Seeing

For the past five weeks, I've been taking an online drawing class.  I should say "taking" in quotation marks because I haven't been keeping up with the assignments.  But I will catch up.  I will.

From my first "successful" drawing (measured by someone asking me to copy and sign it--not by its actual quality) I have pretty much just been watching the videos.  It's a little hard to draw and visit and travel all at the same time, at least in a concrete way.

But watching people draw and show their drawings has inspired me, nevertheless.  I'm fascinated by the differences in the way the five teachers sketch and talk about their work.  I love seeing the more experienced students' drawings.

Drawing, like writing, is about seeing.  It's so easy to get caught up in the constructs of our minds and make abstract statements about things, how things are.  To draw or to write clearly, we have to look at one thing at a time, really look, without comparing it to something in our minds.  To see the isness of a thing, what it is.

I'm learning this morning to capture gestures and body language with pencils.  The teacher is advising us to look at the person and draw quickly, capturing the movement with our pencils on paper.  I'm watching her do that with two live models. I'm observing the fluid movements of her pencils and pens and brushes.

I'm remembering a quotation from Joseph Conrad:

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything."