It requires no special equipment, little space, you can do it on the back of envelopes. Freed from the restrictions imposed by collectors, historians and artists themselves, drawing could become the vehicle for widespread participation in art by the public at large. The abject absurdity of today’s avant garde art should, at least, make it possible to put forward what will seem to be a preposterous suggestion, namely that the whole art world edifice is due for demolition. We need a revolution in the visual arts – from the bottom up.
It will be argued here that a radical shift in the way we view drawing could offer a new lease of life to the traditional forms of the expressive visual arts – in particular, to the now somewhat marginalised activity of painting.
That younger artists have turned in large numbers to ‘alternative practices’ is not in the least surprising since the superficiality of most of modernism, particularly in its abstract form, appears increasingly obvious. But our young artists have only switched media. They remain as dull and predictable as their predecessors and, if Tracey Emin can be taken as a representative example, still in thrall to Renaissance realism. In pious mood talking to David Bowie in Modern Painters, “Rembrandt, he’s fucking brilliant”, she reverenced. What a choice of artist. Heavy, drab over- skillful realist – “old stop-at-home Rembrandt” – the Futurists had much more spirit.
In rejecting realism and abstraction, as well as the currently fashionable emphasis on process, as being insufficient in themselves for authentic painting, we must look for its authenticity elsewhere. The key is to be found in the long tradition of representational drawing and painting as metaphor. In Europe it stretches from cave art to the fifteenth century and goes on to include, very significantly, some exceptional artists in the realtively recent past. But for most artists and pretty much the whole of the rest of society, it ends with our becoming infatuated with the skills of imitation, our one-sided reliance on scientific observation and analysis, and a corresponding suspicion of intuition. The important thing about metaphorical image making is that it not only confirms our interaction with each other and with the world of nature and things but that it also invites us to be intrigued, charmed, interested, moved by how other human beings can, with infinitely subtle shifts of emphasis and idiosyncracy, refer us to unexpected aspects of shared existence. Such embodiments of graphic personality are of course trained out through the conventional process of what is called ‘learning to draw.’ The extent to which society has been brain-washed in this context is illustrated by the exaggerated concern to keep a Michelangelo drawing from going abroad. From published photographs it looks the most unremarkable drawing in the world.
Coleridge’s prescription for poetry, and obviously applicable to drawing, was likeness in unlikeness, a source of new imagery limited only by the human appetite for invention. Those valuable insights which occur in odd scraps of drawing, diagrams, graffiti, apologetic graphic stumblings, done from time to time by people who insist that they can’t draw, will sadly be dismissed by them, and the world at large, as worthless. At the same time large numbers of amateur artists strive vainly to gain proficiency in a kind of drawing which can end only in banality, sublimely unaware that the jaded modern artist has frequently found inspiration in drawings from primitive societies as well as those by children, where innocence of conventional skills has allowed a freedom of expression all too often denied to the professional artist by his very training. What an irony. If, as I believe is the case, drawings by untrained people are more likely to offer fresh insights and idiosyncratic vitality than drawings by professional artists then there are many difficulties to overcome, not least the fact that the untrained have no value for what they themselves can do. They, God help us, want to draw like Leonardo!
The radical shift demanded, requires recognition of the absolute gulf between real drawing – drawing as metaphor, and what is universally known as good draughtsmanship. Particularly if art’s essentially expressive role is to be emphasised we might think of real drawing as a phenomenology of drawing where the artist attempts to grasp intuitively at an object's visual essence without artifice, without preconceptions. It should be remembered that the expressive artist works towards synthesis and not analysis. Here I have found it interesting to compare the complementary positions of David Bomberg and Gaston Bachelard.
To the extent that as Bachelard says images have "no need of scholarship", a more open and less exclusively 'professional' aspect of drawing becomes legitimate. And Bomberg came to believe that Slade School training in draughtsmanship was disastrous. (That was the central plank of his teaching- a fact conveniently buried by those whose interests it endangers.)
The development of western art has been characterised by a skill-based aesthetic. And within the dominant view of drawing the term skill has been subverted to mean simplistically, skill in representation. The claim that he/she is a 'really good' draughtsman, has so often been made to sanction subsequent delinquent performance. This dubious inheritance has, in large measure, left society blocked off from all those qualities of drawing which do not fit what had for so long become set as the dominant criteria. The preference has been for drawing which aims at visual, verifiable accuracy, both as an objective in itself, and as a formative discipline servicing most other aspects of the visual arts.
In drawing "properly" the artist adopts a conceptual and analytical bias effectively setting up a barrier to the process of drawing as a complex synthesis where instead, there could be a balance of thinking and feeling; intention and impulse. Most damaging of all, there has been a corresponding loss of physical, plastic immediacy and feeling for form: in the sense used by Bachelard, you could call this a loss of image or in Bomberg's terms an absence of mass. Bachelard says there is 'a warm intimacy' at the root of all images, in the pursuit of which, reason has no part. Reason drives a wedge between subject and object, removing the possibility of image from immediacy. Concepts stifle the life of images.
This is the common ground between Bachelard's notion of image and Bomberg's spirit in the mass, defined by him as 'the poetry in mankind, in contemplating nature.' In both cases there is an acceptance that the authentic image is the most fleeting product of the creative consciousness. The use of words like fleeting, spirit, poetry do not, I suggest, imply a lack of strength, wholeness or a certainty within itself, but that essentially the image in drawing cannot be verified in any way comparable to a scientific proposition; it is not susceptible to analysis. In fact to analyse it would be to destroy it. Not wilfully, but simply by beingitself, the creative imagination transgresses normal everyday laws of process and expectation.
Clearly this presents difficulties for the artist who has been taught to draw 'objectively' and who has practised the skills of 'getting it right'. If to achieve what Bachelard calls an "imaginary radiance", and if image comes before thought, before the intervention of reason, then the so-called skills of 'good draughtsmanship' become suspect; as ingrained habit they will block any intuitive inclination to deform. That capacity, the capacity to deform, to create a new image, one which mediates between subject and object, between artist-perceiver and the material world, evolves from skills of a very different order, but no less demanding than the conventional practice of so-called 'sound draughtsmanship'. This helps to explain why apparently inept drawings can have so much appeal. The milieu of the creative consciousness is an alert openness to possibilities, backed both by an awareness of traditional precedent and the recognition that the past cannot be regained. Yet, while no option should ever be rejected as too absurd for consideration, the trace of the frozen tantrum has little value; lack of control is not a virtue.
Real drawing and its development could provide the necessary challenge to prevailing fashion - the humanist alternative to celebrity solipsism; one which potentially involves the whole of society and not merely an esoteric minority. It is time for fresh thinking about the vast expressive potential waiting to be released through drawing which could emerge from the general public: drawing – by and for everybody.
Cover Drawing ROSE WYLIE
