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tags: Drawing Art
NOTE
Following my visit to Warwick’s Pacem In Terris, I’ve collected some Frederick Frank books.
Who is the man, the artist? He is the unspoiled core of everyman before he is choked by schooling, training, conditioning, until the artist within shrivels up and is forgotten.
The core is never killed completely. At times it responds to Nature, to beauty, to Life, suddenly aware again of being in the presence of a Mystery that battles understanding, and which only has to be glimpsed to renew our spirit and make us feel that life is a supreme gift.
A non-creative environment is one that constantly bombards us, overloads our switchboard with noise with agitation and visual stimuli. Once we can detached ourselves from these distractions, find a way of “inscape,” of “centering,” the same environment becomes “creative again.” It establishes an Island of silence, an oasis of undivided attention, an environment to recover in.
Exercise
FF instructs his workshop group to find an object outside, close their eyes for a period with it held within their mind. Open their eyes, and wait till the “object looks back at them.” Finally they “see” rather than look, and must draw in a manner of “touching” or caressing the contours of the object. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t looking at the paper, what is on the paper doesn’t matter at all and if the pencil runs off the paper that’s fine too.
There was a drawing of a willow that was as awkward as it was lovely. The one who couldn’t draw a straight line traced a complex path of ivy in a spidery handwriting of exquisite sensitivity.
I’m a widow and live alone, and I often feel lonely. Today I learned that if you really see the things around you, you’re not Lonely anymore.
We do a lot of looking but we see less and less.
When a man no longer experiences, the organs of his inner life wither away. Alone or in herds he goes on binges of violence and destruction.
What really happens when seeing and drawing become seeing/drawing is that awareness and Attention become constant and undivided, become contemplation. It is an unwavering attention to a world that is fully alive.
Any work of art motivated or tainted by the slightest consideration of competitiveness, money, sensation, is automatically devoid of zen, in danger of becoming kitsch.
Everyone thinks he knows what a lettuce looks like. But start to draw one and you realize the anomaly of having lived with lettuces all your life, but never having seen one, never having seen the semi-translucent leaves curling in their own way, never having noticed what makes a lettuce a lettuce rather than a curly kale. I am not suggesting that you draw each nerve, each vein of each leaf, but that you feel them being there. What applies to lettuces, applies equally to all too familiar faces of husbands… wives…
Drawing here becomes the art of leaving out
In the how-to books you will find horses reduced to their basic forms to systems of ellipses or rectangles. In its own way this may be useful for a picture manufacturer but it deprives you of knowing what a horse really looks like. In order to draw a horse, draw horses until you practically become a horse - not “horses in general” but always that particular horse you are drawing at a given moment. Until you feel the tense curving of its neck in your own neck.
All that is left of her natural beauty, her skin is intact, her bones are as they are. No need of paint and powder. She is as she is no more, no less, How marvelous. -Ikkyu
When drawing a face, any face, it is as if curtain after curtain, mask after mask falls away… until a final mask remains, one that can no longer be removed, reduced. By the time the drawing is finished I know a great deal about that face, for no face can hide itself very long.
Every stroke of my brush is the overflow of my inmost heart -Segai