Drawing on our humanity

When I was a child, nothing seemed more inviting to me than a blank sheet of paper. Write a poem or a story? (Few children seem to suffer from writer’s block.) Even more likely, draw a picture. Young children draw what they imagine or what they know: a house, a daddy, a dragon. Only later does one learn how to draw what one actually sees.

This desire to set down a visual record of something seen is the essence of drawing. In the words of the poet Paul Valery, quoted in Peter Steinhart’s fascinating book “The Undressed Art: Why We Draw”: “Things stare us in the face, the visible world is a perpetual stimulant, constantly maintaining or arousing the instinct to master the outline or the volume of that thing which the eye constructs.”

As Steinhart’s richly enjoyable book makes clear, the urge to draw is a very basic human impulse: “Human beings are the only animals that draw.... It is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some time in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for seating guests at a dinner party, sketch plans for the bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.”

A naturalist whose essays have appeared in Harper’s, Sierra, Audubon, Mother Jones, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Steinhart, who lives in Palo Alto, has been going to drawing groups for the last 15 years. He feels there is a strong link between his two endeavors: “The naturalist and the artist are alike in their watchfulness. They are both servants of their eyes. A naturalist learns to look intently at things, to listen to them, smell them, touch them, to wonder what they are made of, what they do, how they are like or not like each other, what they mean.... It seems to me now much like what an artist does, looking for form and line and color and texture to define the relationship between spirit and substance.”

In this lucidly written book, delightfully illustrated with drawings by various Bay Area artists, Steinhart considers the phenomenon of drawing from practically every conceivable angle, and the result is as stimulating as it is enlightening. He explains the differences between drawing and painting, discusses the technical aspects of drawing and examines the reasons why most of us feel impelled to draw the human form. He writes about models and the role they play, and he describes the atmosphere in the various drawing groups he’s attended:

“If there’s a single telling moment that begins to reveal what drawing is about, it occurs at the beginning of a session, when the model drops her robe ... and stands naked in front of a room full of strangers.... Almost always I’ll see flickers of desire flash about the room.... But it is usually as longtime Bay Area artist Bill Theophilus Brown puts it: ‘The sexuality is the first thing the model and artist are aware of, and that vanishes very fast.’ ”

An entire chapter is devoted to models and modeling, which is more of an art than it may seem. Steinhart describes the physical hardships of this poorly paid work, the impressive record of one Bay Area model in organizing a guild, and the inspiring effect a good model can have on those who draw her or him.

Elsewhere, he examines the physiological and psychological aspects of drawing: its links to various functions in the brain and the way in which it fosters intense concentration. While drawing, people will often lose track of time, forget arthritis pains, experience a kind of “altered state.” The great artists of former times considered the ability to draw an essential tool of their trade, but many of today’s aspiring artists interested in representational work meet a chilly reception from art schools and galleries.

Steinhart looks at the ongoing battle between abstractionists (who dominate the contemporary art world) and representationalists, who persist in the quest to portray the world around them. He also provides a trenchant account of how drawing -- and representational art in general -- came to suffer this loss of prestige, examining the way in which the advent of photography led artists to stress the purely expressive aspect of their work. Steinhart’s firm belief in the importance of connecting with the outside world is nicely summed up in a quotation from artist Edward Hill:

“Expression surely stands as the final objective of art. However it is expression of an individual’s understanding of his art and his experience, not a catharsis of his emotions or sheer display of idiosyncratic personality. The student must set understanding as his goal, not self-expression. The latter will arise naturally from the former.”