Drawing Shapes
I recently have wanted to get back into using a sketchbook a bit more, and wanted to pair that with a bit of research on what online resources there are for drawing education. So, the other day I signed up for a course on online education website Domestika.org - Drawing for Beginners - Level 1 run by artist Puño. I know, I’m not a beginner - but I thought it would be interesting to see what happened.
In the first couple of lectures Puño was talking about his influences and inspirations and he started talking about Saul Steinberg and his Mask series, made famous by a collaboration with photographer Inge Morath (Morath and Steinberg 2000; Schuman 2018). The thing that really struck me about this work - about a lot of Steinberg’s work, actually - is how even though it has real depth and social commentary, it still feels joyful, playful, a little bit silly and a little bit serious. I think Steinberg would have understood plork if you described it to him.
Fig. 1 - Sketchbook drawing of avocado plant
Whilst continuing on the drawing course, I decided that if I wanted to draw more, I should set myself the task of drawing more. Perhaps it was a sketchbook page a day, perhaps more - I didn’t have a clear idea yet, but I knew that I should draw more. In the back of my head I had Corita’s assignments from Learning by Heart (draw the same tree for 100 days, that kind of thing), but I also had De Koven’s games for practicing playfulness, plus a general awareness that to do something better you have to practice it. That’s why it’s a drawing practice.
So I began to draw in my little sketchbook one of the plants in my room. And I was having absolutely no fun. I don’t know whether it was because I was doing it as part of a course, or whether it was because I felt like I should be drawing more rather than wanting to, but I took very little pleasure in doing this drawing (Fig. 1). It didn’t feel particularly natural to me. Not work, exactly, but it definitely felt more like I was trying to draw rather than actually drawing.
So far, so frustrating. But what happened next was quite interesting. I was so annoyed with this practice of drawing - and, in a way, with the course I was taking - that I sat down at my drawing desk and thought “no, I’m going to draw what I want to draw”. And I did. I got my chunky pens, my graffiti markers and my pencils out and began to draw…nothing in particular. I started with basic shapes lines, patterns, and when I felt one was finished set it aside and moved onto the next one. And I realised I had really started to enjoy myself, and in doing so I was producing work that I actually liked. Even the drawings that weren’t particularly aesthetically pleasing felt like they had value - they were, to an extent, failures, and yet they weren’t because I couldn’t possibly fail in this practice.
Fig. 2 - 4 days of drawing and an old painting
Fig. 3 - Closeup of some of the drawings (I’m going to take some nice shots under a rostrum when the project is further along)
This wasn’t an entirely new way of working for me. During the pandemic I started painting (having never painted before) and enjoyed combining random shapes, lines, colours and patterns in an almost street-art-inspired style. The shapes themselves are based on a series of toy blocks - rudimentary shapes such as squares, circles, triangles, bridge-shapes. This work was originally inspired by the work of Mike Perry , but quickly developed into my own way of working as I embraced more of the randomness and colour that gave me aesthetic pleasure. However, the drawings felt new, fresh, having set myself an internal understanding that they could be produced quickly only featuring a few shapes.
Whilst drawing I started thinking about shapes, and shapes as symbols, and what one could interpret them as. Which led me down a path of thinking about card games, and what would happen if you had a game with no rules - would people be able to make up their own rules? I decided to stop what I was doing prior to drawing and follow this train of thought as I became excited, enthused, energised by the ideas that were coming my way thanks to this drawing practice. Instead of writing them down in a notebook or sketchbook, I jumped straight into designing a deck of cards with symbols on them (which I will only display an example of, Fig. 4, for IP reasons), even going so far as to ask a game designer friend of mine what he thought of the idea and if he had any feedback.
Fig. 4 - Work in progress card game
By engaging with a playful, pleasureable, productive activity (abstract drawing) I engaged my own playful attitude, which then drove me to be productive in ways I hadn’t conceived at the start of the process. And as De Koven points out, maybe that only came about because I was doing something unpleasurable to begin with, making work in a way I didn’t particularly want to be. Perhaps I had to get to what I previously called “the fuck it point” where I work on a project and go “ah fuck it” and do something I actually like instead. And on top of that, bubbling away underneath is my general personal desire to engage with playfulness - if I wasn’t open to the possibilities, I wouldn’t have engaged at all. As ever, playfulness and play are complicated, mercurial metaphysics.
But what I can say with some confidence is playfulness leads to more playfulness, which leads to good things. If nothing else, this little microcosm of creative practice proves to me the value of plork. It has inspired me to make this my new drawing practice - to take an unspecified amount of time (but around an hour) after lunch and produce some abstract drawings, with no pressure, over time producing what will for me be the largest body of consistent illustrated work I have ever produced - and not to worry what any of it looks like.
It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this has on my animation work - but for now, what I can say is that for the last few days I have been excited to draw, which has made me excited to make other things. I have scheduled time to plork, and I’m going to see where it goes.
References
Domestika [Online]. Available: https://www.domestika.org/en [Accessed 07-06-2023 2023].
DE KOVEN, B. L. 2014. A Playful Path. ETC Press 2014.
KENT, C. & STEWARD, J. 2008. Learning by heart, New York, Bantam Books.
MORATH, I. & STEINBERG, S. 2000. Saul Steinberg masquerade, New York, N.Y., Viking Studio.
PERRY, M. Unknown. Mike Perry Studio [Online]. Available: https://www.mikeperrystudio.com [Accessed 07-06-2023 2023].
SCHUMAN, A. 2018. The Mask Series: Inge Morath & Saul Steinberg. Magnum Photos [Online]. Available from: https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/inge-morath-saul-steinberg-masks/ [Accessed 07-06-2023 2023].