Drawing

A new, small, independent bookstore opened in Orleans this year. We used to go to Compass Rose, a larger bookstore, and spend hours going through the stacks. In the last few years it had gone downhill, its inventory dwindling and generally becoming shabbier. Last year when we visited it was gone and we mourned the loss of another independent bookstore. We were thrilled to visit this year and discover Main Street Books had opened. Although the store is small, each book was a jewel, thoughtfully selected and representing a broad range of interests and local subjects.

I made my way to the section on Arts and I practically lunged at the shelf when I saw this book, The Undressed Art, Why We Draw. The blurb on the back by Billy Collins says in part, "The Undressed Art is a charming, illuminating study of our impulse to register the world by putting pencil to paper." The book is fascinating and explores the reasons, emotional and intellectual, that causes one to draw, as well as some of the history of drawing and, a subject I knew nothing about, the history and life of life models.

Finding this book on vacation was a great gift. I read it obsessively for two days, flinging it down at times when I had to draw, just had to draw something like a crazed woman (which my husband observed as I woke him up jumping out of bed to find my pen and journal) .Steinhart approaches the subject by beginning with the observation that everyone draws when they are little and wondering why most of us stop as soon as we become literate. In middle age, the author, a naturalist, found himself beginning to draw again and explored the origin of this impulse.

"As I wrote less, I drew more. I had drawn as a child, stopped in my late twenties and thirties and then came back to it in my forties. I've been drawing more and more, and I wonder now whether is has become a substitute for the exercise I used to give my eyes out in the woods, seeing new country, describing new creatures. And that has gotten me wondering about the whole phenomenon. Why do we draw?"

The book is filled with quotes from artists and art historians who study the need to draw the world they see, and discuss how drawing differs from paintings or sculpture.

"A drawing, says art historian Otto Benesch, " is an immediate emanation of personality, of the rhythm of life and its creative faculty." Drawing is more an act of discovery - of one's own feelings or of the world outside. A painting is likely to translate that discovery into something broader and more calculated."

Considering that I had dedicated the vacation to learning painting skills, it was cool to switch back and forth between drawing and painting and make my own observations about what I brought to the different processes and what they demanded from me. Drawing makes me intensely study the contours of the object, noting the scale and proportions and tonal values. Painting makes me more observant of the light that falls on an object. Drawing is about the line; painting is about the light. With drawing, I'm more concerned at depicting a realistic version of what I'm seeing. With painting, I'm concentrating on the style in which I want to portray the subject, and more importantly, the color. I'm just a novice at both, and having the two to compare has made me more aware of the skills each demand of me.

I loved the way Steinhart compares drawing to being a naturalist and talks about the similarities of the two:

But there is an underlying unity. The naturalist and the artist are alike in their warchfulness. They are both servants of of their eyes. A naturalist learns to look intently at things, to listen to them, smell them touch them, to wonder what they are made of, what they do, how they are alike or not like each other, what they mean....It seems to me now much like what an artist does, looking for form and line and color and texture to define the relationship between spirit and substance."

If you are interested in drawing, pick up this book. It's not a how-to book, though it does contain a few tips on contains a few tips on standard anatomical measurements. The book will get under your skin and make you itch compulsively until you throw down the book, ransack your desk for a pencil and blank piece of paper, and fix your sight on something, anything to draw.