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Fall Quarter Essay — August 2006

Drawing the Invisible
by Andrew Rush   ©2006

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Art does not reproduce the visible. It renders visible.—Paul Klee

The brush drawings reproduced in this newsletter are selected from my illustrations that accompany four books of prose-poems called Voice of the Borderlands by Drum Hadley (Rio Nuevo Press, 2005). The original drawings (& watercolors) were done on-site in the canyons of southern Arizona along the Mexican border, where my friend and rancher poet Drum has been living and ranching for many years.

As an Arizona artist, much of my working life is outdoors by choice. While my studio provides the quiet bug-free rooms I need to develop art projects (and store my stuff), what most nourishes my soul flows into my art from my drawing and painting excursions into the silent expanses of Southwest wilderness areas, like the remote borderland canyons from where Drum's poems also come.

Drawing or painting in the wilderness is a whole different experience from traditional studio work, such as still life, figure drawing, or even a pleasant landscape painting well-landmarked with fences or barns, doorways or steps. Obviously most of our art-making reflects our manmade world, using formulas anchored in the certainties of familiar objects and places well related to the rectangles of book and frame and urban interiors.

But to be in the wilderness of a canyon wash, miles from the nearest road or the hum of an electrical grid, is to be a pilgrim without a map. What seems essential is not any one object or thing. Rather, one is in the presence of a kind of invisible life force that is in the space itself. It is made visible only by the geological eruptions of rock and shale, by waves of air patterns and changing light, by the traceries of wind and water over the ground.

For a student new to art, one of the hardest drawing concepts to grasp is the unseen role that 'space' plays as the co-relative of a form. Yet a sense of space is an essential distinction in art, an invisible presence that it allows us to actually 'see' a subject at all. So the real question is "how do we learn to 'see' space?"

The real answer is that we don't. As one learns to draw, one comes to understand that many of our notions about what things look like are conceptual (idea based) rather than perceptual (observation based). So it is that space is a concept and not a thing. Nonetheless while one does not 'see' space, it invisibly organizes the world we do see, like all concepts do.

Every art culture has had a space concept of some kind. Our visual distinction of 'space' as a three-dimensional volume had to await the rise of empirical science in the west. And very quickly a new interest in objects in space called astronomy [Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642)] found Alberti's (1407-72) new 'invention' waiting, the first really usable visual system of representing 'space' on a flat surface called linear perspective.

Ever since my art school days, the only place that space has been 'taught' to art students is through lessons in 'perspective' and 'chiaroscuro' value, both methods for projecting objects in three dimensions and part of the pictorial conventions of our single lens spatial system as developed by Renaissance painting and later the camera. While some sense of space does lurk in the language of many design courses in terms like figure/ground, the subject was hardly ever mentioned again, as if that was all there is to say about it.

However, in my art excursions into the great wilderness areas of the southwest, space is the subject. My early efforts to apply art-school formulas of perspective and chiaroscuro values to describe the grandeur before me quickly seemed both puny and irrelevant. So I began to look more to the centuries-old eastern spatial systems. The Chinese, for example, communicated deep space by subtle atmospheric and light effects of brush on silk by artists trained in the marking movements taught by texts like The Mustard Seed Garden. My search continues to find more emotionally satisfying visual metaphors for space in my drawing. Lately I am finding the images of galactic space offered by the Hubbell telescope to be pointing me in the right direction.

I think that we are very fortunate to have the natural world close to us here in the Southwest as an extraordinary teacher of the invisible role space plays in our vision. In fact, if we are to continue life in harmony with our earth home, our survival may very well depend upon those artists who can effectively connect us all, as Paul Klee notes, by rendering our shared invisible space visible.

©2006 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission