On seeing

It was like September first came and when it did, summer hightailed it right on out of here. It got cooler, the humidity dropped, it’s been overcast and occasionally rainy. But the thing I’m most interested in is the overcastness, because as soon as the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped, the colors got more interesting.

It reminds me of last summer, when it was still hot in Maryland, but overcast and cool in Michigan at my grandparents’ house. The colors blew me away.

It’s delightful. It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring. And I’d normally try to capture it with a camera. The problem is that I’m not always lucky enough to get a photo that reflects the true emotional impressions I felt at the time.

I guess you could say that I used to observe the world in brushstrokes. I realized it when I was in high school, after I’d studied art for a few years. Typically, we learn to look at the world and identify things, then assign an absolute definition to them. What I see is an apple. What I see is a flower. It is.

But once you start learning to draw, you end up having to relearn the skill of observation, to redefine your environment, turning what is into what appears to be. When you begin, you draw what you know a thing to look like. When you discover how to draw a thing as it appears to be — what you see, rather than what you know — the whole world transforms around you.

And one day, as you’re staring out the car window at a particularly striking sunset, you realize that your mind is busy mixing colors, making marks and blending lines, layering fields of color, pulling out highlights and intensifying shadows. You’re not looking at it: you’re recreating it, impressing it on the canvas of your memory. You observe the world in brushstrokes.

Then you run home and pull out your sketchbook and medium of choice, to spend a meditative hour or two letting your mind play lightly in the space between conscious action and subconscious reenactment of the painterly moment.

(Me? I always preferred soft pastels and charcoal; I say “brushstrokes” because it’s simpler. In truth, I really dislike painting. I always found that the best art tools I have are attached to my wrists.)

I realized recently that for the past few years, something had changed. Too many years out of the habit of drawing and the accessibility of digital cameras has transformed me from someone who created elaborate mind-paintings to someone who thinks, I wish I had a camera. For the last half of this year, I’ve been trying to get back into regular practice of the fine arts (which, ironically, the collegiate study of had drained me of energy for). And I realized that it all starts with drawing.

Art students, art majors anyway, typically seem to despise drawing class. I mean, drawing your hand 100 times over the course of a semester does seem a bit like a waste of time, especially when it takes up so much time, and especially when your focus area is photography, or sculpture, or ceramics, or graphic design, or something other than, say painting. Painting realistic representational paintings. Back then, I inherently knew it was a fundamental skill, and didn’t so much mind drawing class because I was always good at it. But I was still bored by it, and I still thought those three hours every Tuesday night could be better spent (which is not to mention the hurried hours working on out-of-class assignments).

I understand it now though. Practicing drawing isn’t so much about the act of drawing as it is about the act of observation. No matter how much technical skill you have, if you don’t look, you won’t see. So it stands to reason that the best way to get back into the habit of artistic observation — and to therefore develop a perspective, a voice, on which to base future works of art — is to practice drawing.

I decided that I’ve soaked up enough imagery and it’s time to be brave enough to let some of it spill back out. I filled up the first page of a new sketchbook with an impression of some of the subdued scenery I’ve been enjoying lately. Just a modest sketch, quick, unpolished, mediocre, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a place I’ve traveled past nearly every day for the past five years, and every day four months of the year for four years before that, and I know the landscape well. Today, though, I decided to see it.