I’ve been drawing, slowly and doubtfully, for 10 minutes each day, sometimes out-of-doors during my workday lunch hour and sometimes indoors at home. My hand is uncertain. Tracking the fast and greedy path of my eyes I rashly push the pen at silly angles, lapse into reductive approximations of the world’s subtle face. Then, shedding hurry, my mind coils and clings like smoke, enfolding details and obscuring the larger relationships of part to part to whole. As I draw I grieve, a little, for the truth.
My students this year have not yet come into their own as makers of drawings. (I can’t settle on a good word for the makers of drawings – draughtschildren? Drawers is too unruly a homograph.) At least in their classroom work, they have been slow to arrive at schema and only a few have burst, spontaneously, into figuration. I’m impatient on behalf of their work as well as on behalf of my own. Impatient, stubborn, eager, focused.
In my own drawing I am ensnared in the problem of leaving spaces where something is going to be, something important that will lie on top of (or stand ahead of) everything else, preceded by and taking precedence over all. As I draw I worry how to keep the paper clear for the upper, last lines. I draw the curve of a plate and interrupt it, somewhat arbitrarily, where I think a knife should be drawn lying across it. I draw the knife and find the space between its tip and a tilted bowl is now inadequate. One arm of a bicycle’s fork fails to mirror its opposite arm from the other side of the tire, rim, and spokes. Drawing the heavy, squared off links of a chain as they enter and emerge from one another is compelling agony. I make countless distortions which feel, nonetheless, very true to my life: distortion is central to the problem of trying to leave space for interdependent things. For many years I left space in my life to make paintings or, later, to write even though I was not painting or, later, writing. I left space for men who did not occupy it. In my drawing and my life a bold outline (or through-line) does not emerge from my habitual “minutiae-first” approach. I recoil from making an overarching plan – in my efficiency I might exclude or I might fail to see a most precious detail or, worse yet, might miss the turnings of my destined path.
I have one student this year who has a particular fear of drawing, of setting down any line whether bold (capturing) or tentative (meandering.) On Wednesday as I set up a transition from our mid-morning meeting into a small-group drawing activity, Hiroki wilted at the edge of the rug. “I don’t want to do drawing,” he urgently, tearfully informed me. I spoke to the whole group. “Sometimes it feels very hard to do a drawing, sometimes it feels like you can’t draw what you want it to look like. I think drawing sometimes makes Hiroki feel worried. I will help you Hiroki. Come sit with me.” My day is full of these sorts of speeches or scripts: emphatic and containing. There are many times during the day when I tell a child what he is feeling and say that I will help. Sometimes I may be impinging on the experience of the child, sometimes I cast a ray of understanding and relief into their discomfort. With Hiroki, that day, I did a bit of both.
We sat together at a table with other children, all of them happily, busily making drawings about the holidays just passed and a recent visit from one child’s mother. Hiroki sat with arms limp at his sides. “I think I’ll draw a present,” I said. I uncapped a green marker and began making a loosely looping line, piling nested ellipses in a tangled, roughly square mass. “There,” I said, a note of satisfaction in my voice, “Hiroki, you can add a bow if you want to.” He sat, tears trembling on the sills of his eyes. The other children at the table clamored to show me their work and I busily noted their captions in small block letters, penciling names and the date on the drawing’s reverse. I glanced at Hiroki and found he had made a fat blue scrawl on the corner of my ‘present.’ He was happy when I acknowledged his blue bow and went on, straight-away, to get more paper from the basket on a nearby shelf and make a second drawing of two bells (tremulous, barely closed forms...with large looping 'clappers') surrounded by scores of stabbed dots. He had drawn, had broken the spell of worry; he could live again!
Later that day I wished I had just invited him to draw what a sound sounds like, or a flavor tastes like, something no one has seen before; a place to start from which any endpoint could and would be a success. I feel so strongly his anxiety, rooted in apprehension about ill-defined but absolute notions of goodness, badness, and perfection. It is these concerns which urge me to hesitate, to leave spaces for things, to come back later and hesitate still more, to live important parts of my life in discontinuous ribbons of what is, what is not yet, and what is, finally, never going to be.
On Friday, though, Hiroki came without hesitation when I invited him to work with me on a drawing of a train he was playing with, Spencer, from the Thomas the Tank Engine pantheon. “What shape is Spencer?” I asked, knowing Hiroki, in all his cognitive splendor, would feel confident answering, “Rectangle!” “Yes, let’s make a rectangle,” I said. I traced my finger along the paper and Hiroki dragged a line along behind, his hand gripping the middle of the pencil in a uniquely inefficient way. With happy intensity he slid the pencil, with little control, and yet, detail by detail (circles for the wheels, circles for Spencer’s face and eyes) the image of a little toy train car did emerge, did surge forward on the page. “You drew Spencer!” I said. “Can I show it to my mommy?” Hiroki asked. He choked it into the pocket of his classroom mail box and went back to his play and I felt, I feel, a little dawning optimism in him – a little love for himself that will tide him over until mommy arrives to confirm and reflect his goodness.
For the developmental psychologist, at least, children’s symbolic representations are thought to have their origins, first, in relationship, in early positive human attachment, in love. I find it good to believe that representation arises from love, from feeling secure in love…but not entirely secure, needing to create a manifestation of that love, a ‘transitional object’ that represents the beloved (or ‘caregiver’ in the parlance of early childhood educators) in her/his absence. Children who solve the problem of separation symbolically can go on to create an ever more sophisticated range of symbols, whether they are pretend enactments, drawings, constructions.
What if my writing, my teaching, my drawing is fed by, and echoes with, all the sorts of love I have absorbed? Slow and doubtful as I am in my drawings, I could find my way through them, sometimes, to a quiet not-being-worried-and-in-fact-being-loved that is just as true and worthy of my notice as the graceful angles of every thing I have not yet found my way to represent.
