Packing the Suitcases

I woke up this morning thinking about drawing.

The main idea, for some reason, was this: that in drawing, one must simultaneously keep in mind both the general and the specific---a sort of juggling process, one of many pairs of opposites which must be held in balance and reconciled as you proceed.

As you draw, you assume a god-like power of creation. You create small details, as well as the larger structures which those details fit into. Or to put it another way, you balance both the macro and the micro; keeping one eye on each, as it were, as you move along.

You must somehow become comfortable with both views of the world, and with the “world” which you create on paper, in order to succeed. However, everyone has a natural disposition, it seems, which can sometimes be obstructive; a tendency towards “detail thinking” or towards “structural thinking”.

If you forget about one, or obsess too much about the other, trouble often comes. Imbalance. That’s what I’ve found, looking back on pieces of artwork which I now see as failures. Too much detail, without enough creative effort first on the structure which holds it all together, and you get a rambling unfocused assemblage of pieces-but-no-glue. You emerge from a morass of details, step back and assess, and to your horror you realize: the thing’s not hanging together as a whole. Then you chop it, change it, wrap bandages, or even throw it out and start over, sadder but wiser…

And on the other hand, if the drawing has lots of structure---broad design thinking---but lacks in convincing detail, then it doesn’t “sell” itself to the audience; it’s never quite believable enough. It’s too general. And you arrive in a similar place: realizing that the thing’s just not working, not as well as it could. Perhaps this is an easier problem to fix than the first. You can add detail, sometimes, on top of a structure that works, but trying to retrofit the structure into a mass of unarranged details is an exercise in heartache.

It’s kind of like those Russian stacking dolls: the smaller ones will fit into the larger ones, but not the other way around. Or taken another way, it’s like packing your car’s trunk, or closet, with a group of suitcases of various sizes, and trying to have them all fit in: you learn to place the big ones first, then sequentially fit the smaller ones into the gaps left, until you’re done.

It’s common, and easy, to start with details, thinking of them first, losing ourselves in them. We first encounter life this way, as children. We don’t fly over the landscape as does a bird, and see the larger wholes, from afar, presented to us---we’re down on the street, moving along, we have to figure the bird’s-eye-view out for ourselves as we get older. In daily life we see an endless procession of details, all from our limited vantage point, and we sort through them looking for order and arrangement and meaning---looking for the larger structures.

In creating a drawing, it’s the same thing, just moving in the other direction: from the general to the specific.

It takes another kind of thinking, a sort of abstract vision, to perceive the larger structures at work behind the many details provided by the vision of our eyes. While drawing, one must balance both perceptions. This hidden aspect of drawing helps keep it endlessly fascinating.