The Nature of Drawing

by Michael Ayrton for THE STUDIO
 

THE STUDIO VOL. CLXI NO. 813 JANUARY 1961

Michael Ayrton, well-known British artist, discusses the characteristics of man's oldest form of art expression. The article is based on a talk on Network Three of the British Broadcasting Corporation last January

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WHEN I BEGAN to write, I found myself looking idly at my own right hand—writing. And at the same time I was thinking about drawing, and wondering why it held so much importance for me—over and above the fact that it is my trade. It is more than that really, it's my way of life. In fact, I have been drawing almost every day for twenty-five years, and find myself subject to a compulsion to think by drawing. At this point I looked at the colour plate and I became aware of the knee in the right-hand corner of the drawing reproduced there—the reclining male nude by Michelangelo. This red-chalk knee is a statement about articulation, one is in no doubt as to how the knee works. It is explained in a series of interlocked bumps established by letting the blank paper do the work of the light falling and the chalk, hatching in quick, short strokes, moves round the bumps and under them, explaining the form. The chalk remarks, quite effortlessly, the relief map of the joint. From the hip towards the underside of the knee a line, a varying line, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft, states the heavy muscles of the thigh. It has moved, this line, from just below the bulge made by the wing of the pelvis. It has moved twice, once very lightly and once more certainly. In the moment of making this second, definitive line, in the centre of the downward sweeping movement of the chalk, right in the middle of it, Michelangelo must have lifted his chalk from the paper and made a stab at the line which defines the top of the thigh.

His hand has taken a compass bearing, perhaps several. I am not reading this in a crystal ball, looking through time. I am drawing it myself in my mind, this is what must have happened; it is inevitable, automatic.

Whilst I have written this down, my own right hand has moved across the paper to the right, and I have watched it. The most visible tension rests in the web of sinew running up from the upper joint of the thumb to the knuckle of the first finger. The thumb, bent in, presses the pen against the forefinger—the four small cylinders, my fingers, jointed, press against the opposed, pressing thumb. Obviously : it is merely a man's hand writing, what about it? `What about it'—if you think in terms of drawing, is not in any way the same thing as `what about it' if you are just thinking verbally about the simple everyday business of writing an English sentence. A whole sequence of complex actions, most of them subtly visible, are apparent to me. I take my hand off the paper and relax my fingers—stretch them. They alter, their whole structure is reset, the definition of the boundaries of my hand must instantly be reconsidered. Put like this it sounds as if it would drive any normal person crazy, and perhaps to be obsessed with this kind of thing is a little crazy.

Look at the reproduction of Dürer's drawing of Adam's right arm. His hand holds an apple. How do you hold an apple? What is the best way to hold an apple-forefinger up or down? How exactly does each finger relate to its neighbour? Well, who cares, you may ask, how best a person holds an apple? But Dürer cared and I care, and I also care—and care vitally—about Dürer's opinion as to how a hand does hold an apple. Dürer's opinion, or five different possibilities, five different opinions, makes the drawing itself.

In drawing, as you can see, one tries to reach some sort of conclusion about what is happening to forms, especially to living forms, and in the work of the great figure artists, the human form, which is perhaps the most remarkable complex of forms we know, has been the centre. All of them, from Leonardo to Cézanne, have fretted over what happens when a man moves his hand—what muscular changes occur, naturally, in the shape of his arm and shoulder when he moves his hand? How does the fall of light (which is of course the necessary element), reshape itself on the forms of his wrist when he closes his fingers? The shadow opposed to the light and conditioned by it (with which nature draws) is what one actually sets down on the paper ; that and the contour which encloses both light and shadow. At least this is the most usual form of European drawing, during the last five hundred years.

Let me examine this phenomenon called contour. It is a line and it is artificial—essentially artificial-for on paper it marks an edge which in fact is not an edge at all. Look again at the Dürer or the Michelangelo. In the Dürer the contour of the underarm—the big arm on the sheet—is begun and stops and then is begun again. You can see the short discontinued line just below the underside of the wrist. In the Michelangelo, the top of the thigh of the bent left leg is redrawn at least four times. You will find again and again that the contours, those supposed edges which are drawn to separate the body from the paper and define the space it occupies are tentative brooding, thought and rethought. In the Degas drawing, in the Cézanne, in the Rembrandt and in the late Leonardo drawing there seems to have been no final decision taken as to where anything begins and ends, as to where exactly anything is—but equally there is no doubt of the weight and the solid roundness of the figure established by this network of lines. Look at it casually and you may simply think of it as a `rough sketch'—those scribbled words, implying all the hesitancy of ignorance. But if you understand the contour the problem of the contour, it becomes something quite different.

