Taking a Dot for a Walk

Paul Klee: "A line is a dot that went for a walk."
William Stafford: "Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along."
Jasper Johns: "Do something, then do something to that, and then do something to that."

These are three drawings I worked on recently. All are pure explorations, drawn with my left (non-dominant) hand in order to add another layer of unpredictability to an already open-ended process. I'm considering whether to add color to either of two black-and-white pieces, and if so, what kind of color. But there's a presence to each of these drawings, arising from the movement of the lines, that I can respond to.

(The pictures are showing up pretty dark on the screen, for some reason.)

So here's the connection I've been thinking about and exploring. Drawing and writing are physiologically and intellectually similar activities. In most cases we are taught in our schools that there are rules to be followed and basics to be mastered before you can become an artist, or a writer. Little children, who love to draw and write before they are told that they don't know how to do it, grow into adults who have little or no use for art or for writing. Having to follow the rules in order to produce a predictable result based on someone else's idea of what that result should look like is not interesting, and it's certainly not much fun.

My inclination—and for those of you who are open to it, my recommendation—is to go back into the process in a pure spirit of play. Take up a pencil. Start drawing. Start writing. Push marks you make onto the paper. There will necessarily be a sequence of moves. Once you are doing any particular thing, you will continue doing it until you decide to do something else. First this. Then that. Then whatever comes next, like the man says.

That's exactly what I was doing as I was typing this paragraph, and it's the basically the same kind of exploration that I was conducting as I worked on these drawings: pushing the line (of words, of thoughts) into the white space in front of them. I wrote it the first draft on the fly. (The next morning I came back to tidy up.) But as I was writing I had no idea where we were going to wind up. But here we are. The moral of the story: trust the process.

At some point you can step back and review your work decide what is most interesting or worth pursuing. Some of what you write, perhaps a lot of what you write (or draw) won't be great. As Stafford says, of writing poetry, "A writer must write bad poems, as they come, among the better, and not scorn the "bad" ones. Finicky ways can dry up the sources." The first task is to get the lines on the page. Then you can begin to look at what might be worth extracting or reworking, or what might suggest a new beginning.

It is a practice. It's an exploration. As Stafford says in his indispensable essay "A Way of Writing," "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."