I have begun writing a book about drawing. This post includes a very rough, first draft of an early portion of the book, which is why one part of the text below refers to “this book.” In the current outline, this section is one of ten parts. Reader comments and suggestions are most welcome.

It’s challenging to describe the process of seeing. It’s hard to capture the interest. The perception is experiential. The connection is hard to put into words. But I aim to try. I may edit the material at this same post as I get new ideas for its rewriting. The illustrations are provisional.

The natural beginning of drawing is the desire to do it. You have looked around at the world of visual things and learned that you want to make pictures of the phenomena you see. Maybe the desire arose because of drawings that you have seen that you love. These drawings prompted a desire to make your own drawings. The meditations that follow will get behind desire and lead into observation and description. These writings are not about technique. So many such books exist already, and while it is perfectly fine to create yet another book on technique; this one leaves all technical questions unanswered. My focus will be simply perception and the unfolding thoughts that arise while looking at things with a pencil in hand.

If you were drawing for the first time, where should you begin? Your notion of what a thing looks like might suggest that you begin “here” rather than “there.” You’ve probably heard that in drawing a face you begin with an oval. An oval generalizes the shape of the face into one simple element. It’s a good beginning. However, you could as readily start by describing the contours of a face and then you really have to begin that linear path somewhere. Should you start with the brow, or the shape of the left eye, or the bridge of the nose, and so on? The pencil has to drop onto the paper and begin a line somewhere. What I am counseling now as a form of meditation is to let go even of the choice, to allow intuition or some hunch to direct the first motions so that you find yourself simply looking at something (it could be a face or could be something else). You just begin where you begin. It doesn’t even matter.

You pick a beginning point and then let the pencil describe lines that you see as you see them. When you notice something next, you draw that. You follow a series of perceptions and each one finds expression on this page in a sequence of time that is not logical but which is temporal. It is what you noticed. That was the order. Your pencil lines follow lines that seem to occur in the scene — the edges of objects or the lines that mark visual contrasts of one sort or another.

On my table sits a blue pedestal dish, a compotier. I found it in a thrift store and it has been my delight. I have loved the compotier as a form since encountering this type of bowl in the paintings of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and others. I wanted to find one myself (and now I have several of different design). The blue glass compotier is a favorite because its shape is lovely and also because the fruits that you put inside it are colored by the blue glass which adds an enjoyable element of complexity to the image.

Right now, my blue bowl has bright colored, artificial fruits sitting inside it.

I can draw the same arrangement whenever I want since the fruit isn’t real and only gets a bit dusty but otherwise doesn’t change. Only the light changes. Of course, changing light changes everything. It’s not for avoidance of change that I use the artificial fruits. Real fruits are lovely, but then I would have to create precise times for drawing because fruit spoils; whereas this bowl is always available, always ready to look at and draw. If you want to draw suddenly, spontaneously, having something prearranged is helpful. But everything that I say could be applied to anything that you see — whether it is steady and solid, or whether it is moving and ephemeral.

I always seem to start with the largest fruit, drawing it as a loosely circular shape and then I begin indicating its relationship to the bowl. The edge of this bowl follows a series of curves that are decorated with little “tear drops” in each place where two curves intersect. I draw those curves as they pass in front of the large fruit — which is supposed to be a pomegranate, but which could as easily seem to be an apple. Next to the pomegranate, a fake bright yellow lemon rests in the bowl. Its color is greener and darker where visible inside the bowl and is brighter and more yellow where it rises above the bowl’s edges. There’s a gap between the lemon and the pomegranate. These gaps between things are often the most beautiful elements of seeing. At these gaps we are not looking at “things” anymore. We see what in art is called the “negative space.” The gaps are composed of somewhat random parts of objects.

In the case of this fruit bowl, in the gap between pomegranate and lemon, part of a pear is visible under and mostly covered by the fruits around it. The bottom contour of the pear appears through the glass. Its edges lie below the pomegranate and the lemon. The pear is dark, shadowed by its surroundings, its edges, softened by the glass. Not all edges are equally crisp. You notice that some edges fuse into adjacent colors. You are aware of light diminishing next to the lemon. Only in one place is the pear lit even a little, where its surface curves out and catches a faint glow.

As I look notice these effects that lack names. I draw in a meditative way. I am not in any hurry. I have an eraser to use if there’s any stray line that seems to interfere with my ideas as I go forward. But since I am not insistent about accuracy, I leave most of the preliminary lines exactly where they fell. I only change them if they seem to confuse my next decision. As I notice shapes, I put them down. In this instance I am using color, so I place the local color with similar directness and immediacy. If I were using only pencil, then instead of noticing color, I would think about the variations between dark and light. (1,016 words)

These are visual thoughts. I don’t worry about any need to be correct. I do want the observations to be true. I draw what I thought I saw. That’s important to me. If what I thought I saw doesn’t look like the actual objects that will be interesting in its own way. Then I can compare — meditatively — the drawing and its subject and can ask myself what differences are evident.

