Trauma, Chaos, and drawing

Category: Observations

I have drawn from a very young age. As an artist, it's my default medium. There are artists who see the world artistically through photography or film or clay or corten steel- may way is through drawing.

This is why I am ostensibly a printmaker at my current institution: because intaglio is uniquely suited to my approach to drawing.

Drawing for me has done many things, but I think it has been most important in the way it allows me a control over the world that is often otherwise not in my possession. This is a confession of sorts. There is something both profoundly human and somewhat pathetic about using one's art to solve one's problems. And the desire for control is at times a less than commendable motive.

I'm thinking about this because I'm remembering how, in my life, drawing has, in the presence of crisis or trauma or chaos, functioned and not functioned to my selfish ends.

I'm recalling a drawing class that I took in undergrad that, occuring as it did in the midst of personal chaos, of newish fears and considerations of my own mortality and fragility - the typical post-adolescent recognition that the sense of invincibility one earlier felt was an illusion (something I had utterly grasped intellectually, but that does not do it) (the admixture of the traditional fears and a small medical crisis exaggerated these out of their due proportion, I say retrospectively). For some reason, our primary lesson, to, in a fashion both modernist and self-consciously Eastern, let go of our desire for control over the drawing-as-result-of-a-process, rather than liberating me, led me into greater internal conflict. The result was a discomfort with drawing that would be take quite a while to overcome.

I also remember my temporary incapacity to draw following September 11th. The Thursday following the attacks, I told my teacher that I would be far below 100%, and unlikely to have enough focus to produce good work. For some reason that remains obscure to me he asked why. (September 11th may have been a far-off and, because I was not connected to any of those killed, abstract trauma, its awesome horror, spectacular amplification, and my simple empathy made it a trauma indeed) Drawing had not served me in the immediate term to fit my mind to the ugly edges of the world. Yet in the coming weeks, that event and the war in Afghanistan would lead me into a rather ambitious and personally significant drawing that, if not succeeding in ordering my world, served its purpose.

At the moment I am weathering a familial circumstance which frightens me and gives me trauma as I define it. (That is, I consider trauma to be any circumstance that redefines the self or the world outside of the self in ways that the two cannot be easily or immediately reconciled) On a certain level I have not confronted my direst fears head on. I have at no point in time conceived of the world in which my loved one is passed away. There is something about the leaden sense of death that has pervaded this entire Christmas season that makes this ideation almost unnecessary.

The fact is that a consistent discipline of drawing has both provided me with the pleasure necessary to see the greater circumstance beyond the lens of doom, and it has also served as a channel for these emotions and others in this time of multiple discomforts, longings, and losses.

This finally takes me to the advice that I gave to a good friend who is dealing with a terrible loss. I suggested to be aware of the ways in which grief and loss can make the act of drawing an act that does not serve intended ends. And yet I sit here recognizing that drawing in the midst of loss or crisis can provide meaning and liberation. I am myself and cannot speak definitively on this subject, one's pain is one's own and one's methods to cope are perhaps as unknowable, but I know that for myself drawing can do what discussion sometimes cannot: anchor us in unsettled seas.