Drawing of a tree (University of Denver campus)
Drawing is one of my great loves. And I like reading about it too. Lizzy Stewart, whose work I admire immensely, posted awhile back about why she draws. What she wrote resonated strongly with me, so I'm re-posting excerpts, illustrated with some artist's drawings I particularly like. (The words are by Lizzie Stewart, the artists are credited in bold.) Hope you enjoy.
Lizzie Stewart
"On a few occasions I have been asked why
it is that I draw, as though the career I am in
the process of crafting for myself has been
rationally reasoned and considered.
It is a question that, for a long time, I have
not taken seriously. I glossed over it with a
flippant remark- ‘its the only skill I’ve got’
or something about really wanting to cultivate
my terrible posture and poor eyesight.
Recently however this question has begun
to demand a more considered response.
Larger musings, admittedly self-indulgent
ones, on who I am at this quarter-century
stage of my life have brought me round to
thinking through what I do, this thing that
has, and will continue, to define much of
my life.
Alessandro Toccacelli
"I will often say that I draw because I am not
musical; that my inability to write a great
break-up album forces me to draw it instead.
Similarly I might say that it is because I am
a poor writer, childish with poetry or
dangerously uncoordinated as a dancer. I
claim that drawing is my mode of expression
by default, that creative failings have led me
to plump for this as my outlet. This is all
true, in a sense, but it gives short shrift to
drawing for, in truth, it is one of the most
natural an instinctive forms of expression
I can think of. Not for a second do I
genuinely feel I have settled for a lesser
medium.
Cuvier Day
"Firstly I should establish that whilst I am
‘an illustrator’ I am not talking about
illustration here. Drawing is not illustration
and illustration is not drawing. Whilst
differentiating between the two might
verge on the pedantic and is certainly,
in many ways, reductive it is also
necessary in this context.
When draughtsmen recorded nebulous
masses of stars through eighteenth
century telescopes or the sinewy capillaries
of a lung dissected in a Victorian
operating theatre they were not drawing.
The choices they made in the information
they recorded determined contemporary
unders. standing. Their medium was
explanatory rather than expressive.
Where, in drawing, the artist allows
for minimal interference between the hand,
eye and mind, moving between the three
with deft swiftness and an almost
unconscious intent, the illustrator must,
through their own hand, factor in the eye
and mind of the viewer.
It is the viewer's understanding that must
be met before any of the authors creative goal.
JMW Turner
"Whilst expression and creative flair play
an integral role in the desirability of an
image the onus falls on clarity of message to
determine its overall success. The fine
artist's goal is often an emotional one and
thus they are afforded a freedom of
expression that is not always afforded to the
illustrator. We are, perhaps, more
generous with our reading of fine art image-
making because we understand that the
artist's message might not be a tangible or
concrete one because drawing is so instinctive.
As a caveat this is not to say that illustrators
are not artists, nor that a fine artist lacks the
capacity to clearly deliver a message. The
most successful illustrators marry the two
and can create beauty and clarity.
Beatrix Potter
"Sketching, which I confess I do rarely at
present, is fast and unthinking and and yet
you are decision-making the whole time.
With every swift stroke across the page
you are deciding which parts of your
subjects are most important to you. In essence
you are re-sculpting one thing into another
unconsciously. In filtering visual
information from eye to hand you tell a
specific story, one that is unique to your
way of seeing. Furthermore drawing is
hampered by very few obstacles; information
travels from eye to brain to hand without
having to be compressed into language,
rife with barriers and limitations. Feelings
that cannot be summarised in words can
often be succinctly expressed with the broad
stroke of an inky paintbrush or a sweep
of pitch-black charcoal. Often drawing
feels like taking notes; quickly getting down
as much information as possible, keeping a
record. My sketchbooks are a mix of images
and words but the text rarely feels like
‘writing’ but drawing. There is the feeling
of ‘pulling’ something out of the page,
shaping it and giving it weight. Whether
this occurs with words or pictures is,
during the process, almost irrelevant.
Instead there is just the feeling of pressing
an idea to the page, in whatever form it fits.
Harry Rountree
"For me drawing is a form of thinking.
A drawing need never be finished, much as
an internal thought need never be formalised
into a precise statement. It also benefits
from, I believe, an inability to lie. The hand
will only do what it can do naturally, there
are no dictionaries, no filtered lenses or
editing tools to reshape it into a more-perfect
thing. If a mistake is made you erase it or
paint over it but the ghost of that mistake
remains- denting the paper or traceable
through the slight relief of paint. In this
respect it seems honest. Even those who,
perhaps unwisely, attempt to ape the
draughtsmanship of another will be
betrayed by the habits and limitations of
their own hand.
FD Steele
"To return to exactly ‘why i draw’- I suppose
of a need to expel gathered
information, which seems a somewhat clinical way to boil things down. As a person
to wanting to store as much as possible as
memory I find that drawing acts as a way
of purging certain ideas before the clamor
for attention in my head becomes too
cacophonous. I like that it is, in effect,
a quietening which is mirrored by my
physical state when working. The process
encourages me to to slip into a mode of
being that is automatic and relatively unthinking.
Rima Staines
"Finally then, I draw because I want, in some way,
to be known. Not in any genuinely intimate way,
I’m not angling for romance or hoping to draw
myself a soulmate. Rather I draw for the same
reasons that, I believe, anyone makes anythings.
It feels like people are huge, enormous in fact
and so many are frustrated by the limits of their
physical selves that they feel fit to burst; filled
with vast swathes of thought and feeling, joys
and sadnesses. Every single person is so much
bigger and I suppose we fear that the rest of us,
the parts not represented by body or speech, will
be lost. I draw, then, for this part of me, the
majority of me I suppose; because that way it
might outlive ‘me’. If drawing is the best way
of establishing what is important to us visually
then it must go some way towards recording
what it important to us internally."
Lizzie Stewart
Lizzie Stewart's blog is always full of insight. Hope you will check it out!
Thanks for reading!
