What is it to draw
To draw is to pull out of something and shape it into another thing. One draws steel into cylindrical pipes.
When you sit in front of a scenery, you take a canvas and paint it, you are drawing out of what you see, something that you are choosing to depict. The act of choosing is also the act of leaving. The chosen entity that finds it's place in the paper is also undergoing a transformation. It is getting interpreted as it is getting drawn. It might loose its scale or dimension, it might loose a lot of what is not found relevant by the drawer. This act of interpretation isn't just loss of detail but also the substitution of it. You choose to change some thing and substitute it with something else. Perhaps shape, perhaps texture or perhaps scale.The act of interpretation here is often not on purpose. Specially on paper, your intuitions play an active role. They take over as your conscious thought steps back. Very soon you are just a spectator to what you are making, a witness to the act of having things drawn by your hand and your heart, your eyes working as an input to the system. Your conscious self is seeing your intuitive sense bloom. You are becoming a shaman, a vehicle for something interesting to occur. You are becoming a conduit of sorts, allowing for things to flow through you.
Why does one draw
Why does one draw? Is it to tell the world that something was witnessed? Is it to commit to memory? Is that memory a public memory or a private memory? Is this so that you don't forget what you saw or you want the world to remember what you saw or felt or witnessed.
Saw, felt and witnessed are completely different emotions. Let's start with witnessed and work our way backwards. Witnessing as an act needs you to be aware of the fact that you are a part of the setup. A witness's biggest excuse for not being an actor is that they did not act or could not act. They did not disturb what they transpired but they could have had. They are thus complicit in what happened, but not complicit enough to change the outcome.
Being a witness is connected to an event having occurred. Opening a bank account needs a witness, marriages need witness. Witness could stop the act but they chose not to. They realised that there role is only to witness. A witness is committed to thus bear testimony to an event having happened. A prolonged passage of time is not an event. a event is a smaller time window.
If there was no event, there would be no witness. If there was no witness, no one would know that an event took place.
Drawing is almost the act of witness if the draw-er is a conduit to what is being drawn. You become the eyes through which the event has a public telling.
Drawing -Scenery and memory
So what happens when one is drawing not from scenery but from memory. The reference has a nature of jumping across space and time. Unlike a scenery where all the objects of reference exist in the same place at a specific point of time, in memory they don't.
In memory, objects exist as collage. they exist in relation to each other. They aren't just the relations of space and time, they are also relations that this particular individual, the one that is making the drawing, finally conjures between these objects.
Drawing from the memory, are often a map of the relations that the individual choses to establish between the entities or inherently sees between these entities. in drawing from memory, the individual is framing and reframing the world, trying to record their change of understanding each time they visit these objects in their head.
There is another journey that the drawer takes where they choose to be completely devoid of agency, giving up the control to interpret things in their head or to exercise the skill to stylise things towards a defined end.
This act is closer to the act of photography except for the fact that the forces of nature at play in organising objects in a certain manner are the forces of mind and not the forces of physics. The observed objects deform and morph, they scale up and down, they shed age and colour, they change from living beings to non living objects and vice versa.
One, as observer begins to understand the power that the relationships wield over the perceptions that the individual has with the objects. the ability for an object to be relevant to an individual supersedes the ability of that object to be relevant to a larger collective, say a society or a community.
Planning a drawing
The act of drawing out of each of these places is thus the act of destabilising an existing arrangement in some form or another. As an activity, drawing requires preparation. It needs materials. It needs a dedicated space or needs one to be in a specific space. It also needs time. very often drawings can be stretched beyond days and days of work and still appear incomplete.
It can thus be compared to an act like travel. You have to pack things and a journey, both internal and external may be involved.
It may be safe to conclude that the act of drawing is thus not spontaneous. You may not premeditate all of the drawing, however, the act of drawing has to be planned.
The act of drawing has to be planned?
I hear you! We have drawn at the back of our notebooks, at the edge of exam sheets, on meeting room notepads. We haven't decorated these drawings. We have left them in these notebooks, in those answer sheets.
Some of us have drawn to listen better, some of us have drawn as a force of habit-say drawn cars, dresses, faces etc. Some of us draw as we listen or draw what we listen as opposed to what we see. Drawing as an activity, independent of seeing can often feel truly liberating.
Going away from drawing
The idea of colouring a drawing is the first step in separating the drawing from the self.
Unless you draw with colours, colouring becomes an act of curation. When you colour, you are putting aesthetics on a sound, making it into a language that can be consumed by someone else.
When you draw a scenery, you begin colouring to bring it closer to what you have seen. Leaves are painted as leaves often look like. Details around light and darkness are added and some other effects are added to add a critical differentiator, or a point of focus. this needs skill and possessing skill to draw in various styles often needs a lifetime to master.
This, i feel is the point where drawing is left behind and illustration begins to appear. When you illustrate, it becomes a strong exercise towards a definite end, it becomes more defined for consumption, the labour and the exploration come in conflict. The ability to control how something looks, the restraint and the extravagance are there to please, attract and engage the eyes of the beholder.
Illustrations thus move to a commercial end. They need to be consumed. Someone has to pay for the labour of the illustrator. Something that may have started as a very personal and intimate act of contemplation is now put out as a commodity, faintly with the hope that the viewer also gets to see the objects and the relationships that the drawer establishes for themselves.
The drawer becomes an artist, the drawing becomes and illustration or a painting. The market adds meaning.
This meaning gets mass produced to be consumed inside a book or to be owned as an artist's original. All these are acts of commercial meaning making.
