I’m probably coming down with COVID, and I hadn’t prepared the post that was supposed to go out today, so I’m writing this from bed with my laptop balanced on top of the blanket.
I learned drawing as a kid, but I quit when the lessons got to portrait work. The reason was embarrassingly simple: portraits were supposed to begin with bones. You had to learn the structure first, then the flesh. As a child I had a severe fear of skeletons—my own private diagnosis, if you like—so that was the end of it. I never got past still life and quick sketches, and whatever skill I had eventually went to waste.
School outings always came with a certain kind of competitive performance. There was always a cluster of students who would pull out sketchbooks and start drawing on the spot, and another group who would somehow produce musical instruments in the middle of a picnic. I don’t know whether kids still do this now, but I’ve always been curious about the ones carrying instruments around on field trips. Did they actually love playing, or were they performing for an audience? Usually their parents would appear as soon as the group had a break, and that was the cue for the child to give a little public performance right there among everyone else.
I was one of the students forced to sketch, though I could barely produce anything. The only thing on my mind was the food laid out on the picnic cloth—that, to me, was the real purpose of the outing. But schools always need a few cooperative “performers” to make the event look educational. The students playing instruments usually occupied the center, because they were meant to attract attention and instantly tell passersby: this is a school excursion. The students who could draw were placed on the outer edge, facing different directions, each pretending to capture the scenery.
At one point I was assigned the task of sketching the landscape, because the school needed something to submit afterward as proof that the group outing had been full of educational value.
I did not do the job well.
I drew the outline of a distant mountain, and then I was already bored. So instead of continuing the picture, I took the blank spaces divided by those first lines and began filling them with words, using language to record everything I saw. I wrote about the color of the far mountains—I had learned gouache and traditional Chinese painting then, so I tried very hard to explain that bluish distant hue, that layered mountain color that only appears when things are far away. I wrote about the willows nearby, how they swayed in the wind with a kind of repeating order. I wrote about the people on the boat, what they might have been thinking. I wrote about the ripples folding back as they neared the shore, and how a water strider wobbled from side to side between the alternating rings on the surface.
Of course the teacher hated it. In her view, I was being lazy.
But that really was the quickest sketch available to me at the time. I was describing a visual scene through imagined language. I even argued back: if a photograph can preserve the original scene far more directly, why insist that a person must record it through a pencil sketch?
It took me until adulthood to realize that my mind works in reverse.
I’m not someone who sees an image first and then produces words. I have the words first, and only then do I go looking for the image that matches them.
A lot of my friends are into photography, and they tend to build a complete frame in their heads before searching for the right moment to capture it. I’ve always struggled to sync with that way of thinking. When they show me a photo and explain the story inside it, the story playing in my mind is often completely different, detached from whatever they intended as the central idea. I even started a strange little section on my blog for this tendency—a kind of “unwritten album” for photos that began as text in my head before they ever became images.
Words first, image second: I think of that process as a kind of stream-of-consciousness sketching, and it is very hard to pin down.
I once tried an experiment with a friend. He gave me one of his photographs and, without any background or explanation, asked me to write the story of the image. That was nearly impossible.
Then we reversed it. I described in words a certain kind of scene I wanted, and handed the text to him so he could try to find or capture an image that matched it. That usually failed too, because by the time I had written the description, the image already existed in my head in a very specific form.
The only method that worked was the other way around: I would take a photo, and then ask him to explain in words what the framed image was expressing. Strangely, he could answer. His description often came surprisingly close to the core of what I had wanted to say.
After repeating this experiment enough times, I came to a conclusion: people led by language are not good at beginning with images. They need words to interpret a visual scene. People led by images are not good at beginning with words, because words narrow the imaginative space of composition too early.
The balance point between those two, perhaps, is stream of consciousness itself.
For someone dominated by language, stream of consciousness arrives as images. For someone dominated by images, stream of consciousness arrives as words—words that help set the direction of the frame they want to build. And when either type uses that current of thought to construct a scene, that, to me, is what sketching really is.
Not the kind where overly earnest students sit in a park holding up pencils toward the landscape and pretending to measure proportions.
I’m probably infected, though the fever still hasn’t started. Right now the valve that usually releases that stream of consciousness in my head feels completely shut. So all I can do is talk about things as they are, in the plainest possible way.
Maybe if the fever kicks in later, my brain will start building complicated images for me again.