The Line Starts Here

Tracing Our Path Through This World

I think it was the posthumanist that broke me. I was doing some doom scrolling on Substack and I was stumbling deeper and deeper into the fetid imaginations of pixelpushers I hope to never meet on a screen again. The posthumanist bizarrely, had a picture of themself, and oh the comments, celebrating the courage of their stance in the face of mean, arrogant…humanists? like that Pope Leo guy. Serves me right for following the downward doom scroll.

Drawing is a profoundly solitary human act. An ancient language of marks, forms, and handprints, interceding with the mystery of the natural world and our fear and awe of it. Drawing could capture the spirit of the beasts that we hunted and conjure the good fortune of its success. I think drawing began as a way for an individual to speak to the cosmos, to mark their passage on the land like the stars traced the sky. I think telling stories to others was a byproduct, a necessary accident of social beings.

We have upended the act of drawing into performance and product. We have scaled up this solitary act like so much we have supersized. But scaling doesn’t work for everything, we may find what it doesn’t do for ‘intelligence’ soon enough. But back to drawing. The materials may have changed in 40,000 years, but we haven’t evolved out of the need to make marks with meaning. I was chastised online this week for a negative post about the lack of depth and meaning in generative images. The comment suggested that we are being offered the wonders of Star Trek—- Gene Roddenberry would NOT agree— he would have despised images and culture being materialized by the food ‘replicator’.

Images are not just for consumption, feeding attention and the insatiable appetite of the platforms. Where are we in this equation, in this massive math experiment, what calculus values us, or are we just inputs and bottlenecks. All of the images in this post are drawings that I love. I started each, except one with charcoal and then used Photoshop to extend my reach. All of the pieces are personal pieces. I am working on an editorial commission presently and It’s purely about drawing, it’s a joy to do.

This drawing means a lot to me. This is a material based drawing—just pen on paper. It was one of 3 ballpoint pen drawings I did as part of a collaborative project with my partner, Lorraine Tuson. I have posted about the project here. At the same time I was making these marks I was dealing with the most profound loss I have experienced in my life. These black strokes on the surface of the paper provided solace and sorrow. I didn’t escape into the drawing, it wasn’t a distraction or a way to stay busy—-it became a prayer, a private act of dialogue with the most meaningful way I can express myself. This drawing is memory and presence and the marking of my pain and the privilege of living. Raise a pen to team human.