Drawing Impulses

In the impulse "A Walk in the Forest" I encouraged you to collect and press leaves or flowers or other plant parts to use them for collages. And then, in the impulse “A personal herbarium” you already got to try a simple collage. Now I’d like to talk about the different techniques of collage, their possibilities and versatility. I want to introduce the concept. Collage is a technique that originated in the visual arts. You apply several found pieces of paper onto a canvas or piece of paper to create a new image. The word itself comes from the French "coller" meaning "to glue", and "la colle", which means “glue”, as the technique glues things onto a surface. The collage is of course not only relevant for the visual arts, but later also in literature and the performing arts. There are text collages, music collages, theater collages, film collages, or even text-image collages, as for example by the famous author Herta Müller.

There’s a magic in every beginning. It’ a wonderful energy to start something new. To start a new chapter, a new theme, a new idea, something that wasn't there before. There's a great power in that, in that newness, that unprecedentedness, and that's what we're starting with today. We’re now in this wonderful season of autumn. The colored leaves may have already fallen to the ground in great numbers, and yet autumn is a delight. Maybe the snow is already in the air, and you can literally smell it. 

In the last impulse "A Walk in the Forest" I encouraged you to collect and press leaves and other plant parts. You can now use these pressed parts to make collages with natural objects from the realm of plants. The practice of pressing and drying plants is an old one. The oldest surviving herbarium dates back to as early as the 16th century (1524). It’s located in Kassel, Germany. Originally, people dried plants to have decorative material in winter. That’s how the tradition of the herbarium began. Over time, people realized that they could do this with all sorts of plants and that they could systematize the herbarium and add the roots, the buds, the flower heads, and the fruits. They became scientific works. Nowadays there are herbaria worldwide, most of them in Europe and North America. Often, they can be found in botanical gardens or natural history museums. The largest herbaria are in Paris, St. Petersburg, London, St. Louis, Vienna (they were established mainly in the times of the monarchy) and in Berlin.

This time there are two tasks. The subject is still the spiral. We’ll stay with the spiral, it’s too good to let it go already. But the theme becomes a little more concrete: the spiral as light. You’ll approach it as follows: First, you draw a square on your drawing sheet. With a ruler. And within this square, you draw a spiral. It has one line. Only one line. Then you go into the square with a color of your choice, it can be black ink, or another tint, or charcoal or pencil or ballpoint pen. You go into the square with small strokes, which then blur into a surface, so even that only the line remains white. The background becomes dark. The spiral remains in the white of the drawing sheet. And then you confine this line as close as possible. You must frame the line from the left and the right with the color until only the spiral remains free. It would be nice if your square was quite large for the line to have enough space in it and so that you have room to go in between the lines of the spiral with your color. This is the first exercise.

This time there are again two tasks connected with each other. For this I ask you to go out into nature. Go for a walk. With open eyes. The first task is to look for leaves and other parts of plants from meadows or the wayside, which you can take home with you to press them. They can be grasses, leaves or delicate flowers, just not plants that are too thick. Lay these leaves flat between sheets of newspaper or kitchen rolls, they absorb the moisture particularly well. The leaves should not touch each other, leave plenty of room between them. When you have prepared all the collected plants in this way, weigh them down with books or other heavy objects so that they are flattened. This will take a few days.

With the fern we’ve already approached the spiral. Now I’d like to discuss it in more detail. What can a spiral be? The spiral is a primal symbol. From the observation of nature, it has found its way into science as a geometric shape and for calculating various phenomena. The spiral can move from the outside to the inside, or from the inside to the outside. We’re starting with a spiral that goes from the inside to the outside. The spiral line can move outward at the same distance until your drawing sheet ends. In theory, it could go on infinitely. On the other hand, when you make a spiral going from the outside to the inside, you start by making a circle first. That’s called a limited spiral. There are other possibilities too: The spiral can start from a point and gradually move away from the center, so that the distance from the center becomes greater and greater. There are also spirals which develop from another geometrical body as a basis. For example, you can circumscribe a sphere by drawing a circle and spiraling a line around it from the outside, sometimes stronger, sometimes more delicate. You can do the same with a cone. You can also develop a spiral around a triangle. Or you could draw a square and look how a spiral would develop inside. There are many possibilities.

