Artist and academic Iain Biggs suggests that when we refer to drawing should re-examine the word and return to its meaning as a movement, a flow, or connecting impulse:
‘…an inclusive verb that always awaits a further dynamic; as indicating a relational cutting across of discrete categories – as transversal, to use Guattari’s term. To engage in drawing as a verb from an animist perspective is to place oneself in a dynamic relationship: as in the ‘drawing up or down’ of material to the centre or the peripheries of space and the senses; or in the ‘drawing out’ of meanings or resonances otherwise too compressed or ephemeral to register; in the ‘drawing together’ of apparently disparate elements into a particular constellation; or as in a ‘drawing through’ or ‘drawing out’ of a thread of intuition, argument, analysis and so on.’
he continues:
‘this means attending to our being drawn into the matter of the world, placed by all the forces at play there; drawn out of ourselves into new meanings or as a resource in larger assemblages; drawn together into new constellations, despite and with our differences; or drawn into otherness as a result of following threads of intuition, argument, analysis, and so on. And all these events should, in turn, inform our expanded acts of drawing.’
I make a lot of drawings from life in a small note book. There is often a sense of urgency in the drawing that comes from battling with elements, such as the rain or the cold, or possibly from drawing a subject that may move at any moment. The drawings are frequently unfinished and I usually hate them for it initially, and love them for it when I look at them later. To my mind the less ‘finished’ a drawing is, the more successful it is, as it will retain a freshness, a dynamic energy that gives the drawing a vitality that jumps off the page for the viewer. Norma Bryson, in her essay ‘A Walk for Walk’s Sake’, writes:
'the drawn line in a sense always exists of the preset tense, in a time of its own unfolding, the ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward...the drawn line presents Becoming. Line gives you the image together with the whole history of its becoming-image.'
From my experience, the process of drawing from life is similar to walking, in that it is a ‘way in’. The action of drawing is like pushing through a hedge; a way of penetrating the separation between subject and object. Time drops away, and for a while there unfolds a union between the the drawn subject, the eye, the hand and the paper.
-Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature,
'I’m interested in ‘polyvocal’ drawing that helps me explore ideas – often about landscape or landscape related issues – through combining different media and/or categories of sign...I see drawing (the process) as a performative, temporal art in itself, rather than as subordinate to producing a ‘finished’ work of art. '
-Iain Biggs, 'Two dimensional aspects of deep mappings' (online)
Within my studio, drawing and painting happens a different way; this is a more automatic form of drawing that has nothing to do with figurative representation, but may still refer to (for example), the trajectory of a walk, or mark made on a wall. This is the hardest kind of process to describe. The drawings and paintings I made in the High Cross House studio, for example, referenced various elements. These included: the winding nature of brambles and ivy that tore at my ankles in the woods; the encroaching darkness as winter approached; the heterogeneous nature of the Dartington landscape with its chess-board arrangement of paths, hedges and fields; my sorrow at the discovery of the empty pig enclosure, and the trailer marks left to tell the tale of their journey to the slaughter-house.
When I made those drawings I had no intentions, no plan, and no rationale behind my process. The work was made through a kind of re-enactment of these events while in the studio. A re-living of these memories informed the choices of materials and their arrangement through a form of embodied knowledge which was drawn from my walking experience, that had nothing to do with intellectual design. What is more, it is only with the distance of months that I can look back and review this, and know that it is because I managed fold all these elements into the the work that I now consider them to be successful pieces.