The contour is a convention essential to describing appearances by drawing. What it describes however, in a drawing of the human figure is not an edge like the sharp corner of a table or a cutting side of a razor blade, but the point where the rounded form, which tends, in the human body, to be cylindrical, turns away from you and goes out of sight. Beyond the contour is the invisible but vital area in which the figure has its being—the space it occupies-the envelope of air which is represented by the paper itself. Put your own hand flat on your own knee—put your hand palm down. There appears to be a line between each finger and a line down each side of the hand itself. You know there isn't, for if you move your fingers each finger will show itself as a cylinder with no edge. Nevertheless to draw a human hand the practical convention is to set a line of demarcation along each side of each of the five forms of fingers and thumb in order to establish that there, and there—at these places—the forms have gone round and out of vision.

Forgive this laborious illustration but it is important, in so far as it explains, for one thing, why Leonardo should be so doubtful about the contours of his enigmatic, pointing figure or why Michelangelo should so doubt the placing of the definitive line of the leg, that he hazards its possible position several times. Where exactly can one find the exact equivalent, the line which will state with real certainty, not only where the form turns, but the space the form displaces—and state it, not to the spectator reverently looking on, but to the man himself who is drawing in order that he may satisfy himself that he knows? Where is the right place to put the line—not the arbitrary, nice place to put it—but exactly the right place? This interplay between certainty and uncertainty is the very crux of great drawing. Faced with a breathing human form, perpetually in slight motion, perpetually taking up subtly different positions in space, it is impossible to be certain about the contour. You may spend a long lifetime publicly insisting, in your drawing, on the rightness of what you see or feel. Your drawings may look excellent, they may reap praise and acceptance, carry conviction, be believed. But look at the late drawings of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, of Rembrandt, of Degas, of Cézanne, and it is easy to see that in the end these great masters had lost all interest in demonstrating their abilities. They were no longer making categorical statements, but were sunk in the final problem ... the question, do I believe that what I am drawing approaches the visible truth about the forms I am seeking to pin down on the paper?

Wisdom lies in the discovery of how much one does not know. At twenty one knows, at sixty one does not, and in these late drawings by great artists this wisdom is transcendent. There is however a catch here, for the very doubts and hesitations of the great have time and time again been imitated by lesser artists who have vaguely felt that to produce something on paper which looks like frenzied knitting, is tantamount to making a great drawing. But fifty irrelevant, sketchy lines are no help. If you look at a Michelangelo drawing none of the lines is wrong. Each hypothesis could be carried through to a logical conclusion. Each line is thought, then rethought.

The primary value of a drawing to the artist must be and has always been in what he has learned from actually doing it. You cannot really know and possess the appearance of a thing until you have drawn it. This is the deep magic of drawing. The crystallization of an image, the making of the spirit into flesh in a special sense, is the nature of drawing.

Every seen thing in a person's life moves—continually moves and continually changes. Not only living things, but the most apparently static objects are, in fact, in motion. Take, for example, a rock—which is as solid and motionless a thing as I can thing of at the moment. Consider this rock and it seems perpetually still—still since some prehistoric glacier or primeval earthquake disposed of it. But, firstly you, who are looking at it, are moving. You will stare for a long time and then inevitably you will move. You will not see the rock from precisely the same viewpoint again or in precisely the same way. You yourself may have moved what seems an infinitesimal amount, but the change will have taken place. Secondly, of course, the light will move—the sun will pass across the day—and this will continually change the appearance of the rock. The great problem of drawing—and this brings us back to the problem of the contour—is how to make a permanent distillation, in a single image, of something which in fact has changed all the time under your eyes. The restated contour is a comment on this movement. There are various ways of attempting to resolve this problem, all of them ultimately unsatisfactory even to the greatest artist. How do you make a visible statement, which is static, out of a vision which moves perpetually in space, without falsifying that sensation?

The strength and greatness of great drawing lies partly in the very fact that there is no ultimate solution to this problem, and if there were, the work of art would cease to breathe—would cease to be alive. With high-speed photography, for instance, you can, of course, pin down an image in a fraction of a second. It is there, and the change which has taken place in the position of the galloping horse's legs, or whatever—is so rapid as to be invisible even to the mechanical eye. But a Degas drawing of a galloping horse, or, at the other extreme, a Cézanne drawing of the Mont St. Victoire, or a Leonardo study of the motion of water, contains a distillation—a sequence of perceptions and responses bound together into an image, the implications of which contain both the general and the particular. Or to put it another way, the rock is put down on paper as it is, and as it was, and as it will be, because its essentials have been visually understood. Not only that, but its relationship to the landscape in which it is situated has been understood.

This comprehension (and drawing is the artist's attempt to understand what his eyes and mind tell him) is imprecise, even at its highest, and in this ultimate imprecision is the breath of life. Drawing, like painting and sculpture is, as Picasso once said, a lie. But it is a very special and magical kind of lie. The point about the Rembrandt drawing of a seated woman is that it is a paraphrase in fifteen minutes or so of Rembrandt's concentration upon his physical, mental, spiritual and emotional attitudes towards a person.

