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.
