WHY DO WE DRAW?

Why do we draw?  Why we draw is a fundamental theme of these pages.  By contrast, these pages are really not about how we draw.  That sort of thing has been covered by the Chings and the Lauseaus and the Nicolaides.  Instead, these pages ask why we draw.  They ask, what is our purpose?  They ask, what is the rationale for your act of drawing?  For the nearly sacred act of putting a line on a piece of paper with your hand holding a pencil, we are looking at why we do that.  As has been stated from the beginning, we are problem solvers.  And as problem solvers, the reason we put lines on our paper is to think.  We draw transparently because it allows us to think more holistically.   We draw transparently to free ourselves from the strict limitations of Representational Spacetime.  We draw transparently as a means to think, and therefore draw, outside of our culture.  With transparency, we are no longer concerned with abstraction.  When we focus on the why, we are addressing the state of our mind.  A more open mind, free of shackles such as representation, hand eye coordination and an instant of time, allows us to think outside.  When your greatest concern is how things look, then you are drawing representationally and you are concerned with how.  When your greatest concern is how things work, you are drawing transparently and you are concerned about why.  It is like a jazz pianist who plays notes which are outside the chord.  When you play outside the chord, there are no bad notes.  In Transparent Drawing, there is no bad line.  There is no bad drawing.  There is no accepted technique.  We don’t talk about figure ground, or contrast, or definition, or line weight;  these topics are about how.   The act of drawing with a time window greater than a single instant opens our minds to the complete resolution of forms.  Our understanding of a complete form can not happen without time.  Transparency does not exist without time.  Drawing across time, that is to say, drawing transparently, opens your mind to a greater holistic reality.  You are brought into the spacetime of your subject.  You are no longer excluded;  you are no longer the viewer who is outside looking in to the drawing.  Your mind is now part of the spacetime of the drawing.  This is why we draw.