Drawn to Life
It’s one of my earliest memories and a frustrating one as well. I remember as a four-year-old, walking with my mother in a department store one particular day. A small figurine for sale caught my attention and I found it beautiful. But I was penniless at that age, and my mother was understandably more concerned with other important things to buy. I was determined, however, that if I couldn’t own this small treasure, I would draw it. And therefore preserve its beauty forever. Back home at my desk, I set out to accomplish this. After a short while, I abandoned my pencil and paper. I don’t remember the moment I learned to draw but I do remember the days when I couldn’t. This day happened to be one of those. I was so disappointed that the memory had to stay hidden in my head, invisible to my pencil and paper. Drawing seemed impossible. It seemed like magic. And I did not possess the powers yet.
The wish for the magic
Have you ever seen something incredibly beautiful and then wanted so badly to be a part of it? I used to sit cross-legged between the bookshelves in the library, looking through colorful children’s books and wishing so hard that I could jump right into the page. A following wish? To make the page myself. In her many seasons, life has an array of beauty to it. But It’s more than what we see. It’s also filled with what we hope for, what we feel, and what we remember. These invisible things can all find their way to the surface when our hand connects to a pencil and then connects to the paper. The master artist, Andrew Loomis, described the process as “vision on paper.” But exactly how does expressing this vision happen? “Magic, of course”, we tell ourselves. And so we begin.
The effort of an illusion
But the sooner we dig into practicing and learning, the sooner we realize that we are not magicians. That first struggle as a four-year-old was only a precedent for many more hours of hard work to create beauty. Thankfully, with good teaching and effective practice, enough progress lights the path and persuades us to keep going. But the path doesn’t always get easier. Just when I thought I had crossed into the world of making decent drawings, I went to college. There, I sat in classes that discussed design, anatomy, perspective, and form, and realized there was far, far more to learn. Drawing, my teachers explained, involved creating an illusion of a 3-dimensional object on a 2-dimensional surface. An illusion. I could relate to that. At times, drawing looked harder than it actually was. Other times, it gave the illusion of being easier.
And over time, my understanding of the drawing process deepened. I too learned how to create these 3-dimensional illusions. Someone might see the many class hours, filled sketchbooks, and completed projects and assume the goal is learning how to create what we love and to make it look deceptively effortless. And they would be right. But not entirely. Something else is actually happening here as well.
The reward for the journey
Each attempt is a step, and those add up after a while. They become a journey. And while our destination may be to reach a certain skill, there’s also a second reward taking shape. Our endeavors may not always take a straight path. In fact, they may remind us of our crooked, first attempts at creating a line on paper. But the pencil moved after all, and so do we. When we see beauty and strive to recreate it, we build sensitivity. We build resilience. We build excellence. These small seeds take root and grow into a meaningful perspective of life. It changes us. And when we grasp a deeper honesty of the world, in all of her glory and struggle, we feel an incredible desire to express it. This changes others. It’s an amazing, never-ending process. We aren’t magical creatures (sorry to remind you again), but the process of growth is full of wonder. So, if the memory needs to be preserved, if the feeling wants to be expressed, and if the idea begs to be constructed, then return to that pencil and paper and try again. And wherever this journey takes you, I am sure that the world will see things once invisible and hidden inside of you drawn to life.
Mentioned in this article:
Loomis, Andrew, Successful Drawing (London: Chapman and Hall, 1952) pg.4.