Back to the Drawing Board

 

 

 

 

This is the most recent in a long line of pen-and-ink drawings I have done over the last fifteen or twenty years. I have a particular way of working that has evolved over time. Most of the drawings are done on Bristol paper, which has a very smooth surface that accepts a clean line, and doesn't tear up the tips of the Pigma Micron pens (usually .05 or .08) that I like because the ink dries quickly and is waterproof.

I find the process of drawing to be enjoyable, a way of centering myself. I most often listen to music, humming or singing along to myself while I am drawing. I begin by penciling in the rectangle that I'm going to work within. I used to do the drawing first and add the surrounding rectangle, afterwards, but discovered that it is prohibitively expensive to pay for mats and frames in custom sizes, so in recent years I pick a standard-sized mat, measure out the opening in the mat, and then draw very lightly in pencil the lines that will form the outer edges of the finished drawings.

I never have a plan laid out in advance when I draw, I just put the tip of the pen down on the paper and draw some kind of shape and fill it in, then do another next to that, and another next to that. I leave white space between each shape, and as I work the white space, the negative space, starts to assert itself as a compositional focus that often outweighs the shapes I have actually drawn. At some point I will draw straight lines, like the diagonals in the picture above, to subdivide the paper into sections. In terms of composition, my goal is to wind up with a some stylistic consistency within each section and stylistic variety from section to section. (In an earlier post I wrote a poem about how this process works.)

Obviously this drawing is not a literal representation of anything to be found it the world. It's more or less a pure abstraction, although inevitably some abstracted elements will wind up suggesting something to whoever looks at the drawing. While it's not unusual for people to tell me when they "see" something in the drawing, it is very unusual for that something to be anything I had consciously included. An example in this case is the small rectangular shape in the middle right of the picture which reads as perhaps a house or a face sitting atop something that might be read as a star. I find it interesting when those elements make their presence known as I draw, but I can't say that I have planned them. I accept them as pleasant surprises, or as evidence of my subconscious tossing up something I was not expecting and will not immediately—or perhaps ever—understand. Even the large flowery shape at the upper left emerged mostly because I was working to fill in the negative spaces left by the sixteen smaller shapes surrounding it. I was also consciously trying to introduce some semitones in the form of dots and thin lines to contrast with the more heavily contrasted black and white sections in the rest of the drawing. It became a plant form only by default.

I've had a lifelong interest in art, and have a large collection of books related to drawing and painting and collage. One of the things that satisfies me about the work that I have been doing is that there is nothing like it out there anywhere. There's some Zentangle stuff that I took an interest in for a while, but most of what I saw out there seemed to me to be over-structured and stylistically repetitive. This art is my art. Each time I sit down to draw it's an adventure of sorts, a process of exploration and observation. I enjoy making the drawing, and I enjoy studying the resulting artwork once it is made.

These kinds of drawings do not lend themselves to explanation. There's not much that I or anyone else could offer by way of paraphrase or summary. I could describe in words what goes on in my head when looking at any one section, or at the drawing as a whole, but that would be a pretty pointless exercise. They exist in a non-verbal plane.

Which is not to say that there are no parallels between what I am doing when I draw and what I am doing when I write poetry, or prose, for that matter. My writing practice is not unlike my drawing practice. Probably the most simple and elegant articulation of that process, whether working as an artist or as a writer, has been attributed to Jasper Johns: Do something. Then do something to that. Then do something to that.

I'm sure that there are some people, and you, Gentle Reader, may very well be one of them, who would question why any sane person, given the ongoing political and environmental chaos going on in the world and getting worse every day, would choose to spend his time producing hermetical drawings or often well-nigh incomprehensible poems. My response is pretty simple. There is little or nothing I can do at the personal level to deal with any of that stuff. I'm an old man. I do not see any reason to choose to spend the limited amount of time I have left on this planet tilting at windmills. My art, and my poetry, is something that gives me pleasure while I do it, and some small measure of satisfaction when it is done. Granted, the value that accrues from it does not have a positive impact on the world as it is. But it helps me to navigate and endure that world, for as long as I remain a part of it.

