exercises in observation

I’ve been thinking for a while about the connection between drawing and observation, and the duration involved in the process of perceiving, comprehending, remembering and representing. Is there a more concentrated visual experience than looking at something and observing it, absorbing it to consciousness and letting it reappear at the end of a pencil? When else would you look at something for days on end, calculating the distance between one tiny detail and the next?

I’ve wanted to draw something again for a while, and I thought this rock was as good as anything else. (Utako has a little pile of them next to a pot plant in the studio, looking very Japanese). The more I look at it, the more I see. What was just a rock becomes a vast and endless terrain of details, a fascinating object. One black pockmark becomes a huge crater with ridges, caves and cliffs. Observing it, I try to absorb the exact curvature of its form and the essence of its “rockiness”, even the weight, coolness and roughness you can’t see with your eyes. It’s not the finished drawing I’m interested in; it’s the drawing as this process that makes connections between matter, your eye, your mind and your fingertips.

Can a drawing be a kind of mapping of an observation? Drawing the maps of daily manoeuvres in Berlin (and here) was an observational process, in which the observation took the form of language rather than direct representation. But both kinds of drawing, diagrammatic and representational, are about discovering the relationship between multiple points of experience.

I am trying to think of other ways of drawing as well, other ways of exercising my observational skills. Videoing and photographing don’t quite have the same effect. Your observation is filtered through the apparatus, which does the observing for you (Although they have their own merits and uses…) But this way your body becomes the apparatus directly.