HOW can we pinpoint the origins of the human impulse to draw; is it to record? a test of visual skill, involving precision and honed observation? Incantation? Mere love of line? None of these are enough to describe this act of moving an implement across a ground that leaves a trace of itself and perhaps builds a recognizable replica of something out there. If the implement holder is reproducing an object existing in the surrounding material world the challenge is enormous… is one drawing the outline, the mass, the spirit, the movement, the roughness, the delicacy, shadow, texture, soul? One’s attention cannot hold. The act of drawing is a recognition of the demarcation of the inner and the outer and simultaneously an attempt to join the two together; but then one would not want the inner and the outer to be inseparable, to be unidentifiable one from the other, for then the act of drawing would disappear due to meaninglessness. Humans who had once known the experience would be bereft, this confirmation of the self now vanished. The hands, the manifesting instruments of the brain, have an evolved value all their own. But the contact, the inner mind and outer world, something quite other than the self, the contact can be electrifying. 

Then there is the form alone, I used to think that God just got better and better at drawing flora and fauna. A dawn redwood, with its symmetrically placed branches stuck into a wide cone of a trunk looks stolidly awkward compared to the dancing limbs of an oak. Similarly, the ginkgo appears too simple with its leaves sprouting directly from the branch with no intervening twigs. We call this evolution. The idea that the universe was sketched out with a pencil is farfetched, but we can understand something of its million displays through tracing its lines; it is like the drawing exercise of imaging the tip of your pencil touching the object you are rendering. Of course, the imagination can take off, and one can draw anything one pleases, one’s own cosmos. Whichever the choice, every line counts; it is evidence of whether one is following with all one’s senses, if one can drop a certain rigidity. If every touch of the pencil onto paper matters, then I am alive.

Artist Bio

Rhonda Smith has been immersed in visual study all her adult life. She graduated from St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, and studied at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Cooperativa Mosaicisti, Ravenna Italy, and has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She painted until 2017 and has now turned to sculpture and drawing. She is part of the Boston, MA community of artists and works as well in southern Maine. She has shown in Boston area galleries and her work is in many corporate and private collections.