Monster, drawing by NM (3yrs., 3mos old.)
from Drawing Distinctions by Patrick Maynard
(Cornell Universtiy Press), courtesy of the author

We begin, drawing. First, as small children we start the project of consolidating our developing physical control with the expression of our thoughts, images and feelings, just as verbal language is emerging. The unfolding of our linguistic capacities is often accompanied by a blossoming of graphic abilities--even to the point where a young child can express more in a picture than in words. But then, in most children, this power to make controlled expressive marks atrophies, while language undergoes an unstoppable growth. What if drawing continued to develop, as language does?

We also began drawing as a species. Modern humans entered Europe around forty thousand years ago, at the same time experiencing our species rapid "symbolic development". Luckily, we have recent proof of forceful drawing from over thirty thousand years ago: virtually from the time of that arrival and for around a fifth of our estimated existence.

How have we continued drawing? As a group, only because a tiny fraction continues to draw for the rest of us. For example, modern industry is possible because of certain kinds of drawings, used in designing and producing artifacts, often at a variety of sites. No drawing, no manufactured goods. Historically, two bold lines have been scribed by the draughter's pen: the first separates craft and industrial societies. Then, for the latter or modern societies, technical drawing now redraws a line between two of the most important categories of human thought anywhere: the natural and the artificial. That is, anything that was made - any artifact - has to be drawn first.

Besides this there are great arts of drawing. We could easily be lost in the complexities of so much technical and artistic drawing, and there is other free drawing, as well. Still, I think that there is much to learn from studying our first beginnings.

Consider, for example, the topmost charcoal line in this prehistoric drawing on a cave wall. How knowledgeably it scribes the taut dorsal contour of a male lion. But besides depicting a lion, as made of marks it also registers the movement of an assured hand traveling more than eight feet over an undulating limestone surface. This single line is as bold as the lion, and the marking that makes it is no less assured. One could not look at this drawing without being aware of that line and of the action that made it. Although gesture serves line and line serves lion, none is lost in the other; awareness of each vivifies awareness of the others. Thus alleged oppositions of figuration, design and gesture disappear. True realism: the pictured lion seems to gain reality from the solid marked wall before us.

From Jean Clottes, ed., Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press) by kind permission of Jean Clottes.

DRAWING DISTINCTIONS
The Varieties of Graphic Expression
Patrick Maynard

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