DON’T ASSUME FORM

When you draw, don’t assume form. Don’t assume that you understand a holistic form unless you draw it entirely.

Let’s say you want to draw a human head. In every how to draw book, they tell you to draw, with a light line, a sphere or ovoid first. Note that they don’t tell you to draw a circle or an oval: they tell you to draw a holistic, elemental form. Then, over that, you are told to draw, opaquely, maybe 1.5 eyes, 2/3 of a nose, one ear, etc. At that point, all is lost.

We are culturally conditioned to think that we get the holistic form. Think of a human head again. If your drawing shows one ear, then you think you understand that there is another one, directly behind. Yet that other ear is a bifurcated opposite. It looks nothing like the other ear. Ever try to draw an ear as if you are looking at it from the inside of your head?

You might say to yourself, well, why would I ever want to draw an ear from the inside looking out? But aren’t you curious about how the ear works in this direction? Might this give a knowledge of form that you have never thought about before? Might this produce a set of marks on your paper that, because you are on a new pathway, triggers associations that are fresh to you? Could this serve as a welcome creative nudge?

A holistic form is incredibly fascinating. There is an interplay of the elements. Think about the interplay of two human ears: their motion and workings are opposite. There is a functional dialogue between the two. The only way to get at that understanding is to draw it. Simply saying, well, there is another ear on the other side, and it looks just like this one, is completely false. You assume you understand it, but you really don’t.

Why do we not work toward transcendent harmonious knowledge? And a corollary question is, why the automatic shift from form to representation? How can it be that you just immediately move to Representational Spacetime as an end state? Is drawing something, with the end goal of depicting how it looks, really the best use of your time?

You can’t know it if you don’t draw what you can’t see. Knowledge of form cannot be assumed. A holistic drawing of a form as an end state encodes the greatest knowledge. And that is principally because the drawing encodes time.