THE DRAWING ORGAN

You know how they say that the brain is the most important sex organ?  Well, the same is true for drawing;  your brain is the most important drawing organ.

Now, we are typically taught that it is the hand, when it comes to drawing.  After all, it is your hand that controls what goes on the paper, right?  Or we are taught it is the eye.  And we are always taught that it is the old trope of hand eye coordination.  You’ve got to get that right if you are going to get things to look representational.  And if your hand eye coordination is off, well, I guess you can’t really draw, can you.

Yet, just like in sex, the brain is the most important organ, or appendage, if you will.  If the pleasure centers are hit, then it was good.  Dopamine, in both cases, is released during anticipation.  Afterward, the hypothalamus releases it’s hormones.  Anticipation, concentration, knowledge.

And if the act triggers the imagination;  engages the brain, then what might have been a rather routine engagement is expanded to something that is, in hindsight, truly holistic.  There was a renunciation of all irrelevant external inputs.  There is a one pointedness;  a unification of the mind.  The act (of drawing) pushed beyond the superficial limits of representation (mechanics).  The brain was engaged and focused on the complex task of fully understanding the entire object, or subject (of your desires).  This takes imagination.

Although this is all a bit tongue in cheek, my point is that I don’t think that, typically, when we are drawing an object or a subject, we are asked to engage the imagination.  Representational drawing, we are taught, is indeed moving the pencil in tandem with your eye.  The brain is left out, and yet it is the most important organ.

When we draw an object transparently, your imagination has to be engaged.  You have to imagine how it all fits together an how it works as a form in order to understand it fully.  Which results in knowledge;  the complete knowledge.  The knowledge gained from what you just did is internalized exactly because the imagination in your brain was engaged.  As in you are not going to forget about it in an hour or two.  Instead, you will continue to process (in your brain) the event (of drawing or sex) exactly because it was such a complete experience.