Hallo Jim Dawkins
The way you formulated your dissociation around the drawing process inspire me to write this text. While talking poetically about a reality that is as intangible as the wind, you write about the relationship to your own work. You compare the relation to something that resembles the alliance to your best friend and you use metaphors pointing towards materiality as flesh and bones, steaks and potato puree. This also provides associations with different consistency of materiality as mass. It was also interesting the metaphor of the “Metacognitive struggle with the rabbit hole.” The rabbit lives in materiality per se, in tunnels that nobody can control, in the earth’s interior. Here we touch a fundamental driving force in drawing namely “desire”, the source that give the drawn line its energy. You never know when or where the rabbit runs away dependent only of the desire principle or its inhibition. The verbal dialog, inner or outer, that offer a semblance of connection (bridge or link) between the artist thinking and the drawing itself is in my opinion not compatible with the bodily consciousness that belong in the gap, which opens up the space in between “cognitive thinking” and “graphic expression”.
This bodily consciousness condition eludes the ego that become absent, as a conscious control authority of the drawing process. Absent in such a way, but totally present in the body awareness to the surrounding. The unarticulated (in linguistics terms) dialogue that occurs then with the body is nonverbal, dumb and blind .It happens beyond the five senses records of the outer world and is rooted in the sensitive materiality of the body likewise in its coupling with the outer world. Simply put, the “motivational” visual stimuli, like landscape, object, body etc.,have to be answered with a “motivated” gestural action. It is the act of drawing itself, as continuous loop of visual motor integration of outer and inner stimuli. It is through the movement that this gesture will give access to memory and embodied sensorimotor knowledge collected through life experience.
Christian Montarou, March 2015, Norway.
Jim’s post, which this was a response to (see below), said:
Jim Dawkins, Global Circle 3:
Love the images of gdc5 (Global Drawing Circle 5) you just posted. Attached is one from my sketchbook. My work is fairly ‘touchy feely’ – meat and bones or steak and potato stuff. I struggle with the metacognitive rabbit hole of drawing, such as the path the gdc5 drawings seem to blaze…making marks or drawing or sketching is more memory interpretation for me, a sort of expressive impressionism if you will, but not in the vein of Impressionism itself. I’m still working on what I do and why I do it. Perhaps it is just as simple as it looks.
Hope you have a great week!
I know there is some kind of bridge or link between my drawing and my thinking, and I can verbalize it on occasion. But that link isn’t a visual one just yet…if that makes sense. Expressing that link in a graphic manner eludes me. It is kind of like drawing the wind: I know it’s there, I just can’t put pen to paper in a manner that describes the phenomenon appropriately. Last year in NY I saw plenty of our group who seemed to have managed their way into that particular dimension of drawn thought expression. Those were moments when I totally felt a disassociation with my thinking and my drawing, or at least how to represent what I knew to be true in the space that separates (or joins) the two.
brewdrawingcircles 