drawing is still writing
I want to begin our session by sharing a reflection I wrote. It’s a debrief of notes about the book when I was reading it again. This debrief is also important for me to share because it helps to give a bit of context as well about my curiosity with drawing and how my inquiry into this medium continues to be moulded and expanded through a visual and a text-based form.
I want to highlight that throughout you will hear me use this word – compilation- a lot, because it’s a word that seems to reaffirm a habit that I have of collecting things and somehow, I enjoy knowing that these things that are accumulating can also be alternated, reused and changed. And, a lot of what is in this book is a collection of 1 of 1 drawing, thinking gaps, fragments of prose, descriptions, a poster and some maps. I have also developed a preference with the word inquiry over research. Particularly because an inquiry leaves a gap for uncertainty before certainty, trial and error and flexibility than the latter which for me feels more streamlined and stricter in its requirements.
As I sit with the copy of this book in my hand, I am taken back to the origin of my drawing practice, a period where I felt as if though my drawings were speculations. The last few weeks leading up to this moment, I have been reading my copy as if though I was engaging with it for the first time. My copy now looks exhausted and the corners are starting to bend in.
As we prepare to get into this expanded idea of a reading and drawing session, I want us to be guided by the following prompts:
“Draw from life
Instantly and
Immediately…”
Since interacting with this book, it has become a resource for when I forget to create an outline, a trace, or a highlight about things that matter in the moment.
It is an invitation that is about proposing an alternative format for engaging and making a drawing.
For me, the idea of drawing is about balancing a perspective of looking out, with looking in. it has become about locating the practice of drawing as a practice that could teach us how to be aware of oneself in relation to the spaces we are in when we are drawn to something – we are attracted to it or when we draw from it- which is to imply that it somehow influences us. When we draw – we take in. replenish.
I must warn you that a lot of how I am thinking about drawing is partly from a sentimental rhetoric, but I am one who does not mind because there’s something beautiful in being able to romanticise the things we desire and to document it on a piece of paper for assurance or a personal affirmation that the thing we want could be real or possible.
The journey of Drawing Is Still Writing comes from a place of wanting to create a book about this medium. This compilation is a kind of proposal towards an expanded imagination around how we speak, think, read and make drawings without discarding some of its traditional conventions and practices. For those who are new to my work, I am an artist and I am also a writer and I fuse both practices together in my work to create alternative worlds. The two become extensions of each other by mimicking this idea of filling in the gaps.
Another reason why it was important for me to make this book is because I was also interested in the ways of archiving a practice that I have been cultivating slowly in the last 5 years, even though I’d been pacing myself in the arts industry for a bit longer.
My inquiry into drawing is what roots my curiosity and imagination. It is a place holder for moments of vulnerability when words aren’t enough to express an intense feeling in the present moment. It has also rooted fragments of my own mark making language that is continuously growing.
Drawing is Still Writing is another format where layers of my doubts, curiosity, talking to myself, propositions and opinions – some that I have not always been confident to share - are contained within these pages. To ground the medium on a more inward note, the drawings in the book are attempts at being confident. They are visual articulations, a slowing down of a thought process and when it moves again rapidly. The drawings are not just conversations that I am having alone anymore, the textures draw me in as a reader to interact, retrace! to follow a guiding line. To go back to the basics when I’m lost in the rabbit hole.
A Visual Choreography and a Visual reconfiguration. Restoration.
Drawing has guided me to reset, self-define and to self-actualise in no specific order as I gradually started to learn again how to find my way.
What’s come out of this inquiry is that “I am not interested in the performance of holding a pen, pencil or charcoal but I am more interested in the action that takes place when we observe, listen and translate.
I am interested in observations that happen inward and outwardly while we draw. My inquiry is merely an act of looking deeply to propose an alternative structure for cultivating new imaginations.
It is an instinctively tactile curriculum. Practice in Seeing differently. Listening with curiosity, feeling and responding. It is an attempt at humanising a practice. Pausing, again – while granting permission to finish a thought in a visual form. To affirm a creativity. To describe using a visual language.
By gathering together, today’s event is really an invitation into gathering differently together as I quote my publisher Francis Burger- and we will be drawing differently together as we facilitate this session.
As I conclude, I want to share a list of what drawing has taught me about learning to describe things with images.
1. That it is an Illustration
2. Its Clues
3. Its A notebook
4. An impression
5. An unravelling of suppressed and compressed opinions and suggestions
6. Its dada
7. Its cryptic/coded
8. Its unending
9. It’s a guide
10. Its reassurance
11. An existential mapping about the everyday, how drawing was never separate from our daily routines. Whether you are signing something, or playing the lotto. It’s A text-based print of your parking ticket.
12. They are affirmations of ideas and interactions
13. Its textural
14. The blank page is a space for defying expectations when one is being asked what is this about?
15. It’s a practice into translating the thing that is being looked at without thinking too hard about it.
16. It calls us to be present. to be more aware. To familiarise.
17. We are outlining the detail and filling it in.
18. It’s an imprint on that piece of wooden furniture. A mistake you may need to sand away.
19. Drawing is about finding a way.
20. It’s about Being present
Fin.
