In the beginning there was no drawing - and then there was drawing. "Emptiness is the beginning of all things," wrote Raymond Carver. "Nothing out of nothing comes/Nothing into nothing goes" - so insists Shakespeare's King Lear. Bishop Berkeley held forth that nothing exists outside of the mind unless it is perceived to exist, thus ceasing to be the case when the perceiver no longer perceives it. "What you see is what you get," said Frank Stella. Now you see it, now you don't. Out of sight, out of mind.
With all this in mind, the spirit moves me to say: I draw, therefore I am. Or: I am, therefore I draw. Either supposition seems viable enough, if drawn in an appropriate context. Certainly, having been moved to draw, some class of drawing will exist. The act of drawing will condition my thinking, my sense of being. (Drawing is thinking - the thinking eye.) And so on . . . until I begin to draw my next drawing. (This, one suspects, must be true of any act, but let's stick to drawing.) The pencil poised over a blank sheet of paper, this is where drawing begins. So begins the creative act of drawing. And drawing is a creative act. Before there was a drawing there was no drawing.
It's the creative aspects of drawing that I find the most appealing. Above all, as a painter, it's drawing with paintbrushes loaded with paint or with any other mark-making means on canvas, or other support, in the prelude to the act of painting, or the combination of both painting and drawing, that transports me most readily through those much paint-bedaubed portals that open to the personal odyssey of the painter.
Paint . . . painting . . . painter . . ! (In blazing rubrics). In the hands of great painters, the forms and styles of painting and drawing are powerful magical forces greatly to be reckoned with. But back to the act of drawing creatively - as if there was any other kind of drawing - though what exactly this means is not so easy to define, there being such a wide range of interpretation and so many different opinions along with notions of rectitude.
Jean Genet, writing of Giacometti in his Prisoner Of Love, says that "what he, Alberto, makes is the last image of the world". This final image of the world is eternally unfolding. Time is a folding of eternity. Eternity is now.
The denouement of the future of the world can be, and is, expressed in the creative act of drawing. We draw the world with our eyes. We draw our idea of the world. What the eye draws is conveyed through the nervous system and externalised, into the world, by whichever medium is at hand. Having made this final image of the world, we are now in the position of being able to see what it is we think the world is. See what it is we think we are. See how it is that there is something rather than nothing.
And this something, this drawing, having been made, displays for us the last image of the world as it appeared then and the way it continues to appear in the ongoing now. Say, for example, from the hands of a denizen of the Palaeolithic period (the earliest drawing known to us), right up to present-day cyberspace, and so it goes on. In the 35,000 years just spanned in the last sentence (was there something before that?), we see examples of humanity's ingenium evidenced in the creation and recreation of itself (sympathetic or imitative magic?) always as ultimate image in the Eternal Now. A phenomenon appearing to produce something in place of the "nothing new" that Murphy's sun, having no alternative, shone upon.
A creative drawing affords us a sense of the last image of the world, as it appears to be while the drawing is being drawn. The impressionistic sketches decorating a Julian work calendar at the beginning of the previous millennium; a book of hours; marks on a wall from ancient Mesopotamia; an Egyptian tomb or a Mayan temple; Mesoamerican codices; figures on a vase from Greek or Roman times; comic strips; cartoons consisting of animated drawing enacting an impossible tragi-comic runthrough of a theatre of the absurd. Everything and anything that will give us some idea of what we are not . . .
. . . Drawing can be employed to make an objective interpretation of the subject under scrutiny, as it were, or equally to express subjectively the feelings of the artist apropos the object or motif of their creation (ad nauseum). All this aside, it is the form of the drawing as it enters into the nervous system, via the ocular nerve, that gets us first, that excites us the most. Drawing as stylistic arrangements of experience. The medium is the message. The cutting edge of the creative act as it produces the last image of the world.
