The very best part of doing a drawing is not when you are finished, nor just before you start, but when you are right in the middle, like the centre around which a knot is tied. The reason for starting the drawing is in the past, and you haven't quite turned the corner towards its end. It is an incomparably tactile and timeless moment. It is not stand-back time, not proportion time, nor light and shade time. It is the time where the concept, content and activity are at seamless play. You are not "lost" in your own occupation, but surrounded by it, exquisitely busy, on an is1and between intellect and instinct. When I look at artists' drawings, I try to imagine where it was in that work that they got onto this "island", where the fusion took place and the business kicked in.
When I am moving around, travelling, doing things, I am all the time drawing. Not with a pencil, or a piece of charcoal, but just drawing in my head: the trees flashing by the train window, the curl on the back of someone's neck, the length of the walk from my seat to the door, the feel of the seat underneath my bum. It's a feeling/thinking way of understanding time, weight, and space. I am even loathe to put this understanding onto paper sometimes, where it might lose its clarity. It's not weighing and measuring and getting it right. It's understanding something with your eyes and limbs and heart and mind. Drawing is thinking.
When I was a student, drawing was still considered a secondary practice, a study thing, something you used to hone a composition for the "real" artwork to come, i.e. a painting. This was the 1980s and colleges were still strictly divided into departments. One was not allowed to present for a degree with drawings alone.
However, as the multi-practice and installation thing began to gather momentum in the art world, departmental barriers dissolved and students immersed themselves in many different disciplines simultaneously. Photography helped a lot here. Because there were no photography departments, it was a free-form subject that could be accessed by anyone. The art colleges held on for a mighty long time to the academic principles which justified drawing as a kind of charcoal workout, that toned and refined your perceptions for the serious job of producing paintings and sculpture. Drawing was the hidden work, the preparation, the prequel. Consequently, you were encouraged to dash them off, lash them out, have folders full of them.
1 don't know for sure when it was that I started to spend so much time on my drawings. I was still a student, anyway. I would spend days, weeks and months with a drawing, until it passed first the idea stage, then the recording stage, and finally got to the stage of being a drawing for its own sake, all its "reasons for being" lodged firmly within itself.
I believe that drawing hasn't yet found its place in the teaching/learning situation. It is still equated by many with spending long days in the life room, lazy hours of skill development. But laziness is the enemy of drawing; ultimately the act of recording can be an empty one. Drawing needs all your attention and all your feeling and, mostly, all your intellect.
The opening paragraph of this text was first published in Knot, the catalogue for an exhibition curated by the artist and held at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1999. It is reprinted by kind permission of the gallery. Alice Maher has a new exhibition at the Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, which runs until May 12th.
