The Things I Choose Not To Draw

 

There is a strange discipline involved in drawing a zebra.

The animal appears to offer the artist everything.

Every stripe seems to demand attention. Every change in tone appears to need recording. The surface of the body is filled with subtle variations of texture, light and shadow. And when the subject is Hartmann's mountain zebra, there is an almost irresistible temptation to try to capture it all.

For a long time, I thought that was what drawing was about.

Looking carefully.

Recording accurately.

Leaving nothing out.

But years of observing these animals have gradually taught me something rather different.

Sometimes the most important part of a drawing is what I choose not to put into it.

The more time I spent with the zebras, the less interested I became in simply reproducing their stripes. The pattern that makes a zebra immediately recognisable can also become a distraction. It is possible to draw every stripe perfectly and still fail to capture the animal standing in front of you.

A zebra is more than its pattern.

It is the way it holds its head.

The slight turn of an ear.

The distribution of its weight.

The tension in its body when it becomes alert.

The way one animal stands in relation to another.

The particular quality of stillness that belongs to an individual animal.

These are the things that cannot be measured by accuracy alone.

As my observation deepened, I found myself asking a different question.

Not How much can I draw?

But:

How little do I need to draw for the animal to become present?

That question has changed the way I work.

I began allowing edges to disappear. I stopped feeling compelled to describe every hair. I became more comfortable leaving areas of the paper untouched, allowing the viewer's eye to complete what I had deliberately left unresolved.

This was not an attempt to make the drawings less detailed.

It was an attempt to make them more truthful.

In the wild, we rarely see an animal in perfect isolation, presented to us as a complete and clearly defined object. Light changes. Distance intervenes. Dust moves across the landscape. An animal turns away. Part of its body disappears into shadow.

Our experience of wildlife is often fragmentary.

We see a moment.

We remember an impression.

We fill in the rest.

I began to realise that a drawing could work in much the same way.

The charcoal itself became part of this process. I work almost exclusively with a Faber-Castell Pitt Charcoal Soft Pencil, using pressure and the gradual building of layers to move between the lightest marks and the deepest blacks. I don't need a collection of different pencils to describe the animal. A single pencil can say remarkably little or remarkably much, depending on how it is used.

And the paper contributes something of its own.

I work on Canson Montval 300 gsm, chosen primarily for its texture. Rather than painstakingly drawing every variation in an animal's skin, the surface of the paper can begin to suggest texture for me. The charcoal catches differently across the surface, creating subtle variations without requiring every detail to be described.

The materials themselves encourage restraint.

They remind me that not everything needs to be said.

Perhaps this is one of the unexpected things that prolonged observation has taught me as an artist.

When we first encounter something beautiful, we often want to record everything about it. We want the photograph, the drawing, the complete description. We want to make certain that nothing is lost.

But sometimes, in trying to preserve everything, we lose the thing we were trying to preserve.

The character of an animal does not reside in every line of its anatomy.

It resides in its presence.

And presence is often created through suggestion.

This has become particularly important to me as Collected Moments of Survival has developed.

The drawings are not intended to be a catalogue of Hartmann's mountain zebras. They are not studies designed to demonstrate how accurately I can reproduce their appearance.

They are moments of encounter.

A head turning.

A body emerging from shadow.

Two animals standing close together.

A mare watching over her foal.

A stallion looking towards something beyond the frame.

The drawing gives the viewer enough to recognise the moment.

The rest is left open.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly comfortable with unfinished edges and areas where the image seems to dissolve.

I don't see those spaces as omissions.

They are invitations.

They ask the viewer to slow down and participate in the seeing.

And perhaps that is what drawing has ultimately become for me.

Not the act of putting everything I see onto paper, but the much harder task of deciding what is enough.

Enough to suggest the animal.

Enough to convey its character.

Enough to allow a moment to remain.

And enough to leave something unseen.

Because sometimes, what we choose not to draw is what allows us to truly see.