Automatic Drawing
pen + ink
This is a practice that helps me get out of my own way. I set a few constraints for myself: one size of paper, black ink, and a three-minute timer per drawing. I have to be drawing the whole time, without stopping to think, and when the timer runs out, I begin again.
“Automatic drawing” has a long history, veering between the occult, the psychological, and the practical. Depending on who you ask, automatic writing and drawing can be used to brainstorm ideas, investigate the subconscious, communicate with spirits, split the self, enter a trance state, or channel the divine. W.B. Yeats called it “the unknown writer.” Jack Kerouac called it the “undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words.” The surrealists used it to reveal hidden aspects of the inner psyche.
Whatever the source, the compelling part to me is what comes through when the censorious thinking mind is short-circuited. What emerges from that quiet place, when the drone of self-criticism goes on mute?
For me, apparently, it ranges: sometimes there are people, sometimes beasties or plants, shapes and fragments, textures and forms that don’t quite resolve into a recognizable object. And there’s an emotional range: in these drawings I see rage, grief, despair, silliness, desire, love, hope, peace, and all the other unnamed parts of the cascading internal parade that marches through all of us, all the time.
