The Space Between Seeing and Thinking is a Drawing

To move to see to create to transform to abstract to reduce to experiment to vary to concentrate to try out to turn to rotate to think to write to repeat to repeat to float to fly to doubt to ask to research to investigate to superimpose to disappear to discard to breathe to fumble to oscillate to make to accelerate to slow down to pause to dream to diverge to deviate from to summarize to group together to send on its way to get to the point to imagine to observe to circle around to remember to associate to communicate to construct to define to clarify to explain to translate to recognize to supplement to narrate to make mysterious to confuse to stumble to jolt to come to a standstill to be amazed to be uncertain to struggle to recognize to develop to unravel to go astray to develop to empty out to disturb to destroy to note down to copy to add to relate to knot to loosen to interrupt to escape to occupy to clench to tense up to cross out to initiate to line up to come to terms with to confuse to let go to hold onto to design to relax to exaggerate to lift off to play to jump to travel to separate to organize in short: to draw.

To draw is to be active; it leads to nothing, since every line ends sometime. In this way a line is like life itself. Just as much or as little speaks for drawing as for life - and it has just as many different manifestations. To draw means being in time; a drawing is time past.

One passes a picture that always hangs in the same place without noticing it. But if it suddenly disappears, the faded rectangle that remains on the wall becomes a field that reflects one's own perception like in a blind mirror. Whether or not it's a piece of wallpaper that refers to a picture, or a shard of glass that hints at the existence of the entire vessel, I try to give life to things in the airiness of my imagination. Whatever is already complete does not require such possibilities.

While drawing one always deals with (at least) three realities: with the one out there in the world, with the one in one's own head and with the one on the sheet of paper. So drawing is always a process of communication or translation; the drawing becomes an abstraction of reality, the draughtsman a means of transmission. In the congruity or divergence, the harmony or grinding of the gears of these realities is revealed the degree of interest, the sense of being, the relationship to the world which leaves its mark on the paper.

The act of drawing makes a fiction real and the reverse. What's a brim without a hat? What does a line do that delineates a void? Can a circle be a brim, or a stroke of the pen a table top? Lines get the imagination rolling; a line is a line; that's an old adage: it's pencil on paper. To draw means: to draw the hat, to make a stroke, to interrupt the stroke, to knot the line, to let it run freely, to throw out those hats, to make what's serious playful, to take the incidental seriously and to combine concentration with lightness.

The line is the basic component of drawing; its possibilities are the "alphabet" of the draughtsman. A line can achieve both: to close and to open up, to organize and to confuse, to circumscribe and to cross out, a boundary and a conglomeration, that can be precise and imprecise. Anyone who draws a line can be pulled into it. The act of seeing begins to play, words insert themselves into it, rarely does the ongoing thought process allow the line to finish. Drawing a line means setting a trap; to draw means to stumble.

To draw is to think. A drawing is transformed energy. It is a kind of pendulum, similar to a swinging door mediating between indoors and out, that will find its own rhythm and slowly returns to a state of calm, if one allows it to follow its own natural movements. Things that superficially seem unconnected can in a drawing take on a relationship to one another. Everything becomes equally important or nonsensical, hierarchical relationships unravel, what got bogged down now hangs in the balance, everything becomes equally essential or unimportant. In this way whatever had been concealed by being visible becomes transparent through the process of drawing. Drawing is a terrain of questioning and a condition of suspension. To draw means to consider something from a distance in order to get closer to it, to be simultaneously far and near. To draw is an attempt to focus one's "inner field glasses" on the space between seeing and thinking, forgetting and remembering, knowing and not knowing. To draw what one sees and what one cannot see.

Thinking is a way of visualizing things, of coming to terms with them and of distinguishing them. The drawn line finds its own way on the white ground of an unknown terrain, sets limits and discovers forms until a field is created that opens up unaccustomed possibilities of seeing. Thought takes on form in drawing through the collaboration between forms and the space between forms, between systems and spontaneity, between reglementation and latitude, determination and chance, haste and lassitude. Everything is already present; sometimes one need only wait until it reveals itself. Drawing is a process of discovery.

"This is not a pipe" (ceci n'est pas une pipe) is Magritte's well-known phrase referring to the complications between image and concept. What does it mean that along the boundaries of pictures language opens them up and the reverse; the picture begins to speak as soon as language falls silent. This reciprocal assistance, a kind of friendship between text and image, is like the warp and the weft of our understanding and perception in drawing.

Drawing is omission. The world is already so full. What or how little must the artist do, through addition or omission, by covering over, moving around, turning or skewing, to arrive at an understanding that perhaps was there all along but disguised? The world is already full of pictures that see the world, replete with strange provisions, of pictures seen a thousand times, that through the medium of drawing can be cleared and aired out, allowing us to see them afresh.

Thus drawing is the perennial attempt to bring to life what had been stale, to initiate communication, to open up creative spaces, to uncover potentialities that give substance to thoughts and ideas and imagination.

The sheet of paper is the locus where the fragments of my visual filter, bits of memories and shards of thoughts are recorded, where by drawing I bring them together and thus also separate them. Whatever exists between the past and the future on the white surface of the paper remains a constant possibility to give imagination free reign. John Cage expressed this much more aptly: "Each something is the celebration of the nothing that supports it."

Nanne Meyer
(translation: Christiane Andersson)
7 July 2003