"What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary in its creation - a self-forgetting, useless concentration" - Elizabeth Bishop
The means: pencil, charcoal, ink, fruit juice, paint, scratchings in sand, silverpoint . . . etc, etc, etc.
The Aim: that it will convey Vitality. An instant of Actuality.
Above all else, a drawing by Rembrandt or Bonnard, or Michelangelo or Sesshu has Energy.
Drawing for me has always involved two aspects, sometimes separate, usually inter-related. The first is the sheer sensuous pleasure of drawing, something shared with virtually all other painters. By this I mean the pleasure of playing with pencil, charcoal, or whatever - no aim or proposed function - total unseriousness.
The other aspect is a little more complicated: drawing as exploration - physical, spatial, or psychological exploration.
Drawing is simple. It requires few tools and is generally, though it doesn't know it, at the beginning of the development process (which is why we then paint). In this century anyway, every 10 years or so painting is pronounced dead, outdated, a dinosaur, an atavism to be replaced by conceptualism (the 1970s), installation and photography (the 1990s), and maybe now by computers. Of course it always returns because it is so simple. Nearly all the great visual discoveries could be shown with a pencil. Probably drawing is as near to instinct as can be found in art.
Drawing is a way of remembering. It is a way of reliving. The process of drawing, not the drawing, is what counts. (Sometimes if I see something I want to remember or know better and I don't have pencil or paper, I "draw" with my finger on the palm of my hand. This seems to be almost as good.)
Drawing is a way of focusing. In a museum, if you wish to examine a Titian, or a Rubens, or a Piero, then your best way is to draw it. Make a copy, even if it is only in your head.
A painter's drawings often precede the changes in his development. Why? Is it because drawing is the most direct line to the "chips" of the unconscious (and so is the first to appear)? Freud is supposed to have said: "Wherever I go, a poet has been there first" - and, of course, before the poem was the image.
The image first. Maybe there would have been no Interpretation Of Dreams without the strange double line of Cezanne, which quivered and tried to find his apple in space, or the water/skies of Monet when he tried to discover where air and water sat.
PS: Information, that horrid art school buzzword, has little to do with drawing.
Barrie Cooke's next exhibition opens at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, on April 26th.
