Continuous Blind Contour Line Drawing Bird
Letter of Recommendation
Letter of Recommendation: Blind Contour Drawing
A few years ago, I became unhappy with my drawing style. I had been an enthusiastic doodler since childhood, but my art hadn't really evolved since then. Every time I sat down to draw, I found myself producing two-dimensional googly-eyed cartoon figures (pencils, avocados, dinosaurs, hamburgers, tacos, clouds, whatever) that would raise their tiny stick arms whimsically whenever they needed to speak to one another. It was cutesy and severely limited and — after several decades — excruciatingly boring. I had lost the ability to surprise myself. My visual relationship to the world had atrophied. Occasionally, there were minor coups; a 4-year-old would ask me to draw a pirate ship or a dinosaur, then tell me that I was the world's greatest artist. Eventually, however, they would grow up and change their minds.
I tried many times to break out of my drawing style, to emulate the artists I knew or the ones I saw at museums. Their work was so loose and real, so effortlessly complex — there were no stick arms or googly eyes anywhere. Objects had dimension. Unfortunately, my new style never worked. It always just ended up looking as if it was done by me, the boring old googly-eyed doodler, trying to doodle his way into a different artistic mode. The problem, fundamentally, was one of control — I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn't willing to surrender it. You can't control your way out of control. Eventually I got so bored that I pretty much stopped drawing. I fell into an artistic malaise. I became despondent.
I happened to mention my frustration to an artist friend — a real artist who studied real art at a real art school. I expected him to shake his head, commiserate, tell me where I had failed and wish me luck in my art-barren life. Instead he solved my problem immediately. He told me to try drawing without looking at the paper.
This seemed absurd at first. I had never heard of such a thing. But I followed his advice. I drew my iPhone without looking and — when I did finally look down — couldn't believe the results. It looked horrible. It looked like a broken toboggan. It was as if someone else had drawn it: a cataract patient, high on peyote. I loved it. For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely surprised by something I had drawn.
In the following weeks and months, I repeated this experiment many times. I drew the people and objects around me (my daughter, my typewriter, flowers), as well as images I came across in books or on TV (Larry Bird, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud). I drew myself. It was all wonderfully horrible. Finally, my drawing had life in it, just like the art I had always admired. It was ugly, but it had a powerfully direct relationship to the world.
This technique, I later discovered, is a classic intro-to-art exercise called "blind contour drawing." Freshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. It's the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you're looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it. Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.
Part of the magic of blind drawing is the impossibility of doing it wrong. This makes it the perfect antidote to perfectionism, because its first and only step is to abandon any hope of perfection. But inevitably, almost by accident, your hand will produce little slivers of excellence — a nose that looks exactly right, an inscrutable expression on someone's face, the dip and curve of a dog's back — but then these will be obliterated, immediately, by the subsequent maelstrom of lines. I have learned to enjoy the feeling of swimming in sensory ignorance, to appreciate the vast distance between my hand and the reality it tries to trace.
It turns out that the world, on close examination, is gloriously strange. Things are lumpier and hairier than we have been led to believe. Planes are never flat; colors are never solid. Matthew McConaughey's hairline is not the Platonic ideal you might imagine: It is jagged and wandering, like a map of the coastline of a distant mysterious continent. Your father-in-law's head is squatter than you ever knew. Sleeve wrinkles can be as beautiful as the most exotic flower. Every object (book, pencil, glove, banana) is in fact a bewildering universe of lines. Blind drawing allows us to explore those universes, to lose ourselves in them for long stretches of time, to feel their essential strangeness. It is joyful and meditative, one of the fastest escape routes from the prison of consciousness that I have ever found. You can do it anywhere, anytime, with any subject. It will flip you, like a switch, from absence to presence. I am going to do one now.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-blind-contour-drawing.html
0 Response to "Continuous Blind Contour Line Drawing Bird"
Publicar un comentario