The Science Of Drawing

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

We Use Drawing To Express Ourselves

Now the facts of life are conveyed by our senses to the consciousness within us, and stimulate the world of thought and feeling that constitutes our real life.

Thought and feeling are very intimately connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling. But there is this general division to be made, on one extreme of which is what we call pure intellect, and on the other pure feeling or emotion. The drawing arts, I take it, are a means of giving expression to the emotional side of this mental activity, intimately related as it often is to the more purely intellectual side.

The more sensual side of this feeling is perhaps its lowest, while the feelings associated with the intelligence, the little sensitiveness of perception that escape pure intellect, are possibly its noblest experiences. Pure intellect seeks to construct from the facts brought to our consciousness by the senses, an accurately measured world of phenomena, uncolored by the human equation in each of us.

It seeks to create a point of view outside the human standpoint, one more stable and accurate, unaffected by the ever-changing current of human life. It therefore invents mechanical instruments to do the measuring of our sense perceptions, as their records are more accurate than human observation unaided. But while in science observation is made much more effective by the use of mechanical instruments in registering facts, the facts with which art deals, being those of feeling, can only be recorded by the feeling instrument—man, and are entirely missed by any mechanically devised substitutes.

The artistic intelligence is not interested in things from this standpoint of mechanical accuracy, but in the effect of observation on the living consciousness—the sentient individual in each of us. The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of drawing artistic intelligences should be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific intelligences should be the same.
But besides the feelings connected with a wide range of experience, each drawing art has certain emotions belonging to the particular sense perceptions connected with it. That is to say, there are some that only music can convey: those connected with sound; others that only drawing,painting, sculpture, or architecture can convey: those connected with the form and color that they severally deal with.Practice drawing with your mind.

There Is More To Drawing Than Painting