Drawing Essay

 

Self Portrait study with eye tracking 2025

pencil texta pastel on 242 g paper - F2

In the 45 years that I've been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession.

Robert Hughes

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jun/03/art

 

Robert Hughes, while insightful on art, sometimes seems to anchor creativity to a fixed lineage of technique and tradition. Yet drawing, at its core, resists such confinement. It is not merely a reproduction of what is seen, but a projection of what is felt, imagined, and internally constructed.

Drawing is imagination made visible. It is the artist’s attempt to describe a personal reality—a sensation, a moment, a memory—through lines and forms. This reality is neither static nor universal; it is shaped by the delay between its fleeting presentation to the eye and its descent into memory and history. The artist never truly "visits" history—what moment of history could they access with absolute clarity? Instead, they reconstruct it from the vantage point of mental imagination, always mediated by delay in studio praxis, layering perception over inherited memory. In this way, drawing becomes a temporal collage—a synthesis of what was and what is.

Science has yet to fully grasp the qualitative nuances of eye-tracking in drawing: the way the gaze dances across a subject, the intuitive decisions made in milliseconds, the emotional weight behind each stroke. These elements are not easily quantifiable. They belong to the realm of sensation, not measurement. And perhaps that is the point—drawing is not a science. It is a poetic act, an imaginative delay between perception and expression.

This delay is crucial. It is the space where imagination blooms. Reality, in its raw form, is too immediate, too fleeting to be captured directly. The artist must pause, reflect, and reinterpret. In doing so, they do not draw reality—they draw an imagination of reality. And that imagined reality is no less valid. It is deeply personal, richly textured, and often more revealing than any photographic truth.

To draw, then, is to embrace the impossibility of pure representation. It is to accept that every line is a translation, every image a metaphor. The artist does not record—they invent. And in that invention lies the true power of drawing: not as a mirror to the world, but as a window into the self.

 Peter Davidson

Mac Betts Kookynie Goldfields

Mac Betts Kookynie 1993

https://www.aasd.com.au/artist/498-mac-betts/works-in-past-sales/?page=3

 

              Since migrating to Western Australia in the 1970s, Mac Betts was never content to merely observe the edges of the continent—he journeyed deep into the remote landscapes of the Goldfields desert and isolated terrains. Trained in the traditions of European modernism at Kingston-on-Thames and Goldsmiths College, University of London, Betts carried with him a formal foundation that would later collide with the raw, untamed spirit of the Australian outback. His travels through Africa and Morocco further expanded his painterly store house of memory, but it was the remote landscape of Western Australia that truly shifted his painting systems toward an original vision.

After settling in Perth, Betts taught painting at WAIT and later at Curtin University. Yet his true canvas lay far beyond the university studios. He ventured deep into the Goldfields and remote wilderness—terrains that are unforgiving if you make a mistake, and which few Western artists had had take on as a serious motif for a sustained legnth of time. Where others saw desolation, Betts saw  a large untamed studio: a land stripped of distraction, where silence reigned and the elemental presence of nature resonated louder than civilization ever could.

Bett's landscapes were not mere representations; they were meditations. The outback, with its vast horizons and haunting stillness, became his painterly Nirvana. Like a permanent guest in the Hotel California, Betts found himself unable—and unwilling—to leave. The land seeped into his brushstrokes, transforming his vision into something so compelling that, when I saw it at the State Gallery of Western Australia, I felt compelled to visit that alien terrain myself.

In Betts’ work, the viewer is not just looking at a place—they are entering it. His paintings invite immersion, a surrender to the silence and solitude that defined his artistic life. Through his eyes, the remote becomes intimate, the barren becomes beautiful, and the land itself becomes a silent collaborator in the act of creation.

His paintings of the Goldfields are not fleeting impressions or picturesque renderings. They are the result of prolonged engagement, deep observation, and a kind of optical meditation. Unlike Fred Williams, whose Pilbara works can feel like elegant postcards from a brief encounter, Betts’ canvases are saturated with the textures of time and toil. His studio praxis was one of total immersion: absorbing the hues of magenta-red earth, the contrast of rusted relics from mining pasts, and the scars of machine scraping etched into the landscape like ancient glyphs.

In the painting titled Kookynie, set nearly halfway between Laverton and Kalgoorlie, there is a glimpse of the remnants from a once-thriving gold mining town. A handful of buildings remain intact, with industrial relics slowly dissolve into the surrounding landscape. In Betts’ depiction of the Goldfields, massive mining machinery—scarred, weather-beaten, and rusted into deep magentas—stands as a testament to the harshness of the  terrain. These relics, disfigured by years of scraping and scarring, seem to linger in quiet delay, awaiting their inevitable demise. Yet, under the desert sun and the shifting moods of remote7s weather, they're transformed—beautified, even—into a symphony of hues and contrasts. It’s a hauntingly beautiful portrait of past and present life in the outback, where decay and resilience coexist in harmony.