The large pomegranate looks dark and almost brownish. I make it redder because I just want to. Some green grapes drape over the other fruits. I generalize the group of grapes as chiefly one shape. Later I will draw some individual grapes. They are confusing if I try to draw the individual grapes. But I try to draw some of them anyway. One the rightside edge part of an apple appears as a curve behind and beside the pomegranate. Only a sliver can be seen, like a red sliver moon. The contour touches the right rim of the bowl, creating another of those “gaps” where complex bits of visual effect occurs. The bottom of the apple is also visible underneath the pomegranate, darkened by the blue of the glass. Parts of the bowl interior are empty. They are variations on the color blue. In some places they are lighter or darker, warmer or cooler. The bottom edge is darker than the rest and that darkness is easily drawn as thick contour: inside that thickness the darkness diminishes into a softened effect. The diminishing darkness is like the diminishing sound of a bell.

I can render edges as lines and allow them to be ideas — ideas about the boundaries of objects and ideas about shapes on a page. Or I can imitate the light effects I see and have parts that are dark and firm or diminished and softened. I have lots of choices about what I notice and how I decide to imitate it. These observations and choices I decide to make intuitively. I am in no hurry. I decide as I go. I have lots of time to look at the object in front of me. As I look, I discover a jewel-like aspect of reality: that wherever you look, the deeper you look, the more you see. Each corner of the visual world is filled with light and sensation. Each interior gives way to more incident. There is always more to see than you can describe.

Certain kinds of drawing or painting instruction teach ways that you can generalize what you see so that you create one kind of facsimile. You learn techniques for imitating the visual effects, and can sometimes imitate so well, that the thing seems to sit there on the page. All that is wonderful. But throughout this book, we are using drawing differently. We are using drawing as a way of noticing things that we see, including some things that might be too difficult to draw (or too difficult right now at one’s level of observation). We are drawing them anyway. We draw them to increase our notice of them. We draw them to deepen our experience of them. When we stay with the drawing, trusting a process. We will create some drawings that we’ll enjoy. But we are not doing the drawings for that purpose either — not yet. And we don’t necessarily ever have to draw with a preconceived plan if we decide that we love this journey. Those are future oriented choices, and the drawing is only about the drawing that you are making right now.

How am I most aware that I have “started anywhere”?

By doing the same drawing again and now beginning in a new place. If I began with the shape of the pomegranate in the first drawing, now I begin with the lemon — or with the grapes that drape over everything — or with part of the shape of the bowl. Or I can even begin with the “gap” — I can draw the pear first, that which I cannot fully see, drawing only the part. I can choose any random feature of the scene and begin observing there. It can seem very counterproductive to start this way because you lose some of the sense of the thingness of the thing. A parabolic area of murky gray-green is cognitively different from a partly visible pear. Perhaps sometimes I even lose track of what I am drawing and see only colors and shapes.

When I begin with the pomegranate I can tell myself it is round. If I begin with one of the gaps — the bits of light, shape and color that are parts of some object that is mostly hidden — then I am not describing any “thing” — I am instead describing percepts. This color that I see seems to have this shape. It appears thus dark or thus light. The thing is gone. Drawing the perceptions that are detached from identifiable things allows you to notice the entire scene in a new way. This reframing of the experience helps us into the meditative aspect. Because I am just looking and just recording, it doesn’t matter what the things are. If I were to visually describe the perceptions in my drawing with great accuracy, of course, all the “things” will seem to rematerialize. But before we let lose such ambitions, it’s wise first to merely notice what you notice. Whatever happens on the page, we’ll just call that the drawing.

So, in order to learn how to “begin anywhere,” it is helpful to do more than one drawing. In the first drawing I start in one spot and in the second drawing I start somewhere else. Then I can afterwards compare the two drawings not only with their subject but with each other. I can note how I saw things differently (or perhaps I saw them in fundamentally the same way) even though I began the drawings from different initial observations.

This is the essence of beginning anywhere. The process starts somewhat randomly. No conventions intrude. No particular order gets imposed, but instead the image is allowed to emerge.

The beginning has temporal depth. An experience unfolds. When we “begin anywhere” we challenge our preconceptions about what we’re seeing. We are taking the image apart and putting it back together again conceptually. If each time we start from a new place, we reorganize the ideas. Each iteration forces one to think about ensemble in a new fashion. And since the visual reality is densely complex, there will always be more to see, not less. In any moment there is more reality sitting in front of the artist than he can possibly record. This fact is wonderful.

The reality is wealthy, and we can dip into its riches whenever we please. (additional 1,140 words)