Drawing Impulses

Sensitivity and empathy are qualities that are essential for drawing. You will certainly have noticed and practiced this in the past impulses. This time I invite you to look at a field of lavender as an inspiration. A lavender field consists of many lavender bushes. We know these lavender fields from Provence in France. You’ll notice that the landscape is slightly hilly. Depending on your point of view, maybe you can see a patch of green in the background or a house that is all overgrown with green, which blends in with these lavender structures.

For this impulse I’d like to think further about the structures we can find in nature: the view on fields from above. At the latest when you‘re sitting in an airplane, but also when you‘re on top of a tower, a mountain or a tall house, you get an overview of the landscape – we all know this view of the countryside, of the fields. What do we notice there? First of all, the terrain is remarkable. Where you can find fields, most of the time it'll be a flat area, maybe with hills or small mountains. The flat or slightly hilly landscape allows the farmers a certain structure and method to cultivate them. Here there are great differences depending on which cultural area and which geographical area you’re in.

This time our drawing will be dedicated to animals. The dog, the cat, and the bird. It has a lot to do with your inner attitude, with your quality while drawing. Maybe this deeper level of drawing seems unimportant to you at first. But still these thoughts influence you when you’re drawing, and we absolutely need them. So, choose one of these animals. If you can't do anything with the dog, choose the cat. Or the bird that sings and warbles in the summer and whistles an evening song on the balcony for you every day.

This time I’d like to lure you into the realm of apples. A theme that starts in summer and continues into fall. The apple has a very extensive cultural history and an endless history in mythology, spirituality, and religion. There are countless tales about apples. The apple is very well known to us as a fruit. It probably originated in Asia, in the Caucasus, where apples were cultivated very early and produced a delicious fruit. The apple is always relevant. It’s very healthy, we all know the saying: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away". There’s an incredible number of varieties of apples, in the Alpine region alone there are over 150 different varieties. The Austrian Archduke Johann, the brother of Emperor Franz I, did a lot of development and modernization work in Styria in his time. He commissioned apple models of over 150 different apple varieties from a Berlin workshop. At that time, there were craftspeople dedicated to making models of apples and these models are so real and so beautiful that you’re under the impression you could bite into them, even when you’re holding them in your hand. Their weight, shape, color, and luster are exactly the same as in nature.

In the previous episodes we’ve thought in detail about the dot, and thus also about the round shape. In this exercise, we go a step further by considering what can fit into a circle. There’s a square in a circle. If we connect the four outermost poles within the circle with lines of equal length, it creates a square. You know the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, in which he draws the Vitruvian man in a circle and forms a square in the circle. With this Vitruvian man, the center of the circle is exactly where the navel is. Contrary, the center of the square is formed by the sexual organs of the Vitruvian man. In the translated meaning this signifies that the square is earthbound, because at its center is the procreation.

I want you to create your own sun, free from cliché and free from what you’ve already seen. Draw a sun from within. From within means that you feel into what is created on the drawing sheet by your hand. Then feel: Do you need long rays or short ones? Are these rays always in the same distance or in one that is a little different each ray? All these questions are very important. Depending on the position of your sun, you get a feel for the rays.

With the topic of nature and abstraction we have a wide field to plow. Apart from the study of nature and subsequently its abstraction, it touches very much on the metaphysical. When we speak of abstraction, we’re faced with a variety of definitions. This causes problems until today. Because what is abstraction? If we reach for the dictionary, we see: "Abstraction, Latin abstractus, removed. Or abstrahere, to drag away, remove, separate." Yet, we still have no idea what it means. Nevertheless, these terms are quite accurate, because when we talk about abstraction, we’re also constantly talking about reduction. It’s like saying, we leave out as much as we can while still achieving the greatest possible expression. In the process of abstraction, we leave things out to arrive at a generality. 

You’ve already solved the exercises about the elementary order in the two previous impulses and noticed that the basics of every composition, the fundamental questions of composition are practiced and empathized with these elementary orders. In this impulse I would like to go into a little more detail, with an exercise about the dot. Leonardo da Vinci says, "the beginning to the science of painting is the dot."

In the last episode I talked about elementary orders. They’re very important for the organization of the drawing or the picture and come with many possibilities to build on it further, because it refines the sensibility for the development of the picture. Where do the elements accumulate and what order results from that? If you think through and practice this exercise of order carefully, you will become more confident in the layout and distribution of the elements in the picture. In nature we can find those orders, too. From every form of nature geometric shapes can be derived, in different ways. In the previous exercise, you’ve already practiced the basic geometric shapes and how they can be distributed in a picture. Now you can deepen this and connect it with shapes of nature.

When distressing news from outside enter our mind, it’s always good to turn to art, to maneuver our thoughts into aesthetics and to deal with questions that seem to have nothing to do with our everyday life. And yet, these aesthetic questions are exactly what makes our life rich and fill it with joy. What brings us in contact with existential matters and lets us feel for ourselves what makes us human beings, our own beings. With your drawings you can understand this wonderfully and delve into these questions. Your drawings are like a warming ray of sunshine that you share with the world. When you look at a picture, a drawing or a painted picture, there’s a certain order in it. As soon as you put a sign on the sheet of paper with the pencil, you already have a contrast of light and dark. In the following I’ll speak assuming you work in black and white, but in certain ways it applies just the same if you take a colored pencil instead, because some colors work brighter and some darker.