When Iâm drawingâand here drawing is very different from writing or reasoningâI have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.
Thanks to the recent work of neurobiologists like Antonio Demasio, itâs now known that the messages which pass from cell to cell in a living body do so in the forms of charts and maps. They are spatial arrangements. They have a geometry.
It is through these âmapsâ that the body communicates with the brain and the brain with the body. And these messages constitute the basis of the mind, which is the creature of both body and brain, as you believed and foresaw. In the act of drawing thereâs perhaps an obscure memory of such map-reading.
As Damasio put it: âThe entire fabric of a conscious mind is created from the same clothâimages generated by the brainâs map-making abilities.â
Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be compared with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.
When Iâm drawing I feel a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter if pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cellsâŚ
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneselfâŚ
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisibile to its incalculable destination.
John Berger, Bentoâs Sketchbook
2087
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