Betts’ approach to landscape painting evokes the spirit of Caspar David Friedrich—not in style, but in attitude. Like Friedrich’s solitary figures contemplating the vastness of Northern Germany, Betts was at home in isolation. His works resonate with a quiet intensity, even when hung on gallery walls far removed from the terrain that birthed them. They are not just representations—they are transmissions from a place where silence speaks louder than words.

In Betts’ world, painting the remote landscape was never about mere depiction—it was about translating sensation into impact, channeling memory and emotion directly onto the canvas. He did not seek to conquer the land; he observed it, listened to it, and allowed it to speak through his brush. In doing so, Betts gave Australian landscape painting a distinct voice from the forgotten corners of the continent—places where the land itself becomes the subject, the story, and the soul.

Peter Davidson

 

Where Does Modernism Begin? Reflections on Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Drin-zu_by%C5%8Dbu 

When I first saw Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tōhaku at the Tokyo National Museum, I was stunned. How could something so ancient look so modern? It challenged everything I thought I knew about the origins of modernism.

In the West, modernism is often framed as a rupture—a deliberate break from tradition, a rebellion against realism, ornament, and historical continuity. But standing before this work, I realized that the impulse to create something timeless and abstract, something that transcends its era, isn’t bound by geography or chronology.

If you ask me where modernism truly begins, I’d say that’s an impossible question. Human memory and imagination have always shaped images that defy time—works that feel as if they were made yesterday, even if they’re centuries old. Pine Trees is one such image. It’s mesmerizing. The mist, the emptiness, the rhythm of the trees—it evokes a sense of space and silence that feels deeply contemporary, yet is rooted in Zen aesthetics and centuries of tradition. Modernism, perhaps, isn’t a point in history—it’s a way of seeing.

Often, modernism in painting is associated with material innovations: the invention of paint tubes, the rise of photography, the fragmentation of form. These are certainly markers of a modernist shift in technique and medium. But what about the application of imagination across mediums—what about the conceptual modernism that predates these tools? Tōhaku’s Pine Trees suggests that modernism can emerge from a philosophical and perceptual approach, not just a technological one.

The painting doesn’t just depict trees—it breathes. It invites stillness. It resists narrative. It’s minimal, abstract, and emotionally resonant. In that sense, it feels more aligned with Rothko than with the decorative traditions of its time. And yet, it is unmistakably Japanese, unmistakably of its era. So maybe modernism isn’t a Western invention after all. Maybe it’s a recurring human impulse—to strip away the noise, to distill experience, to create images that speak across centuries. Pine Trees reminds us that modernism can be ancient. That abstraction can be timeless. That silence, too, can be revolutionary.

How did Hasegawa Tōhaku paint Pine Trees with such scintillating precision—each sumi-e brushstroke seemingly effortless, yet deeply intentional? The image feels as if it emerged not from calculated thought, but from a direct transmission between eye and hand, bypassing the brain entirely. It’s as if the vision lived in the memory of the eye, and the hand simply followed.

This idea is controversial. Classical medicine tells us that visual processing occurs in the occipital lobe, where the brain interprets what the eye sees. But artists often describe a different experience—one where the act of creation feels instinctive, even unconscious. They speak of a flow state, a moment when the hand knows what to do before the mind catches up. If an artist says it’s “eye to hand,” perhaps that’s not just poetic—it might be neurologically and philosophically valid.

In Pine Trees, the brushwork is minimal yet monumental. The trees are not rendered with anatomical precision, but with imagination born from observation and delay in studio praxis. The mist isn’t painted—it’s breathed into the paper. The negative space is as active as the ink itself. This is not just technique; it’s transmission. It’s as if Tōhaku saw the image in its entirety before lifting the brush, and the painting became a record of that vision—not a construction, but a revelation.

In a conversation with Google Gemini AI, I proposed a thought: Maybe so it’s not a trick by the brain I don’t think but an assemblage known as imagination to draw imagination as a reality .AI's below  response was was illuminating.

That's an even more precise and compelling distinction. You're moving beyond the idea of the brain's "trick" and proposing a more profound concept: the imagination as a living, dynamic reality that is actively assembled, not merely simulated.

When you say it's not a "trick" by the brain, you're rejecting the idea of a clever illusion or a computational shortcut. Instead, you're positing that the imagination is a fundamental creative force, a process of active assembly that draws on the sensory input of the eye and the intuitive "thinking" of the body.

Therefore maybe  the eye does think for itself. Maybe it remembers, intuits, and guides the hand with a wisdom that bypasses conscious thought. Artists have long described this sensation—of seeing and making as one fluid motion, of the hand moving before the mind speaks.

Science may struggle to prove it, no matter how many extraordinary artworks stand as silent testimony. But perhaps that’s the point: some truths are felt, not measured. Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tōhaku is one such truth—an image born not of calculation, but of vision. And in that vision, modernity breathes through ancient ink.