Drawing With Your Inner Sense

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Are You Drawing With Your Inner Sense

In abstract form and color—that is, form and color unconnected with natural appearances—there is an emotional power in drawing, such as there is in music, the sounds of which have no direct connection with anything in nature, but only with that mysterious sense we have, the sense of Harmony, Beauty, or Rhythm (all three but different aspects of the same thing).

This inner sense is a very remarkable fact, and will be found to some extent in all, certainly all civilized, races. And when the art of a remote people like the Chinese and Japanese is understood, our senses of harmony are found to be wonderfully in agreement. Despite the fact that their art has developed on lines widely different from our own, nonetheless, when the surprise at its newness has worn off and we begin to understand it, we find it conforms to very much the same sense of harmony.

But apart from the feelings connected directly with the means of expression, there appears to be much in common between all the arts like drawing in their most profound expression; there seems to be a common center in our inner life that they all appeal to.

Possibly at this center are the great primitive emotions common to all men. The religious group, the deep awe and reverence men feel when contemplating the great mystery of the Universe and their own littleness in the face of its vastness—the desire to correspond and develop relationship with the something outside themselves that is felt to be behind and through all things.

Then there are those connected with the joy of life, the throbbing of the great life spirit, the gladness of being, the desire of the sexes; and also those connected with the sadness and mystery of death and decay, &c. The technical side of a drawing art is, however, not concerned with these deeper motives but with the things of sense through which they find expression; in the case of drawing, the visible universe. The drawing artist is capable of being stimulated to artistic expression by all things seen, no matter what; to him nothing comes amiss. Great pictures have been made of beautiful people in beautiful clothes and of squalid people in ugly clothes, of beautiful architectural buildings and the ugly hovels of the poor.

And the same painter who painted the Alps painted the Great Western Railway. The visible world is to the drawing artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at times revealing to him the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all things.

He has a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a “still, small voice” which he is impelled to interpret to man. It is the expression of this all-pervading inner significance that I think we recognize as beauty, and that prompted Keats to say: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
And hence it is that the love of truth and the love of beauty can exist together in the work of the drawing artist. The search for this inner truth is the search for beauty.

People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture drawing of one, and say that the drawing artist has idealized it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view of things.

Timothy Eller

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