The Drawing of Thinking
The Future Is In Your Hands
My subtitle, The Future Is In Your Hands, was a tagline used in an ad at Sheridan College. Proving that context is everything it was above the urinals in the washroom. So, I’ll wipe (sorry) that image from your mind and suggest that a daily practice of drawing can change how you think.
Drawing as practice is not practicing drawing. I have put in my hours of observational drawing to get better at drawing from my imagination…to expand the IKEA catalogue of forms in my head to draw from. But my journals were different, the density of the content, the time and focus involved in the making and the collision between text, texture, image and graphics, combined to create unexpected connections.
In the 1970’s, British science historian James Burke created a BBC science television series, Connections. Burke believed that invention didn’t occur in isolation, that a web of interconnection and interplay through history is at play. I thought of this series as I revisited these journals and saw how they changed over time.
Gestalt
The gestalt theory of perception posits that our brain arranges parts into a whole. The emphasis in gestalt theory on understanding that the whole cannot be understood by analyzing the parts in isolation became central to ‘reading’ my MeetMeat journals. Disparate meetings and events were arranged on the page with the graphics filling in the gaps between engagement with the content. These books are 3 and 4 years into this drawing approach and there is a flow and continuity that has become more internalized. The drawing is not the external trappings of a decorated page, sitting like page candy to delight the eye, rather the content of the experience——the meaning ——is visualized.
Extending the Brain
We have so many tools today that we use to extend our brains…or do they? We don’t need to memorize directions, phone numbers, or recipes. We have made so much room for so much less. The promise of having entire libraries of knowledge at our fingertips has devolved into filter bubbles of miming rather than mining. We don’t dig deeply into subjects when so much of our attention is caught on the surface of the tech we carry with us constantly.
I am not advocating that we toss our tech into fiery pyres. I spend way too much time on my iPad, as this ProCreate piece demonstrates, to be a paragon of drawn by hand virtue. But this digital drawing suffers from the consciousness of constant adaptation, I edited, changed, and seamlessly remade this image without any effort or risk. I don’t live with my mistakes on the iPad, I fix them and rinse them away like the errant disposable pixels that they are.
That’s the point of these ballpoint pen drawings. The answer happens in the mistakes…meaning isn’t in a prompt, we need to travel to know that we have arrived. Let a pen and some paper draw you a map…the future is in your hands.