drawing II

"In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended[....]the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness."

--Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (emphasis mine)

its not that i like to draw. in fact, some days, like today, i abhor it. i loathe it. some days, like today, i want to gouge my terrible drawings out of my paper with my fingernails, and crush pencils in my teeth. yet no matter how much i enjoy the act of drawing, or hate my final product, it is the gift i got stuck with.

my parents always tell me this story: that when i was two, i took my crayons, and i put them in the shape of an airplane, and that's when they knew i'd be an artist. i don't know why i did this -- i don't know why i didn't just take the crayons and draw an airplane. it wasn't as if the concept of crayons could have been lost on me at two years old; i knew what they were for, and how to use them. i don't know why i chose to make the airplane out of the crayons themselves, instead of with the crayons, but i can take a stab at it.

i almost want to say i could recover this memory -- maybe i have, and maybe i haven't -- but i know what i am like, and how i have been for most of my life, and its safe to say i could approximate the reason for my deviant crayon usage. my guess is that the crayons weren't sharp enough, and i know that i've always hated coloring, drawing, and sketching with worn down nubs; anything less than a perfect point on my crayon or pencil could not be more useless to me. granted, crayons aren't known for the line quality they produce, but at two, that's all i had to work with. and they either hadn't invented crayon sharpeners yet, or i was too young to figure out how to ask for one.

at any rate, i was going to make an airplane. for whatever reason, the shape of an airplane was welling up inside of me, and dammit, i was going to get it out on the page, nubby crayons notwithstanding. i wonder if i thought: "well, the line is going to come out the same width as the crayon anyway," and instead of being hedged into producing a bad drawing because of my poor tools, i decided to put the tools to alternative and creative use. i like to think i decided to do this at two years old because i discovered that a real airplane doesn't actually have a line around it -- that drawing and using lines to produce a picture ultimately falls short of reality, no matter how realistic the drawing. i like to think i used my crayons the way i did to comment on the ineffeciency of the tools of the artist, to mock the inability of my crayon lines, to mock my own ability to draw -- to say perhaps that not only is the line a representation, but in realizing that, i was freeing myself from the burden of realism. i imagine the commentary of critics: "look! look how his work is a comment on the complete mastery of the artist's tool by the artist!" and "see how he is saying that all art is as much an abstraction as it is a representation?"

but of course, i was only two, and i forget that these are things i've only just figured out. still, i have always been frustrated by that line. the line is not real. its not really there. that is not really how we see things. yet, ultimately, it is how we grasp things, objects, reality. we grasp it through that kind of representation. the line is a symbol. it is not meant for revealing what is real, but, in a sense, for containing and representing a visual reality in the best way we know how.

the line is an attempt to join what is internal -- what we see, what is in our heads, what is welling through our hearts -- with the external. to make an object, an artefact that is at once our own, yet universal, accessable to others, ownable, viewable, palpable to others. a way of joining the internal you to the external world, and to a peopled world.

it connects spirit with matter, and in that respect, it is an attempt to create life, to breath our life into graphite and paper the way God breathed his into clay.

and the line itself is false -- derrida's dying metaphor, and nietzche's non-moral lie. it is zeno's arrow, showing us that how we understand and grasp reality is only a mode, a method of representation. all lines -- of a drawing, of prose and poetry -- are not trueness of form. they do not hold Truth. they chip away at it, so that it may take shape, the negative space that allows a block of marble to become the Pieta. the line is another reality altogether. its inability to recreate reality allows it to transcend reality; its shortcomings allow for a transfiguration, allow the not-real to enter the world of the real, allow the spirit of the fantastic to become incarnate. the potential for the line, like zeno's arrow, is eternal, all because of its unreality. the line is a false distinction, only vaguely definable at best. but when the realization creeps in that it cannot truly represent reality, that representation itself is necessarily not the same as what is being represented, then we open a new world for ourselves -- a world of modernist and impressionist and cubist truths that create their own ascended reality...which, in turn, informs and expands the understanding of the vastly profound place that is our reality.

freed from realism, from the pressure of perfectionism, under the realization that all lines are inherently flaws unshackles an artist: he does not have to make anything exact -- because he has no hope of that. he cannot make it exact. but, though inexact, he can still make a beautiful drawing, craft a striking poem, render into language and line something lovely and magnificent. he can even use crayons to do it.