What is this column? I’m going to do that classic “answer by saying what it’s not” thing. First, it’s not going to be the definitive answer on anything. It’s not going to be “the way”, I’m not going to preach from on high on how things should be done.
I draw for a living and in an age when folks are trying to crack the code to making art, but I want to share the human experience behind the images you all see. This business is wonderful and treacherous, I’ll share stories here about how I get by.
If that’s instructive, then cool. But none of this is gospel.
My name is Mike Hawthorne, and welcome to Draw is Life
As a kid my mother was friends with an Illiterate man. He was ashamed of it, but for whatever reason he opened up about it to my mother. She did a thing I hated at the time, she offered to have me, a kid, help him learn to read.
Many years later I see that there was some wisdom to it. My mother understood that it was less intimidating to have a kid like me help him. I was pretty quiet around adults and I wasn’t particularly bright so I wouldn’t overthink it. I’d just try to show him what words looked like.
We worked on a few lessons and I recall he learned very quickly. It struck me as tragic because it wasn’t that he couldn’t learn to read, it was that he had all these social roadblocks that kept him from doing it.
I also remember being struck by the fact that he didn’t know what the words look like. I was always a visual thinker, so the idea that you couldn’t recognize a word without having to interpret the letters individually was hard to wrap my head around.
But he just couldn’t see the words.
Let’s compare that to art. People regularly tell me they “couldn't draw a stick figure”.
Many people will freely admit to visual illiteracy* and think nothing of it. They admit it free of any shame or stigma and don’t feel any need to learn it. Visual literacy, in the sense I’m talking about it, lacks the social & practical value that literacy does.
Years back my family and I spent a summer in Greece. One night, over diner and wine, I ended up agreeing to draw the portrait of my wife’s cousin. As I worked, other relatives would walk past and casually crit the drawing with remarks like “the tip of the nose is too pronounced” or “one eye is too high”.
Now, I’m a trained artist so this got on my nerves a little. But I’d grudgingly reexamine the drawing and would find they were spot on.
Like, weirdly so.
The Greeks just seem to understand the subtleties of looking at things, learning what things really look like in a way that I haven’t come across here in the states.
I worked with a sculptor many years ago and he said to me once that when he was in Italy not everyone could draw a foot, but they could all explain how.
It’s not that we’re incapable of the skill, it’s that somewhere along the line we’ve stopped valuing this kind of visual literacy. Maybe it started back during the cold war, with an effort to promote abstract art above Russian realism (Thanks CIA!) or maybe it was just a confluence of many reasons. I’m not going to argue the “why” here, but it happened and we’ve been struggling to draw stick figures ever since.
I’m not promoting the idea that everyone should be a trained artist (everyone should, but that’s beside the point). I’m saying we need to really learn to see. See in the way that my wife’s Greek family could. In the way that my sculptor friend said his Italian friends could.
That’s what I’m trying to get at. Really learning to look at things, studying them in a way that takes more time than watching a TikTok, then… maybe… draw a little. Maybe badly, but so what? Every drawing done from observation teaches more than a thousand 15 second videos.
We can write without being a “writer”, we should be able to draw without being an “artist”.
Try being at least as brave as my mother’s illiterate friend.
Try to learn what the world looks like.
*Visual literacy is sometimes used in a sciency way to mean the ability to understand graphic signs, which is obviously an important skill. I’m talking about it in a more artistic sence, understanding proportions, color, perspective, and the shapes of things.
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Draw is Life: NEW monthly column!
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JAN 7
You near Philly? I’ll be at the Moore College of Art in Philly this weekend!
More info-
Over on my Patreon we dropped an episode of Life Studied for the month of April!
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Oh, and here’s a peek at this month’s Patreon process video.
Lots of cool stuff waiting for you on my Patreon.
Thanks!
Mike
PS - Here’s Magnus completely passed out.
That’s a great mantra. It’s a really succinct way to explain that how we see and appreciate art helps us see the world, and hopefully ourselves. (My son who’s 11 is still very literal so abstract art drives him nuts! I keep trying to reinforce it’s not what the painter painted but what he saw and interpreted. Meaning is for professors!)
Thanks for a great post to kickstart my brain today!
This was great. Love the concept of visual literacy. When I talk to my kids about art, I ask them what they see, not what they think it “means.” I think what you’re talking about extends from art into the world.