on drawing

I've written before about fishing as a practice in which 'internal' factors (skill, effort, preparation) enter into a relationship with 'external' factors (chance, luck, or - more figuratively - grace) and the fact that some of pleasure of angling seems to lie in this interaction. It is presumably important that the 'external' factors feel a little beyond the possibility of control - or at least on the edges of what can be influenced by the human agent. They need to be unpredictable - not necessarily a matter of pure chance but not easy to grasp and influence. (When you read fishing books, it is striking how often particular aspects of the behaviour or fish are described as unknown or not well understood.)

Over the past few years I've been trying to learn to draw better and it's just struck me that there is something of the same dynamic in that process too - if we're talking about drawing from life, at least. Beginners are always told that they should draw what they see. But it can be strangely difficult to make sense of what you are seeing in a way that allows you to represent it on paper. It is as if the visual stimulus needs decoding before you can draw it with any accuracy and time and again I have found myself struggling with this decoding - failing to 'see' what is before my eyes.

Perspectival drawing provides a good example. If we could really 'draw what we see' in any straightforward sense, we wouldn't need the rules of perspective. After all, their function is simply to describe the way the three-dimensional world appears to us from various different positions. But faced with a complex pattern of rooftops or an up-hill street bordered by houses, it is very difficult to capture them on paper without resorting to the guidelines that the theory of perspective provides.

On my book-shelf I have  a beginner's guide to perspective and, in a blog on fishing, it seems appropriate to talk about the section with the title 'by lake and river'. There is a problem with drawing reflections in water. Objects positioned at more or less the same height as the surface of the water are mirrored in a fairly straightforward way. But the reflections of objects that are further back and raised up on a hill or incline are cut off from view by the land itself. This is so difficult to describe in words that the author, John Raynes, offers some images to clarify it. In the photo below, a model of a river bank is placed on a mirror and images of trees placed at different points upon it. The tops of the 'trees' are at various different heights but, because of the 'cut-off' effect, the 'trees' in the reflection are all much closer together. As the author says: 'The trees are placed at various distances and heights relative to the water/mirror but it is not immediately clear why the reflections are as they are.' The perspectival analysis simply describes what you can already see but 'understanding why [this effect occurs] will help you to see it more perceptively.'

Grappling with the problems that real scenes and objects present is part of the pleasure of drawing. And a combination of knowledge and experience makes it possible to make sense of previously baffling problems and increasingly bring them under control. Is this like the dialectic of 'internal' and 'external' in fishing? Drawing and writing both approximate to the condition of angling in different ways and, in each case, it is something about living on the border between what you can control and what you can't.