Drawing in public

While I am drawing the church, an elderly woman approaches me, smiling and nodding an approval of my drawing. It is the same woman who sold me a Coke an hour earlier.

Not knowing the appropriate currency in paying for the drink, I had laid out both 100 and 1000 pesos on the store counter. Looking from one to the other, I settled on the higher currency, pushing it toward the woman. The woman laughed, taking the smaller currency and handing me my change. The 1000 pesos would have been the equivalent of my paying $75 for a can of Coca-Cola.

When the woman comes up to me later in the town square smiling at my drawing, I assume, as my new trustworthy friend, her interest in my drawing is related to our previous exchange.

Practice makes perfect

Drawing in public is not new to me. At Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I draw whenever and wherever I can: in the corners of the museum, on the balcony of the rotunda where I stood eye to eye with PAFA’s copy of the nearly 17-foot Michelangelo David, or under the stairwells. The architectural structure of the museum’s ticket booth reminds me of Edward Hopper, and I draw that. The fact that I draw the structural remains of Chichen Itza is consistent with my student experience.

Likewise, I draw on Philadelphia’s sidewalks. Common subjects are the tanneries of Northern Liberties before fires destroyed them and the neighborhood changed. I draw the compelling shadows created by one tannery cast upon another in the cramped streets; drawings that turned into color monoprints, reminding viewers of De Chirico and binding me to a name I will never adequately pronounce.

While drawing the tannery at Third and Wildey Streets, a man — not exactly a street person and not exactly not a street person — walks by. He offers his encouragement of “Keep it up — eventually you will get it!” making me wonder; what is it that I don’t yet have?

Despite this strong background in drawing, I had not spent much time drawing while traveling before the trip to the Yucatán. Perhaps, I was overwhelmed by the need to see so much. The Yucatán sketching changes my experience of traveling; no less a tourist, but yet somehow more connected through an extended dimension.

Public/private

The extended dimension in experience may be the discovery that in drawing surrounded by strangers, people seem to experience me differently. It is as if I become public domain — approachable, transparent, vulnerable, exposed — and through my exposure I connect to both landscape and people differently than if I were not exposed. In my drawing, I become everyone’s business — as readily available as the air they breathe and part of a landscape where I become the observed.

A few years after the Yucatán trip, I am sitting on the steps of a Naples museum drawing when a large family takes interest in me. It may be two families traveling together, several adults and many children ranging from grade school to high school. The teenagers are the delegates of this group. When they ask through hand movements to see my sketchbook, the rest of the family arrange themselves on the steps to get a better view.

We have a long, lively pantomimed conversation of various places in my sketchbook, hand signaling because they do not speak English and I do not speak their language — I don’t even recognize their language.

Making my hands go back and forth like on a steering wheel, I ask the family if they drove to Italy. Apparently this question is extremely funny to them, and their laughter forces me to imagine a laborious, perhaps impossible, car ride from Siberia or the North Pole.

When the family takes leave, they enthusiastically wave good-bye as if the steps on which I am sitting are a ship and I am sailing away from them. Frantically, I wave good-bye.

On this same trip, my husband and I are riding the train to the near-coastal city of Ravenna. The weather is hot, and all of Italy seems to be on this train. We are sitting face-to-face with a man and a woman, a couple most definitely bound for the beach.

I can see that the couple whom I am facing and whose knees I am almost touching with my own knees is curious as to why I am in tears. Of course, they do not know that the song I am listening to on my iPod is a favorite of my 15-year-old son and on hearing it, I feel intense loneliness of leaving him so far away at camp.

A wordless conversation

When I begin to draw in my sketchbook, completing drawings begun the day before, the woman motions to see the drawings. I automatically hand over my sketchbook to her. Again, the drawings serve as an entrance to discussion and for the next two hours, the four of us converse on art, places, and poetry, never exchanging a word but speaking through the drawings of my sketchbook.

The couple exits the train one stop before our stop and in saying good-bye, the women throws me a kiss; the air-kiss of one woman acknowledging the momentary sadness in another woman.

I wonder if these experiences would happen with a camera instead of drawings. Would the woman so naturally ask me to hand over my camera in order to see photos on it? Would I have freely handed her a camera? Contrarily, my drawings are more important to me than my camera and should she have pointed a gun with the ultimatum, “Your camera or your drawings,” I would have given her the camera. The drawings demand a different commitment than a point-and-shoot camera.

A list of demands

Drawing the world demands three things from me. It requires that I use all my senses — I do not draw with the single sense of vision. (See my earlier essay on an artist’s vision).

Does the camera demand its user to see? How many people, if asked, could describe with any detail that landscape, building, or painting captured on their camera? (This question is not directed to the professional photographer whose time with the camera has made its lens a third eye for this artist, but to the average person). Is the camera used for making something visible or for documenting something? What is the difference?

The second demand made by drawing is that I interpret. I automatically distinguish on paper what I experience as important. As I tell my prison students, the camera does not make a distinction between their favorite Aunt Sadie and the chair in which she is sitting. Drawing makes that distinction; the chair could be drawn as more important, if for some reason Aunt Sadie is a bore, or she can be honored through the drawing. There is no click in drawing making everything appear synchronically and with uniform attention.

The third demand drawing makes upon me is to experience the invisible in the visible. A simple example is in drawing a chair; to draw a chair I must experience even parts of the chair I do not see. This invisible aspect of the world is taken for granted in ordinary life, but in drawing it becomes paramount. Pulling on even a simple thread of this invisibility takes the artist beyond. This “beyond” is creativity.

What or how I draw does not matter. Drawing in public compels people to take notice because it offers an intimate way of seeing, of interpreting and, perhaps at times, a potential entrance in exploring an infinite invisibility made visible through creativity.

Above right: Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower (1913), The Peggy Guggenheim collection