Roz Wound Up
There are lots of sketching blogs out there, but not many that regularly write helpful instruction. Here is one:
These people are the saints of the internet– they give of their own time and talent to put out helpful material. Thanks, Roz.
She is featured in Danny Gregory’s book: “An Illustrated Life…” , if I remember right.
See also James Gurney’s site, Gurney’s Journey — my blurb here.
We Know the Garden In the Act Of Drawing It
One proper object of our knowledge is the Creator; the other is The Garden. The World is the garden, seen from exile.
We can observe the world via Reason but we cannot know it. This detached observation — science — is the spectatorship of exile. It yields useful information, through which we master and improve the world.
All knowledge is participatory love. Our knowledge of God is through the agency of love, but is often called “mysticism” when it impinges the cognition. Our knowledge of The Garden is in the artistic act, which is simply an exercise of loving the warm light as it kisses the molecules. Knowledge is useful, but the knower, the lover, is indifferent to its usefulness.
So knowledge is interpenetration; it is cognition of the inner essences of created things. Michelangelo saw the inner essence of the stone when he released the angel from the prison of extraneous marble.
So, art is a mode of friendship.
Drawing, by John Berger: “how has… [the face]… become the face it is”
All creation is in the art of seeing – Times Online
But now, because you asked me what drawing was to me . . . when you are drawing, anyway when you are drawing something which is alive, you are drawing the traces of what has happened to it until that moment at which you are looking at it. I mean, the traces of how it has physically become itself.
For example, if it’s a face, how it has, by its experience or the soul behind it, become the face it is. So the drawing is, it seems to me, an observation of how the thing that you’re looking at has become itself. And that of course does have a lot to do with what we’re talking about — and storytelling.
Drawing, 2
The lilac leaf is not interesting aside from the wind, nor is the wind visible aside from the leaf, but the shape of the wind in the lilac will hold me here for hours. It is the dance of the parts with each other, frozen in a moment, that we have the privilege to feel with our pencil.
We only feel it, darkly, like Helen Keller felt the hands of her teacher, groping with the pencil or the brush inside the swishing swirling world.
Drawing
Every sketch is a question about what God sees.
If you treat your sketchbook as a book of answers you’ll suffocate from the presence of the inner judge, who will demand a certain finished quality to those sketched answers. No, see your pencil as a questioning stick. It is a divining rod, doodling among the surface textures of what you see in front of you, stopping to drop deeper into the picture when it passes over the pixel that really pulls at your attention.
So your drawing is questioning and answering all at once and you are utterly given up to the process. Whatever the page looks like at the end of the day is the right answer.
It might be that what God sees in the treeline at dusk is not what you see. We are not pantheists. But we are also not docetists; it is certain that your path to seeing what God sees runs through your own vision, and not around it.