Everything we do in drawing is done with love. Thus, we need empathy with what we see and with what is happening on the drawing sheet.This time we want to turn to ferns. Already Leonardo da Vinci used ferns in his works as forms which he also used to create clouds and water. He developed these motifs from spirals. Spirals also often appear in the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. He was inspired by ferns in New Zealand. Besides the kiwi bird and the kiwi fruit, the silver fern is one of the most famous symbols of New Zealand. Ferns have great significance in mythology and folklore. They’re mysterious plants associated with elves; it’s said that ferns lead to the elves.

There are two major areas when working on metamorphosis and transformation. One is the development of a form, and the other is the condition in which that form finds itself. A prominent example is the phoenix. We all know the saying "like a phoenix from the ashes" – something that you think is lost, but that then appears in new glory, or when you’ve suffered a defeat, get up and continue with newfound strength. The phoenix is an animal of metamorphosis from fire. The fire is already a transformation. Because fire needs nourishment, namely wood or another flammable material, in addition to air and heat, to burn, and then actually nothing remains. Through this act of transformation, the energy of the fire is lost according to our everyday logic and observation. In mythology, something new emerges from the fire and that is the phoenix. This is incredibly exciting because naturally the phoenix unlocks an incredible range of imagination and becomes an important symbol.

When we deal with the theme of metamorphosis and transformation, there are two basic conditions to consider. The first is the freedom of the imagination, which doesn’t do well with censorship. Am I allowed to do this, should I do this, can I do this? These are questions that shouldn’t hold you back. Whatever idea jumps into your brain or pen, execute that idea immediately. This is an endless source of new possibilities you don't know yet. It’s important that you allow yourself this freedom in every moment of creating. That you realize it’s part of the concept for the imaginative new creations that make this theme so appealing. 

When we think about nature and abstraction with the drawing pencil, that’s a situation that of course has a history. In the past – meaning in the 19th century and before – the only way to communicate what things look like was through realistic representation. With the development of photography, a lot changed for drawing and painting. A Monet would be unthinkable without photography. The Impressionists at the time recognized this opportunity: they were no longer forced to represent things as realism demanded, but they could abstract and express atmospheres. This was the departure into modernism and eventually paved the way for abstract art. The study of nature in drawing is still indispensable for any art education and is very topical.

Sensitivity and empathy are qualities that are essential for drawing. You will certainly have noticed and practiced this in the past impulses. This time I invite you to look at a field of lavender as an inspiration. A lavender field consists of many lavender bushes. We know these lavender fields from Provence in France. You’ll notice that the landscape is slightly hilly. Depending on your point of view, maybe you can see a patch of green in the background or a house that is all overgrown with green, which blends in with these lavender structures.

For this impulse I’d like to think further about the structures we can find in nature: the view on fields from above. At the latest when you‘re sitting in an airplane, but also when you‘re on top of a tower, a mountain or a tall house, you get an overview of the landscape – we all know this view of the countryside, of the fields. What do we notice there? First of all, the terrain is remarkable. Where you can find fields, most of the time it'll be a flat area, maybe with hills or small mountains. The flat or slightly hilly landscape allows the farmers a certain structure and method to cultivate them. Here there are great differences depending on which cultural area and which geographical area you’re in.

This time our drawing will be dedicated to animals. The dog, the cat, and the bird. It has a lot to do with your inner attitude, with your quality while drawing. Maybe this deeper level of drawing seems unimportant to you at first. But still these thoughts influence you when you’re drawing, and we absolutely need them. So, choose one of these animals. If you can't do anything with the dog, choose the cat. Or the bird that sings and warbles in the summer and whistles an evening song on the balcony for you every day.

