My birthday approaches, and I am remembering how I spent last year's happily drawing the Mammoth skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History's Paul and Irma Milstein Hall of Advanced Mammals, later joined by Caitlin, who drew wonderful, vigorous mammoths. This drawing, and day, was significant to me, and let me see if I can explain why.
There are so many sides to drawing, and like anyone I have a facility for some parts and less so for other aspects. I have from childhood understood the visual side of drawing, and even though it seems on the face of it drawing is purely visual, it encompasses much much more.
Drawing is a visual response to the world, but doesn't need to be limited to responding to the solely visual world. Obviously drawing can give form to imagined things and ideas - I think that's easily enough understood - but even when drawing observationally (sitting with your sketchbook on a bench in a museum in front of a mounted mammoth skeleton), there's so much to draw beyond shadows and highlights. That is, beyond what it looks like.
In this drawing, I got into a mental space where I felt like I was sculpting the enormous bones, roughly wrestling them into general shapes and then refining into more specific forms. I sustained the illusion in my mind for a surprisingly long time that I was actually engaging with the 5-foot-high bones of the leg rather that moving my pencil point over an 8-inch-high drawing in my sketchbook. 'This ridge turns to the left here, then flattens out there, and bends around the shaft of the femur there …" I thought to myself.
Kimon Nicolaides said you don't draw what something looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing.
The finished drawing doesn't look especially different than my other drawings in the museum. But it took me to a tactile, elemental place that was completely absorbing - I'm not really sure how long I sat drawing, and afterwards I felt invigorated and satisfied.
Caitlin sat beside me filling the air with a cloud of graphic dust as she drew beautifully in her own tactile way. I wish every birthday was as fun for everyone.
I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products - Marcel Duchamp
