To draw is to see...
I’ve been to the Louvre to do some drawing a few times now, when I have had some spare time. It is only a short walk from where I live and offers free entry to EU citizens under the age of 25. I am not an artist and none of the scrawls I produce are what you would call ‘good’, but I am not drawing to have a drawing, that is, to produce and to hold a new work of art, in the end—rather, I draw to see. Let me explain: most of the time, one politely wanders around museums and galleries with (hopefully) some interest and, at least, paying polite attention to what is looking at. All the same, an art object rarely holds one’s attention for more than two or three minutes before one wanders on. One ‘stops to look’, but never really stops and looks.
To draw something is to observe it, to actively engage in observing it, first and foremost—the act of marking the paper is not as simple as just recording what one sees, like tracing; nor is it a passive activity like the act of copying. In fact, no attempt to record lived experience, not even a photograph, is ‘transparent to its subject’, which is to say, no still image (whether produced by the hand or mechanical means) bears the same relationship to the world as the frame of a window and its pane of glass does to whatever is beyond. Never is one more aware of this than when one is drawing a sculpture, which requires a translation from three dimensions to a flat plane and a specific line of sight. Drawing requires you to convey what you see, not to reproduce it. And, in that attempt, one is forced to make certain choices—perhaps that means concentrating on only a portion of the totality, like the face of a statue or the curve of a wrist, sometimes it forces you to forgo such details and focus on the overall composition, perhaps to convey movement or urgency as in Rodin’s sketches of dancers (below).
Consider trying to draw Canova’s masterpiece ‘Amore e Psiche’ or ’Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss’ (below). Viewed from the front, one is tempted to loose oneself trying to capture the connection between the two supple faces, bound by ineffable emotion. But, viewed from the side, one is taken by the long reach of Cupid’s wings, his body weightlessly supported by a single grounded knee and by the line of Psyche’s arms stretching pathetically, longingly upwards to touch the head of her lover. One is tempted to draw quickly and boldly to capture this fleeting moment of blissful awakening This is because the statue is not a static thing—the gaze is not the gaze of a pieta, imbued with stillness—rather, it is charged with energy. Carl Ludwig Fernow, a contemporary critic of Canova, was maddened by the composition of the embracing figures, stating that “‘you must run around it, look at it from high and low, up and down, look at it again and keep getting lost.” Canova even put a handle near Psyche’s foot so that the statue could be turned on its base and viewed from every angle. Drawing the statue, then, is not one activity (as viewing in the gallery might be described as a unified activity), it is many.
To draw an artwork also puts you in the mind of the artist, revealing how elements of the piece work to support others, both technically in the case of sculpting in stone (consider the tree trunk supporting the Borghese gladiator, which is surprisingly easily missed) and visually in the case of painting, where vertical lines on a canvas are mutually reinforcing (line of the Virgin’s cloak and a pillar in the background, for example).
Today I went to the Cluny Museum (which houses medieval artefacts and art objects) on the recommendation of a friend. The representation of figures in medieval art is sometimes thought of as naif, with their peculiarly elongated features and strangely passive expressions. But undoubtedly there is more to most medieval artefacts than that. Consider this statue in wood of Mary Magdalene carved in the Low Countries in the 1400s (below). Where is the centre of this figure? The elliptical form and long fingers gathering the material at her side suggest it is the womb, not the heart or the head as in later art. To be sure this partly reflects the appearance of women at the time, as in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, in which the women is sometimes thought to be pregnant on account of the large gather of fabric at her midriff. But more than that, the statue conveys what we can call the 'sacred feminine'—the icon depicts the saint as delicate and graceful—a quality that remained in images of the Virgin far longer than the subject of this artwork. Take Corregio’s portrait of 1518/19, from just a hundred years later, which portrays her as seductive and voluptuous, with a confident gaze as she lifts her skirt to reveal her ankle and calf. Drawing such art works focuses you on these artisitic decisions, inviting you to reflect on why they were made, what the artist thought of their subject, what the long march of history has directed us to think of the same subject and their various renderings in art.
To be sure, drawing will, in time, improve one’s ability to replicate what Leo Sternberg called the "handy graphic symbols" that are collectively regarded as ‘technical capacity’. But long before that happens, drawing teaches you to see. To draw something is to have looked at it, but not merely as a passerby.
Dinner: Wedge salad, a deceptively simple but delicious melange of lettuce, blue cheese, mayonnaise, bacon lardons and cherry tomatoes.