This time I’d like to lure you into the realm of apples. A theme that starts in summer and continues into fall. The apple has a very extensive cultural history and an endless history in mythology, spirituality, and religion. There are countless tales about apples. The apple is very well known to us as a fruit. It probably originated in Asia, in the Caucasus, where apples were cultivated very early and produced a delicious fruit. The apple is always relevant. It’s very healthy, we all know the saying: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away". There’s an incredible number of varieties of apples, in the Alpine region alone there are over 150 different varieties. The Austrian Archduke Johann, the brother of Emperor Franz I, did a lot of development and modernization work in Styria in his time. He commissioned apple models of over 150 different apple varieties from a Berlin workshop. At that time, there were craftspeople dedicated to making models of apples and these models are so real and so beautiful that you’re under the impression you could bite into them, even when you’re holding them in your hand. Their weight, shape, color, and luster are exactly the same as in nature.

In the previous episodes we’ve thought in detail about the dot, and thus also about the round shape. In this exercise, we go a step further by considering what can fit into a circle. There’s a square in a circle. If we connect the four outermost poles within the circle with lines of equal length, it creates a square. You know the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, in which he draws the Vitruvian man in a circle and forms a square in the circle. With this Vitruvian man, the center of the circle is exactly where the navel is. Contrary, the center of the square is formed by the sexual organs of the Vitruvian man. In the translated meaning this signifies that the square is earthbound, because at its center is the procreation.

I want you to create your own sun, free from cliché and free from what you’ve already seen. Draw a sun from within. From within means that you feel into what is created on the drawing sheet by your hand. Then feel: Do you need long rays or short ones? Are these rays always in the same distance or in one that is a little different each ray? All these questions are very important. Depending on the position of your sun, you get a feel for the rays.

With the topic of nature and abstraction we have a wide field to plow. Apart from the study of nature and subsequently its abstraction, it touches very much on the metaphysical. When we speak of abstraction, we’re faced with a variety of definitions. This causes problems until today. Because what is abstraction? If we reach for the dictionary, we see: "Abstraction, Latin abstractus, removed. Or abstrahere, to drag away, remove, separate." Yet, we still have no idea what it means. Nevertheless, these terms are quite accurate, because when we talk about abstraction, we’re also constantly talking about reduction. It’s like saying, we leave out as much as we can while still achieving the greatest possible expression. In the process of abstraction, we leave things out to arrive at a generality. 

You’ve already solved the exercises about the elementary order in the two previous impulses and noticed that the basics of every composition, the fundamental questions of composition are practiced and empathized with these elementary orders. In this impulse I would like to go into a little more detail, with an exercise about the dot. Leonardo da Vinci says, "the beginning to the science of painting is the dot."

In the last episode I talked about elementary orders. They’re very important for the organization of the drawing or the picture and come with many possibilities to build on it further, because it refines the sensibility for the development of the picture. Where do the elements accumulate and what order results from that? If you think through and practice this exercise of order carefully, you will become more confident in the layout and distribution of the elements in the picture. In nature we can find those orders, too. From every form of nature geometric shapes can be derived, in different ways. In the previous exercise, you’ve already practiced the basic geometric shapes and how they can be distributed in a picture. Now you can deepen this and connect it with shapes of nature.

When distressing news from outside enter our mind, it’s always good to turn to art, to maneuver our thoughts into aesthetics and to deal with questions that seem to have nothing to do with our everyday life. And yet, these aesthetic questions are exactly what makes our life rich and fill it with joy. What brings us in contact with existential matters and lets us feel for ourselves what makes us human beings, our own beings. With your drawings you can understand this wonderfully and delve into these questions. Your drawings are like a warming ray of sunshine that you share with the world. When you look at a picture, a drawing or a painted picture, there’s a certain order in it. As soon as you put a sign on the sheet of paper with the pencil, you already have a contrast of light and dark. In the following I’ll speak assuming you work in black and white, but in certain ways it applies just the same if you take a colored pencil instead, because some colors work brighter and some darker.