Images

Compelling images and scenes, worthy of notice, close examination, repeated contemplation, but of sketching?

In old sketchbooks there are dozens of faces, poses, buildings, scenes I've either drawn from life or copied, but recent work is sparse. What happened?  Hand, where is your eagerness to wield
the pencil or pen; eye, where is your fascination with form and flow? What was I after then, that I am not seeking today?

Here's what I found looking more closely:

Lots of ink drawings, sometimes highlighted with gray washes; little pencil work and not what I want to look at again.

I like outlines left empty or filled in general lines. Sometimes the sketches are freehand and loose, sometimes I'm after precision.


Faces, especially with an effort to capture expression or, especially, likeness. Several attempts, say, of the portrait (from bookjacket) of poet Andrew Young. Careful reproductions of photos: Silvio Berlusconi's smirk, for instance. Also, some copies of etchings by Maurice Sendak: beautiful to put the hand and eye to.

Photos from newspapers, poses, and poisings, especially of scenes including multiple people, say a clutch of girls with lacrosse sticks in full chase

Scenes from life of people, very difficult, because nobody holds still more than a few seconds. Any image is a composite of glimpses. Still, I sometimes get rough poses, single lines that express what I see going on.



At museums, paintings or, especially, scultpures are what I like. Here shading is a pleasure task. It may be that it's so easy to take pictures now on my phone, say, that I think I'll draw the scenes later, but don't.

Several roadside scenes of fields and roads and maybe mountains beyond. Very enticing, , say, a dune scene llike collard or umbel stalks like fennel.

Really seeing is not easy. A comprehensive glance is a snap, but an examination is hard work: actually resolving the components of what one sees and their relations with each other is exertion for eye and hand.

When thinking in my notebooks, my hands occupy themselves with doodles, but these never develop into somethimg. They seem interesting only as gestures.


Lots of these pictures are interesting now that I've forgotten what they were supposed to represent. Their failure to capture their scene is forgiven and their success at getting something is recognized.

These pictures always remain sketches, exercises in seeing and capturing or reproducing, not full, finished presentations, not designs, not diagrams. That suggests I'm after something else. What?

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An experiment: on each page of my notebook in a box in the middle of the page some kind of tiny drawing: a picture of a man from Salgado's Desert Hell, a cube, a goatee, the Brown sisters, Frederick Wiseman, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp--something.

Why?  Is it because every image is an expression of the potentiality, energy and power of something represented as well as that of the observer or conceiver? Is not the very existence of images an expression in some way of  the PEP of existence itself, its very livingness?

Points as places, lines as boundaries, surfaces as maps: all these are ways of exploring and acknowledging and appreciating, indeed encountering existence itself, the this/here/now

Is this what I've been looking for, hand, eyes?  You've been hungry to engage in ways beyond words--though not necessarily against words--and I've been carping: What's the point?  Where's the message?  So what? and other standard discouragements. Have we found a way to work together?