As
the blog goes into its second month I begin to think that drawing and
writing are in different orbits and can never quite meet. Sometimes
they come close but there’s a final barrier, something to do with the
laws of nature, a visual/verbal divide. They can enrich each other but
cannot replace or explain each other.
I
like this idea. It gives me a sense of a deep natural cause or genesis
for all the arts. Most likely it’s an old idea, but to me it’s new and
it arises from my own experience, what I have seen and touched and
otherwise felt with my senses.
Furthermore,
through drawing, I’ve been able to add a sixth sense to the usual list
of five, the sixth being a sense of balance. By this I don’t mean the
medically well-known “position” sense, whereby when our eyes are closed
we can tell which way up we are, and where our limbs are in space.
Instead I mean the ability to tell when something outside ourselves is
in or out of balance. I don’t know where this “sense” resides
anatomically, but I can feel it best by standing well back and wiggling
the lower mid-section of my body while looking intently at the thing
where I’m doubtful of the balance, e.g. an object or figure in a
painting – to study whether it’s in danger of toppling over.
Law-of-gravity
balance is one of the first things I notice in art. That’s just the way
it is. The last three posts all have balanced figures (Sabrina
Charran's nude, my "Man with camera at beach", and Anna Serrao's
figure), though I didn’t pick them for that reason, it just happened.
And I can’t explain in words what it is about the drawings that gives
the figures their balance, only that it is so. Who knows to what extent
this undocumented sense of balance feeds into our intuitive response to
drawings and paintings, and into the aesthetic response in general?
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