Drawing from the Heart

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918)

There was an exhibition in Dallas Museum of Art a while ago called 'The Mind’s Eye: Masterworks on Paper from David to Cézanne'. Drawn from several collections, the exhibition featured more than one hundred works on paper by seventy artists. From quick sketches to watercolors, works by artists such as Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Manet, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, and Delacroix were brought together. It offered new insights into the working methods and practices of these artists, providing an intimate view of their approach to art making while also presenting the drawings and watercolors as finished works of art in their own right.

It touched me intimately and differently than the same artist's well known paintings, decoratively framed and exhibited in any museum halls. May be the simplicity of something makes it to feel more powerful. Going back to the basics, sketching something to make a meaning out of an experience is still relevant in my humble opinion, if you enjoy doing it. Sketching for sketching sake, if not for nothing else.

Drawings are the most intimate of artist’s expressions. A viewer can feel the very pulse of the artist in a direct manner. Almost all of us as children, have done it. Given the chance, we were eager to set down our perceptions of the world, our wishes and our fears. Those drawings made perfect sense to us and they charmed our parents and others. But once the early childhood had passed, and our ‘education’ progressed, we mostly lost the ability to think visually. Drawings are the natural outcome of that urge and artists are still able to retain it.

Drawing something makes just glancing and looking, into really 'seeing' both the over all view as well as its details. The relationship of objects and the contour that holds the 3D space of an object creates the volume in our mind. This spacial distance is internalized in a direct sketch which does feel the same when copied from a photograph. There is a space between objects, which is not a real experience in a reproduced photo. In the actual scene, foreground and background are more subjectively created by us, as we see with our mind's eye. In a reproduced photograph it is the perspective of the person behind the camera.

The emotions get embedded in the drawing which is the 'x-factor' to form a heart to heart connection with the viewer. The major connecting point seems like the imperfections and mistakes in it. Whether scribbles of ideas, or sketching from real life, the process is a 'reflected result' of an original experience in our mind and it is also a documentation of time as we felt it.

Van Gogh

Not all drawings serve the same purpose for an artist. Some are tools or steps, in the process of more complex visualizations. Others -very finished ones- are ends in themselves. It can be the first faltering step into the envisioned for an artist, for others it sheds light into the inner process of a lost past, or that which shows the hidden pathway to the mind of an artist. In almost every case, it is impossible to understand the visual artist without some recourse to his or her drawings.

Millet Study of an old person’s throat and chin(1847-1850) charcoal on paper

(I found this drawing from Millet's sketchbook the most intimate one in the show. I dont know why. May be because we feel the paper and pencil-work, up close and personal. The imperfections, hesitations and mistakes are visible and the drawing is simple and very casual. Observing masters uncelebrated works always gives us an assurance and confidence, that they also did work more or less like us, with mistakes and self doubt, when it comes to the basics of the daily art practice.) “Millet is 'father Millet', counselor and mentor in everything for young artists” - Van Gogh

"We come the closest to the essence of an artist in his or her notebooks and sketchbooks where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist." - Eugene Delacroix.

"Drawing is the honesty of art... One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with the pencil." -Jean Auguste Ingres.

"It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character." - Camille Pissarro.

"My drawings inspire me and are not to be defined. They determine nothing in particular. They place us, like music, in the ambiguous world of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor" Odilon Redon.

Eugene Delacroix (French 1789-1863) Red Indian with a Fallen Adversary -1845 pen and brown ink on paper. The quick pen drawing shows how skilled he was to capture the body language and feeling of the scene. In his letters, Delacroix refers to the group of native American Objibwa dancers came to Paris(1845). He made several studies of Native Americans from life.