I have in recent months discovered, or rather re-discovered, something of an obsession with drawing. There was a time, some five or six years ago, when drawing and the visual arts more generally played a much greater role in my life, but other interests and various personal upheavals separated me from the practice. Two degrees, a marriage, and two children later, I am at last revisiting the discipline, and it has devoured nearly every moment of my spare time since—which I fear has left my Substack activities in dire neglect.
I’ve been attempting to draft some sort of cohesive essay on the pleasures and even spiritual benefits of drawing, but I have been finding this more difficult to articulate than I expected, and there is something somewhat odd in writing about drawing when one could be, well, drawing. So I will content myself to some brief notes and beg the indulgence of those reading.
I’ve encountered two basic methods for learning to draw. The first, which I shall call “flattening,” involves taking the surfaces that one sees and translating them directly to the page, attempting to mimic the pieces of what one observes as precisely as possible, paying particular attention to negative space, the relative positions of shapes and lines, and so forth. Works such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain utilize this method heavily. The other method, which I shall call “reconstruction,” involves breaking down what one sees into basic shapes in order to understand their structure, then reconstructing them in an imagined three dimensions on paper in order to roughly reproduce a reference or to internalize the object to such a degree that it can be utilized in drawing from the imagination.
Now, both of these methods are valuable, and both require intense observation of the world and build understanding of form and how to reproduce it in a two-dimensional medium. As one might guess from the names I’ve given these two methods, however, I believe the reconstruction method to be the superior of the two, as it allows one to internalize the three-dimensional structures of forms to a profound degree, thus freeing one from references and hyper-strict observation. It is this latter method, then, which I have utilized in seeking to learn drawing more seriously.
The best resource I’ve been able to find for learning this method for free is the online course “Draw a Box,” which teaches students to think in three-dimensions on the page and to systematically break down objects into basic three-dimensional forms. Among other things, this involves brutalizing oneself with drawing 250 boxes free hand before progressing to more sophisticated lessons in order to force oneself to think in three dimensions and radically jump-start one’s spatial reasoning. Having only recently completed this challenge, I believe I can say with some confidence that, if one can stomach it, this is a highly effective way to improve quickly, as is the course as a whole.
Through this process, one acquires not just methods for copying the lines one sees, but direct knowledge of the form and how it changes through space. Even basic Euclidean solids are dynamic, one discovers. They shift and change with distance and angle, sometimes radically, but in predictable ways that reveal something about their nature and about the nature of space. The laws that determine how these forms change are the laws of perspective, and adherence to these laws is what allows drawing to create the illusion of depth. Everything is subject to them, and yet we rarely think about them if we aren’t forced to. They are the water we swim in, and so we are usually oblivious of them. Rather than drawing endless grids, however, practices such as drawing boxes and predicting their vanishing points allow us to internalize these laws so we are not forever dependent on more complicated apparatus, even if we are only ever seeking “good-enough” precision.
In drawing basic forms, moreover, one learns more than merely how they live relative to an observer in space. Everything, it turns out, can be broken down into these forms, and so their primacy in the construction of the visual world becomes increasingly apparent, and I’ve come to think that in many respects the art of draughtsmanship is really the art of seeing primary forms in even the most complicated of objects. Whether a rose or the human figure, everything can be broken down in this way. When one begins to see this, the Platonic notion, articulated in the Timaeus, that the world is constructed from regular solids begins to look not only plausible, but in certain respect irrefutable.
Individual forms, too, begin to gain something of the numinous. The sphere, for instance, is at once the simplest and most complex of all forms. It has no faces, and yet as one progresses from the pyramid to the cube to the octahedron and dodecahedron and onwards to ever greater polyhedrons, the closer one gets to the sphere, approaching it as one approaches infinity. In fact, the sphere can be described as having an infinite number of faces. It is well-known, after all, that the only way to model a sphere is to give it a sufficient number of faces such that the eye cannot perceive that the whole is not perfectly rounded.
Were I to combine this observation with my Platonic leanings, I would say that this indicates the infinite or the One as the fullness of being, as the plenitude of simplicity in which all form is virtually contained, the manifested limitation of which births the created multitude. The sphere contains all other shapes yet transcends them all, and so all finite form is a manifestation of the infinite sphere as each color is the manifestation, through contraction, of white light. Each face is the face of this sphere; each eye is the eye of God; each form a manifestation of the One.
Perhaps I better stop there, however, lest I allow metaphysical ramblings to take over, as is my wont. I hope to progress with my drawing, and in the knowledge it requires and imparts. I do genuinely believe it has incredible potential to transform one’s experience of the world.