Drawing a Line Round It

I was watching a fantastic BBC science documentary the other day about the history of the discovery and understanding of the cell - the kind which form the building-blocks of all life on earth.

In the first part (The Cell: The Hidden Kingdom, BBC 2009), Dr Adam Rutherford hops around Europe illustrating the great scientific breakthroughs in the human journey to identify and comprehend microscopic cellular matter. At each stage scientists drew on paper (or commissioned illustrators to do it for them) what they believed they could see through their evolving microscopes. The drawings of small creatures and vegetation were astonishingly accurate - almost photographic in detail. Yet, when they were studying things which they could only just pull into focus, they were unable to overturn their own preconceptions - what they expected to see - with what they were actually seeing. So, cells were read as tiny animals, "little animaliculi": nuclei became heads; human sperm would be drawn as miniature human tadpoles. Theological influences among others meant that these scientists - although seeking out new truths - found it hard to deny what they believed was there, even when their instruments were powerful enough to show them otherwise.

It was this idea that really struck me - that we see what we think we see, not what might actually be there.

I always remember, when I was younger, doing drawings of something or a place and then being surprised when people would admire it's likeness or details as if they had not seen the details of the subject with their own eyes. I realise, now, that drawing is in fact more a way of thinking about things rather than simply a facility to connect the hand and eye as a photographic tool. What you're thinking about while drawing is, I think, to do with the relationships of objects in space - walls, floors, openings - and their exposure to the eye by the fall of light. Reading the optical information of the eye and how that affects our mood was a huge part of the visual education I received, particularly at art school, and recording those two elements - optical experience and one's response to that experience - is still a challenge and a compulsion for me today.

Most people will not analyse their emotional judgement of a place - mostly it will be a matter of 'I like this place' or 'I don't like this place'. Nobody, for instance likes a cramped place, or a dark place. Such restrictions would surely set our primeval survival mechanisms on low alert - can I move freely in here; can I see any danger? Bright, spacious places, conversely, invoke security and pleasure. It strikes me that this is a profound part of human experience and is something which is manipulated by architects and designers, amongst others, to trigger responses - these days linked to commerce, more often than not.

I don't think it's much to say that, as someone with a hand-to-eye facility and an art education, I find I have a keenly developed visual awareness. I don’t mean this as a declaration of superiority. Other people have a facility for numbers, for balance, for memory or speed of reflexes. All I mean by the aptitude and training that I have is that when I come in to a space I’m measuring it up in my head - constructing a mental model from the information delivered by the eyes: height of walls; size of windows; textures; shapes. It’s all at a very low level but it is part of my conscious experience of a place. And this becomes useful when I want to draw somewhere or photograph it or even re-design or rearrange it because I’ve already started the computations necessary for deciding what angle to show something from to best represent it; what forms will be the more complex to explain it in a picture.

For most people its not like that. I remember as a schoolboy being caught by a friend as I closed one eye and rocked minutely from side to side so as to line up foreground and background verticals through a window.

Strange kid.

Mostly, I think, people experience a space they know as much, if not more, by what they think they know about it as what they see in front of them. In a familiar space I'm sure that optical awareness is switched to a low priority - it’s mostly about not bumping into things; seeing things you need to see. Which is why when something is revealed in an image it can come as something of a surprise even to those who think they know it but have not looked at it thoroughly.

It's the old chestnut of looking without seeing.

Thorough looking was a skill that had to be honed when I was at Art School and it’s one I still hold as precious because, more than ever in our digital age, the ability to see thoroughly is compromised by the view of the world we are presented with culturally, through the media, through commerce. More and more we are bombarded by images, peer into our TVs, computers and magazines and absorb a second-hand, vested-interest notion of how the world is - which in turn infects what we know about the world and therefore limits what we actually see.

We see what we know.

More than just looking, Art School instructed in the skill and language of representing two-dimensionally what we perceive in three. This is no mean feat when you think about it. However, there is a link between how we see and the main element in drawing which goes to the heart of human optical perception: humans are very good at spotting edges; edges are easy to represent in line.

It's probably a survival thing; the ability to spot the edge of a cliff, prey or predator, or even an inconvenient stalagmite was probably pretty useful to our cave-dwelling ancestors. We're the same. Visually we're constantly scanning our environment, picking out objects and shapes and matching these to known items in our memory database. Although that edge can then be represented by a line - an outline - even this requires a sophisticated level of visual translation and comprehension - children begin with diagrammatic representations and matchstick figures; outlines come later. In fact, I know plenty of adults who must still draw matchstick figures to achieve any sort of visual sense.

Edges leave us with a world defined by cardboard cutouts. The use of line to suggest volume becomes difficult when you move beyond those objects which have nice sharp objects - how do you, for instance, suggest the volume of a sphere with line when it's only edge reference is a circular outline? All an outline gives you is a flat pancake. These were the sorts of problems we were posed in drawing class, and the ultimate challenge was the smooth surface of the human figure (as an aside, of course, the human figure represents all sorts of profound, philosophical notions of existence, but also it's just bloody hard to draw). In fact, it makes you wonder if we haven't devised a world of sharp edges so that it's easy to navigate.

Mostly, people are just busy navigating. There's not the time - especially not in our advanced societies - to sit down and enjoy what we see, let alone ponder the wonder of how it is that we see things at all. And maybe that's part of the role art has to play. As someone involved in making art, that process in itself takes me outside normal, everyday navigation. For me, that process is deeply tied up with the optical. But common to what I know about artists in any medium, I think that the work artists produce is a kind of offering - partly coming from an awareness that other people will not have the time to look at things - but also because the navigation of everyday life can seem to be a constriction. For me at least, through making art you connect with a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human - here and now - and try to share that.

When a work connects with someone - it might be as simple as them seeing a space or person or object they already know represented by another hand - something is clarified through the translation, the selections made in the process of making a drawing, for instance (of course, it could just as easily be an abstract or conceptual piece).

The point is that, standing outside of the hurly-burly of everyday navigation - if only for the time they make art - artists are following their individual explorations of what is an essence of their experience - not the essence (which is what you'd think great artists had discovered if you believed much of the literature on art - don't get me started) - and when this is then offered to others it becomes a shared experience; to the viewer, if successful, a revelation, to the artist an affirmation.

I once read a quote about art which stated something like; a thing is not seen until it is revealed by an artist. There's an equivalent to that in every art-form - and I've certainly been on the receiving end of that equation myself. So, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised when people who don't draw, look at something I've sketched and say, "That's amazing," even if I don't think it is. As we stagger through our screen dominated, multimedia, consumer-oriented, goal-oriented lives - there's maybe never been a more important time to have a clan of people standing just outside (or maybe way outside) the normal of point-of-view, who, whether they use charcoal or biro or performance or electronic media, draw a line around what they see or imagine and offer up work which says: it's like this, isn't it?

GJ
NOV.09

Illustrations from top: Human Red Blood Cells; "Little animaliculi" Spermatozoa as seen by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 1678; Internet Cafe; Life Drawing Class.