The paraphrase of reality which has resulted is splendid in its broad simplicity. Nothing unimportant has been included, but everything that matters is there. The problem of the transition of appearances from three into two dimensions is again as obvious as it is paramount. Most European drawing, other than certain kinds of calligraphy, takes as its point of departure a three-dimensional object—a person, an animal, a plant, a mountain or an assemblage of such solid things. Inevitably drawing must substitute for the third dimension-either an illusionary depth and thickness by shading and modelling—part of the special lie—or a convention of line which will be accepted—which is a different kind of lie. Since drawing is fundamentally a private art we need not greatly concern ourselves with who accepts the convention. It has at least to be acceptable to the artist himself.

Upon the linear convention, the Florentine method of ' disegno' was largely based, and it has remained a most potent one. Early Degas drawings are not the last things to have been done on this foundation. Picasso has used it to great effect. Upon a different and even more austere linear convention much of Chinese and Japanese art has been based. The spectator must—and of course readily does—accept the fact that the lines bounding forms contain implied solids even though no solid is specifically visible. There is nothing unusual. The linear paraphrase is the oldest of all drawing conventions. It goes back twenty-five thousand years ; it was unvarying in Egypt, and the Greek painting on vases, which is all we have of Greek drawing and painting, is equally linear.

On the other hand, the drawings by Michelangelo and Degas, although the linear convention is maintained, are the drawings of men who instinctively thought as sculptors. Michelangelo, of course, although he painted the Sistine Chapel frescoes, thought of himself as a sculptor and considered painting a rather effeminate activity. Indeed he and Leonardo had a bitter exchange of insults on the subject. Degas is thought of as a painter who took to sculpture when his eyesight began to fail, but I believe this is an oversimplification. I believe that, in another age, Degas would have been a sculptor and I believe that he thought and drew as a sculptor even though most of his life was spent in painting. If you compare the drawings of Degas with the drawings of Michelangelo they have much in common with each other. Both concentrate upon the plastic qualities of form, both are deeply concerned with solidity, the density of flesh. The tension of sinews, the hidden scaffolding of bone—these things obsess both of them and, as Sir Kenneth Clark has pointed out, Degas gave to the female nude the muscularity which four hundred years earlier Michelangelo had given to the male.

The sculptor—or the painter-sculptor—tends to draw to arrive at a comprehension of the mysterious nature of solidity. In the late Michelangelo it is the extraordinary weight and plasticity of the figures which emerges from the pale and tentative scrawls of the chalk. And again in the summary but marvellously economical nude study by Degas it is the weight and solidity of the figure which first impresses one. Yet Degas inherited the Florentine tradition of 'disegno' to which Michelangelo belonged. The linear foundation of this approach to drawing is as much apparent in Degas' early drawings as in Michelangelo's early work. But in each case, as they became old, these two men threw off the constriction of the contour—that definitive edge, which is not an edge—in order to work into the centre of the form. If a drawing of this sort is sufficiently powerful and the interior forms are convincing enough, the contour can become subsidiary almost to the point of irrelevance. With Michelangelo, it became tentative to the point of a misty network of lines. With Degas, the contour is simplified in the opposite sense, a heavy structure controlling the enormous impetus of plastic energy, which bursts from the centre. In sculpture, contour in a linear sense is not a primary concern. Sculpture is concerned with the displacement of actual space, and furthermore, great sculpture invariably moves inwards towards its centre.

There is one final point I should like to make, and it is about the idea of the artist, which many people hold dear, and which gets between the spectator and the work of art. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Romantic Movement built a lay figure of the artist which remains and is accepted, even by artists themselves. This puppet has intense feelings and is entirely motivated by them, he has sensitivity, he has passion, but he has no intellect and feels no need of one. He is not like other men. Curiously this notion of the artist works retrospectively. It is a kind of cult image. But in fact it is a false one, because intellect is an essential adjunct to great creative powers. The Greeks, upon whose civilization ours is founded, had two great passions in art : the human body and mathematics. Mathematics dominate Greek sculpture and architecture and when their culture was reborn in Italy in the fifteenth century mathematics, measurement and systems of proportion were of enormous importance to the practising artist. They were far more important than we today, looking back, find it easy to credit. The employment of mathematics is surely an intellectual activity, a process—in the case of the visual arts—of ordering the senses and imposing disciplines upon them. Whatever system of ordering sensations so that they can be expressed with clarity and precision is used, it is likely to involve a mental as well as a sensory activity.

Well, I have maintained that drawing is a process of thinking and granted that emotion and the senses and all are engaged, it is finally the mind which distinguishes us from the brute creation. You can be a pretty good artist with a scant supply of brains, but I doubt it you can be a great one. Great drawing is great intelligence at work on passion and perception. It is observation and it is logic, it is calculation and sensation. As a man thinks—so he draws. Those with whom we have been concerned here thought with blinding and marvellous clarity, and thought straight on to pieces of paper which remain to testify to the fact.



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