Drawing is meditation

I have drawn since I was four years old, when I recorded the experience of seeing four Navy helicopters being forced to land in fog near my home. Through my childhood I amused myself making things, copying Disney cartoons, drawing Greek and Roman soldiers and later, designs of imaginary sports cars I dreamt I would own one day. Though I tended not to draw what I saw around me, I was creative, enjoyed art and design generally and went to art school in 1971.

In those days life drawing was an essential part of visual education. Figure drawing is difficult; as hard as I tried, my early efforts resembled burnished metal forms - like Roman soldiers… unsurprisingly. Like many others in my group, my lines lacked understanding and were insistent, wilful and not very responsive - more like a sign or a signature and more half remembered than seen. The figure drawing was constructed with parts seen and laboriously recorded, as is music played by a beginner. Though I could recognise a good drawing, the process required to achieve one was elusive. Certain phrases were used by the teachers - “draw what you see, not what you know” Understanding how we learn and the nature of knowledge is helpful for progress  as it can carry us through the frustration that accompanies struggle with the unknown.
But it does not enlighten because conscious understanding is not the way. In short, it is time spent, repetition and openness to experience without judgement that eventually leads one to a realisation of the wholeness of the process. Looking back, not unlike Zen teaching or the process of meditation.

One day, after many sessions and more teaching, I glimpsed it.
I can remember the pose and the drawing but curiously I became aware that the figure was not what I thought it was and neither were the drawn lines. Rather than a graphic device delineating the form before me, I could see line as a porous separation of form and space, negative and positive. To represent form one has to visualise it on the paper and feel ones way to its edge. When drawing a rounded form, a line is a horizon, be it a shoulder, a boulder or the seas horizon - a gently receding plane - which, though artificial, has to embody the truth of the perceived experience. The form cannot exist without the space and are in fact the same thing, a space occupied, separated only by our way of looking.

But line also has a simultaneous existence.  As light is both wave and particle, or a wave is both static and flowing, a line is also an entity, an arabesque with an independent life that flows, surges, meanders and eddies its way across the paper, breathing as it makes its serpentine path, carrying energy as it travels, articulating and imbuing life into the adjacent space.
This experience was an epiphany of sorts and encapsulated many things I read and learned subsequently. Only after the struggle of looking and trying, failing and glimpsing, failing better, straining at the edge of my ability, was I able to recognise the way - and it came through forgetting my part in it.

Drawing and making art are not necessarily the same thing and one could say that to really draw well one has to forget about “Art” - one’s preferences, ambitions, confidence, heroes - to find your self you have to forget yourself.  Years later, I saw some parallels with Buddhism and the need to let go of attachment to achieve enlightenment, but the most direct connection appeared to be with the process of meditation.

The time I was at art college saw an increasing indifference or reaction against the tradition of observation drawing in favour of greater experimentation with materials and awareness of cultural and conceptual contexts. The view of “traditional drawing” was that it was unthinking, academic, conformist - an outmoded toolkit. Indeed, the “traditional” way of teaching drawing encouraged students to “draw stupid” with no questions asked beyond truth to experience without judgement. Drawing what you see, not what you know.

Rather than seeing this process as skill acquisition for outmoded art practice, we should see it differently,  for what it is - active meditation that is profoundly life changing.
Draw stupid.