27th
the gestalt
Drinking a small teacup of soymilk and contemplating the day that has passed.
I think the last few weeks and months have been culminating up till this point. I had a break through today in the studio and I haven’t experienced one of these in a few years.
I owe it to a skinny man named Kimon Nicolaides.
I bought this book sometime last year as I had started to develop an interest in figure drawing. Last year I was scrounging around for books on drawing the figure because after 3 years at art school, I realised I knew nothing about the human body and how to draw it. So has begun my self-education on the figure.
I could render the body as I saw it, but rendering a likeness and understanding what you’re drawing are two completely different things.
So along with acquiring Vilppu and Hale, Nicolaides soon joined my shelves and sat comfortably and quietly until now.
The idea behind this book is that you do all these drawing exercises for a year or so. It’s not so much the exercises that interest me as some of the ideas he presents about drawing. Take for instance this simple sentence:
“A man can usually draw the thing he knows best…”
An unassuming statement that implies a great deal. It has become important to me because I have realised that in drawing, or making art, seeing is not enough.
Significantly, complete understanding can not be done by the eyes alone. And this is perhaps the secret or my holy grail of drawing. One has to experience or become familiar, or intimate with it to truly understand and be able to ‘draw’ it.
Perhaps Hokusai the great Japanese printmaker encapsulates what I am feeling best:
“From the time I was six, I was in the habit of sketching things I saw around me, and around the age of fifty, I began to work in earnest, producing numerous designs. It was not until after my seventieth year, however, that I produced anything of significance. At the age of seventy-three, I began to grasp the underlying structure of birds and animals, insects and fish, and the way trees and plants grow. Thus, if I keep up my efforts, I will have an even better understanding when I am eighty, and by ninety will have penetrated to the heart of things. At one hundred, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live a decade beyond that, everything I paint - every dot and line - will be alive. I ask the god of longevity to grant me a life long enough to prove this true.”
- Hokusai,
[translated by Carol Morland]