Yes!
If success in drawing depended on accumulating art gear then the richest among us would be the finest draftsmen. When you get a chance, examine the drawings of the very rich and see if they are substantially better than your own. Craft bric-a-brac is just that and reflects the merchant's need for profit. It's to the advantage of the art marketplace to confuse the beginner by confounding the pencil with what the pencil draws. Short circuit the whole art supply marketplace by picking up a stick and drawing in the dirt. Beach sand is good too.
The hand draws what the mind sees. Everyone has a visual imagination, an assertion affirmed every time someone describes a vivid dream to you. Cultivating your visual imagination is your daily duty as artist and like any muscle, becomes more powerful with use and atrophies from lack of use.
Drawing your vision requires that your hand serve your mind. Blind drawing occurs when your hand happily bolts loose, which happens all the time because once you begin drawing, the impulse is simply to keep rolling along. Suppose you're drawing an imaginary face and you grip your pencil and scratch away with your nose two inches from the canvas. You draw one eye of the imaginary face and architectual logic, not imaginary vision commands you to place the other eye over there some place on the other side of the nose. You stand back and critically examine your drawing but it doesn't look right. You return to the two-inch position and fiddle with it, but the redrawing still doesn't look right. A circle of frustration begins.
Here's a test to determine if your hand has bolted ahead of your visual imagination: Erase hours of careful drawing and then stand back and the whole drawing looks better! This effect occurs because the human mind has a gestalt impulse to supply the missing parts. Put your hands in your pockets and don't move! Contemplate the gestalt effect and weave it into the total vision of the imaginary face. When you achieved a revised vision of the desired image you can remove your hands from your pockets and pick up your pencil.
I maintain a playful relationship with my visual imagination. Working on a painting tends to crowd out any new visual ideas, and as I finish a painting I'm visually exhausted. This might provoke angst - painter's block! - but I short circuit all this negativity by making a bet with myself and marking my calendar two days forward. The bet is that in two days my visual imagination will have given me at least one, perhaps several visual sparks for my next painting. Now I can relax and merely be attentive to the images that flash past.
I also directly provoke my visual imagination. I put a large sheet of drafting paper up on my drawing board and then sit down in my artist's chair about twelve feet away. My drawing board is an old canvas stretcher that I've used for years and is scarred with pencil, charcoal and paint. It's also warped and curved, all of which makes it a rich playground for the imagination. I pour myself a glass of wine, put a Schubert sonata on the CD player and let my visual imagination conjure with the surface marks on my drawing board. I enter a state of "imaginative viewing" that patches the marks and shadows of the drawing surface into the image of my mind's eye. Suddenly a face, a nose, the turn of a lip appears. At that point, I put my wine down, pick up a pencil and walk to the blank page and place a line. The process begins anew.
The relationship you maintain with your visual imagination is your private affair, so for readers who are new to drawing here are some notes about my own visual imagination. Other painters may be given whole paintings with all their complex details, but my visual imagination only gives me details such as the tilt of a head, a certain smile, the way a hand is poised, and so on. On the other hand, these details can be very distinct and concrete. Once my imagination fixes such a detail, it works like a 3D editor that can enlarge or reduce images, tilt them left and right, up and down. Try doing this interesting exercise with your visual imagination: Once you have seized an image, say a cow standing in a field and a milk maid holding a pail, try imaginatively walking around them and examining them from all 360 degrees. The more you play with such an imaginative image, the more concrete it becomes, and as its specificity increases, the easier it will be to draw. After a week of playing with the image of the milk maid and the cow, I lifted a pencil and had drawn the cow within minutes.
Occasionally my visual engine spins out of control and an image obsesses me. For example, several years ago I was doing floral landscapes when blue birds began to insert themselves into my paintings. Then more animals appeared. Suddenly I was beset by the image of three blind mice holding white canes and striding forward towards the picture frame. I could see them marching forward with their large foreshortened feet. This image returned to me day after day and I finally had to exorcise this demon image by drawing the three mice. Once I had anchored that part of the image, the other elements such as the kitten in the tram, the pig smoking a cigar, the lioness nurse maid were easy natural consequences. I painted "The three blind mice go for a walk" and, at last, I was at peace my visual imagination.
If you do original drawing and your work springs from your visual imagination, asking what an image means, or explaining it in words, is essentially futile. My painting of the three blind mice has no precedent and no subsequent, it was merely an image that popped into my head. At best it can be understood as a snapshot of the location in my visual universe at some time several years ago. I've never returned to the theme of the three blind mice, but I have fond memories of doing that painting.
Examine the artists' statements on virtual galleries such as DeviantArt (below are some sample statements from the Traditional Art group) and you recognize a certain inarticulateness.