Drawing as an Essential Life Skill
On bringing mind, heart, and body to the canvas
When I was growing up, like most little boys, I wanted to be like my dad. He was a milkman, which meant he got up early every morning, drove a big truck, and delivered milk to grocery stores all over town. On rare occasions I would go with him, and it was easy to see that everyone on his route loved him. He made sure their milk was fresh but also took time to shoot the breeze, chew the fat, and make people feel like they mattered. I was proud of him.
My dad was also an artist. After coming home from a long day on his truck route, I remember him sitting back in his naugahyde recliner with pencil and sketchbook in hand — and he’d draw. Sometimes it was the celebrities we were watching on television; I remember a caricature of Bob Hope that captivated my nascent imagination. Sometimes he’d paint, especially scenes from his own childhood — animals, churches, and country roads.
And what young boy does not want to be like his dad? For me, being a grownup looked like having a day job that helped people and an evening hobby as an artist. It seemed natural and wonderful. So far as I knew, every butcher and baker and candlestick maker would come home after a long day and spend glorious evenings drawing and painting.
Like my dad, I’ve been making art all my life — mostly as a graphic designer, but occasionally with a pencil and sketchbook in hand. Even today, my meeting notebooks are filled with doodles and portraits and endless drawings of letterforms (but very few meeting notes).
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. — Pablo Picasso
No doubt inspired by my childhood, I have come to believe that drawing is an essential life skill — at least for a designer. While I will always be gratified by the making of sketches, what has been most transformative is how drawing teaches me to see.
There is a kind of cognitive dissonance while drawing, forgetting what you think you know while observing what is actually there. Everyone can call to mind a chair, for instance, but to draw a chair that is sitting before you requires a dissociation from what you know to lean into what you see.
But drawing is more than just creating a likeness, as author Virginia Woolf once said, “Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough.” The ability to capture a likeness by observing how forms relate to each other is vital, but when those drawn lines begin to evoke feelings or memories, then drawing becomes what artist Edgar Degas described as “not what you see, but what you make others see.”
It is this longing to see, and to help others see, that makes me believe in drawing. This developed skill of observation — of both the (cognitive) surface and what lies (emotionally) beneath — is what tantalizes my imagination.
Last year I had my faith in drawing put to the test during a weeklong summer workshop focusing on The Gesture, how the movement of the hand as a uniquely human action influences the making of art and design.
During the workshop I read an essay by philosopher Roland Barthes about the Virginian artist Cy Twombly and was intrigued by Barthes’s claim that the French language is right-handed. I’m not sure what that means, but it does help explain why the French word for “left” is gauche, which can mean awkward, inelegant, and even klutzy.
This is interesting, at least to me, because it has been said that some work of Cy Twombly looks like it was drawn with his left hand. His gauche works are sometimes mere scribbles, seemingly childish, and utterly lacking in sophistication. To me they are beautiful.
Although Cy Twombly’s work looks like it was drawn with his left hand, I spent the better part of two days actually drawing with my left hand. To be utterly incapable of creating the quality of line I wanted was both frustrating and freeing — and delighted my fellow students. While they were demonstrating enormous expertise in drawing, I was flailing about, trying to make some mark on the page look like something I intended.
Even though I never achieved a level of comfort drawing left-handed, our instructor pushed me further by handing me a four-foot stick with a piece of charcoal taped to the end. I stood before the easel, some four feet away, and made a massacre of the drawing paper.
Come to think of it, I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun. The freedom of not having to get the drawings right — to work fully from my gut — was transformative. I made dozens and dozens of drawings, most of them quite hideous, and by the end of the week I was drawing with my right hand again but in a way that was not as controlled or derivative.
I spent much of the week deconstructing everything I thought I knew about drawing and destroying every piece of paper taped to my easel. Our group critiques tried to discern the best of my bad options, and my fellow students — eager to be kind — would point to single scrawls across wastelands of charcoal and pronounce them brilliant.
On the morning of the last day, I decided to create a single piece of art that would represent a culmination of all that I had learned and unlearned during the week. Most of my drawings had been inspired by an enormous array of lilies — dazzling and splendid — and that day, I gave them my full attention. I had no desire to represent the flowers, per se, but to respond to the ways the lilies reflect light, turn in space, reveal color and texture — all in an attempt to more successfully achieve the gauche approach inspired by Twombly.
Standing before my easel, I worked with both my left and right hands — having discarded the stick — and smeared, ground, and erased piece after piece of charcoal. What resulted looked nothing like Cy Twombly but was nevertheless an intricately layered composition that revealed a subtle beauty I was not even trying to achieve. I don’t pretend that I created a masterwork, but I realized that something new was in play. It was that my body got involved, as well as my mind and emotions. I experienced something more visceral that week, which I took to be a fuller expression of creative freedom.
I don’t think I have ever fully considered the impact of the body on drawing before, even though I would have most assuredly given the idea a pat on the head. No doubt our minds and emotions are involved in making art, but this exquisite experience helped me be more aware — and intentional — about the ways our bodies are in play, too.
Cy Twombly once said drawing “does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Not long before his death he spoke of this reflection more directly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” adding that, afterward “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”
As a designer, this idea rings true to me — that drawing can be an immersive experience of mind and heart and body. I want to see, but also to help others see, to clear the way for others to have meaningful experiences, too.
It’s just a gut feeling.
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