The Self-Isolation Residency 3rd may 2020: Day 35

To(ward) the lighthouse: drawing, versus photography, versus drawing; or how to not live life through a lens.

Please excuse the weak pun in the title of tonight's post, I couldn't resist it and hopefully you'll understand why as you read more. What I would like to talk about tonight is something that I feel has become quite fundamental to, not only the way we look at art but more importantly to the way that we live our lives. I just used the phrase 'look at art', but actually what I am going to be looking at here is not about looking at art, in fact it is quite the reverse of looking at art.

I have been an artist all of my life, I'm not bragging I'm just stating a fact. The way that I first expressed this as a very young child was in drawing; I don't mean the standard, but very beautiful, drawings that all children do from their imagination, often of their dream, idealised, house. Did you ever notice that from those drawings how we all grew up in detached houses with 4 windows in the front, a door in the middle and a rainbow in the back garden? Still I digress. No what I am talking about here is drawing from life, drawing whatever was around me that interested and stimulated me. At the age I was I thought of drawing as, number 1, a hobby, number 2, a way to get better at drawing and number 3, a way to record what I saw. No I didn't have a camera, yes I am of an ages that predates the smart phone currently in everyone's pocket; there's even a good chance that you are reading this on such a device right now. If I saw something that interested me I had two options, I could try and remember every detail of it or I could draw it. To draw something you have to go beyond looking at it, you have to 'observe' it, you have to understand it. That's really what drawing is about, observing and processing your observations into understanding. To the greater extent the mark making part of drawing is of secondary importance and it is certainly something that can be learned with practice. So drawing teaches us understanding which is a life lesson we can all use.

But unfortunately drawing from life has fallen out of fashion and I'm afraid much of that understanding that I mentioned has gone with it. When I was studying art I often also worked in art galleries to help fund my studies. When I was young I used to visit an art gallery to look at the work, to understand the work, I still do this today (sketches below executed in the cast room of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). I would take time to really study pieces that were of particular interest to me and of course I would also make sketches and drawings of them to further and develop this interest. By the time that I came to work in art galleries unfortunately this had all chanced. Now we have come to a time when people are not interested in understanding art, they just want the experience of having been in its presence, and whilst I applaud the idea of 'experience', what I am referring to here is a much shallower meaning of the word. Now the observer no longer observes, they don't even look. Those 'tiresome' tasks have now been relegated to the work of the smart phone camera. People walk through art galleries and it has to be said through life, without observing or even looking. The most they concentrate on is where to point their camera to get the best shoot that they can 'share' to show that they have experienced this moment of culture. But what have they experienced if they have not understood or even observed? This is life through a lens, the delegation of though to a computer and it is done in the most inane way as most of the photographs taken, even if the 'observer' has traveled thousand of miles to take them will never be looked at or considered again. Generally these are going to be bad photographes, unworthy of the spectacle that they purport to express. My advice to these would-be observers is save yourself time and money and just buy a catalogue of the exhibition you have just sleepwalked through, at least that way the photographs will be in focus. It's a shame there isn't a similar catalogue for you to buy about the life you are missing.

All of this reminds me of the tale of the electric monk from Douglas Adams' 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

'The Electric monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you , thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself: Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.'

'Smartphones' are our Electric Monks, they experience tedious life (and art) for us, thus saving us the bother of experiencing it for ourselves.

In Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', the lighthouse stands for tangible experience, a visit there is a thing that the young Ramsay children want to experience for themselves but are denied for most of the book due to factors beyond their control. The factors that control our experiences are in out own hands, we only need to take control of them ourselves again to realise this and to reinstate drawing as an art form and a tool for observation and experience, and photography as a tool for recording what we already understand and not expecting it to that part of the job for us as well.

I began tonight's post by apologising about the pun in the title; the sketch above is of Toward Lighthouse (pronounced 'Tow-ard') which my daily exercise period walk took me to and which I quickly sketched during my break there. This sketch took me approximately 10 minutes, but I experienced the feeling of having lived and of having been there far more keenly than if I had just 'snapped its photograph.