I'll bookend this post with the followup drawing I completed yesterday:

 

Intermezzo

            Sally Rooney has a large number of readers who enjoy and admire her work and an equally large (or perhaps larger) number of readers who dismiss her out of hand as a niche writer catering to GenXrs ("the Salinger of the Snapchat generation") by mirroring their romantic preoccupations. In his NY Times review of her latest novel, Intermezzo, Dwight Garner leads with an acknowledgment of the "Rooney backlash" before mounting a strong defense of the book. And so I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Dwight Garner, no stranger to snarky dismissiveness himself, in his assessment. Because Intermezzo, in my opinion, isn't just a good book, it's a terrific book, in pretty much every respect. It centers largely on five characters. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy. His brother Peter, ten years older, is a successful lawyer. They are both in mourning for the recent death of their father, and, from early on in the novel, they are both involved in complicated but utterly convincing relationships. Ivan falls deeply for Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties. Peter has a close relationship Sylvia, an ex-lover his own age with whom he still keeps in touch, but he is also involved with Naomi,  a younger woman who seems to be using him for her own purposes at the same that he uses her for his. In the process they manage, without necessarily intending to do so, to create something that feels very much—first to the reader, and then to the characters themselves—like love. Peter and Ivan have a different kind of complicated (and convincing) relationship, elements of fondness and love warring against elements of resentment and dismissiveness as they try to find their way toward one another.

 

            A summary of this kind perhaps makes it all sound like some kind of hipster soap opera. What saves it from being so is Rooney's uncanny ability to render the events of the story from inside the heads of each of her characters. I don't recall having read a book which so strongly conveys what it's like to be torn in three directions at once as one attempts to decide what to do in a particular situation. Here's an example in which Margaret, who has just met Ivan at a chess match at a venue where she was the hostess, offers to give him a ride back to his room. They are both aware that there is something in the air between them, but neither of them is possessed of the sophisticated social skills that more experienced (and perhaps more jaded) proto-lovers would use to gloss over the awkwardness. The paragraph serves the very straightforward narrative purpose of getting Ivan from point A to point B. But Rooney follows Margaret's thoughts very carefully as Margaret considers not only her own feelings in the moment, but Ivan's as well:

 

Outside, the car park is glowing with the skeletal orange light of the streetlamps, the paved surfaces dappled and glistening. She turns on her wipers and they click and scrape rhythmically over the windscreen. It happens all the time that she drives someone home like this, or drops them to the station, and they sit in the car together this way, chatting about something. It’s just work. And if Ivan doesn’t want to chat, if he wants to sit there looking at his hands and then looking at her and back at his hands again, that’s okay — he’s only twenty-two, and very gifted at one particular kind of board game, and after all there’s no formal etiquette for the situation. Finding yourself in the car of an older woman after a presumably strenuous public event, being driven to your accommodation with your little black suitcase, no one ever teaches you how to behave under such circumstances. If he wants to sit in silence, looking at his bitten fingernails, that’s alright, no problem. She, too, of course, is sitting in silence, and has nothing to say. They come off the main road and down onto the small lane to the holiday cottages, the gravel crunching noisily under the tyres of Margaret’s car. She has done nothing wrong, has done nothing at all, in fact, beyond what is required for the purpose of driving Ivan from the bar to the holiday village. If she made a little error in the conversation earlier, if she used one little dubious word or phrase, asking him what he was passionate about, that was excusable, even in a sense deniable, because subjective. She pulls up outside one of the houses, a white bungalow with peeling paint and darkened windows.

 

Later, as another example, we are inside Peter's head as he is driving to court and adjusting to the pharmaceuticals he has ingested. I love the way the scattershot syntax and time dislocations convey what he has done, what he is doing, what he is seeing, what he is thinking, and how it all plays out:

 

In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages. The point of law. To raise the question of. His briefcase then, bitter aftertaste, overcoat, and outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts. Feels the effects by the time he’s inside, dressing: slow serene feeling beginning in the hands and feet. Breathing settles. Thoughts grow orderly and sequential, facts arranged in place, stately procession of claims and counter-claims. That’s not actually recreational, Naomi told him once. Like, you can get a prescription if that’s what you’re using it for. Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

 

Yes, this is writing that places demands on you as a reader. But it offers extraordinary rewards as well. I felt, and feel, like I got to know these characters as well as I have ever gotten to know most any of the flesh-and-blood humans beings I have met in my life. And that's because when you are with an actual person, you can never know for sure what they are really thinking. But with Rooney, due to her extraordinary psychological insight and writerly control, you can. 

The complexities in a story like this inevitably make you wonder whether the plot will be plausibly satisfyingly resolved, and whether or not the trip will have been worth it. The answer to both questions is a resounding "Yes!" Rooney is no longer occupying the wing in my personal house of literature  associated with interesting contemporary writers. She's in the larger room at the back having tea with Jane Austen and George Eliot.