If I Could Write With a Blindfold On ...

I started a Learn to Draw class three weeks ago, inspired by my daughter. She’s doing drawing classes as part of her Bachelor of Fashion and Textile Design and when I visited her in Sydney recently, I saw one of her latest drawings. It was just done in pencil. It was of a face. And, my god, it was fantastic. I had no idea that a simple pencil could produce something so beautiful.

So I enrolled in a Learn to Draw class because I want to be able to draw a face as well as she can with just a simple pencil. And after just three weeks, the art class has been so revealing to me, not just about drawing, but about writing. Sounds weird, I know, but bear with me.

Doing to Do, Instead of Doing to Produce

The first week of class was all about hand-eye coordination, which I’d never thought about in relation to art. Turns out, it’s as important in drawing as it is in sport.

To teach us this fundamental skill, the teacher asked us to look at a picture of a hand and to draw what we saw in the picture, keeping our eyes fixed to that picture, never looking down at what we were drawing, and never lifting our pencil from the page, never picking up an eraser to change any marks we made. This process is called a continuous line drawing, for obvious reasons!

I found it incredibly meditative. To just let my pencil meander over the page, following the lines of the hand that I could see in the prompt picture before me. I felt no pressure at all because it was obvious to me that what I was drawing wasn’t going to be any good, wasn’t meant to be any good—I was doing it to learn a skill, not to produce an artwork. I was doing it just to “do”, rather than to make something for an audience.

So many people in the class rebelled at what we’d been asked to do. They wanted desperately to look at what they were drawing. They wanted to lift their pencil off the page. How could they possibly know, they asked, what they were drawing if they couldn’t look at it?

You’ll know what you’re drawing because the prompt picture is right in front of you, the teacher replied. The minute you stop looking at that prompt picture, then you aren’t drawing a hand anymore; you’re drawing what you think a hand looks like.

There was so much discomfort with this process that only about half the class returned the following week!

Photograph of the poet Anne Sexton by Rollie McKenna. Sexton is looking just as relaxed and gorgeous as I do every day at my desk—not!

So What Does This have to Do With Writing?

Everything!