NON KNOWING

From The Poetics of Space:

“Even in an art like painting, which bears witness to a skill, the important successes take place independently of skill.” 1

A meta mantra in these pages is that there is no bad drawing. And it is great to hear Bachelard confirm this; the success of our drawings is independent of the skill that we apply to the drawing.

Bachelard goes on to include a quote from Jean Lescure in his analysis of of the painting of Charles Lapicque:

“Although his work gives evidence of wide culture and knowledge of all the dynamic expressions of space, they are not applied, they are not made into recipes…Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a for of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for a oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom.”  1

Non knowing. Independence of skill. Pure beginning. This mindset is certainly counter to how we are conditioned to think. Yet this primal innocence is our desired state of mind.  There cannot be a recipe.

When we start a drawing, we should not know where we are going to end up. For us to learn the most we can from the drawings we make, we must suspend our knowledge.

Simply the act of drawing non representationally is a form of non knowing. And certainly drawing transparently moves us into the realm of non knowing.

Other posts with this concept include a non specific way of seeing, innocent student drawings, non realistic drawing, etc.

1. Both quotes taken from Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p xxxii