Kinesthesia and Imagination in Drawing
From “Previewing¨ in Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner
We use previewing not only with eye and imagination, but also in actual bodily movements, calling on our kinesthetic sense. This sense recognizes verticality because we learned to stand upright; the horizontal, because among other skills, we sign our name on the dotted line. Having moved through space in multiple environments and touched myriad surfaces, our entire body has a stored memory of many life experiences. And again, quite literally, we can draw on this sense as artists.
The various claims made here are as follows (Garcia 2003, 37):
- There is a kinesthetic sense, i.e. kinesthesia exists
- This sense involves the ability to intuit direction or trajectory (given the examples provided in the quote).
- This intuition is developed through entrained or conditioned movement, the position of limbs or the body and external resistance to motion
- The body as a whole can hold memories of movement experiences.
- The intuition of direction or trajectory is a function of the body’s ´“memory¨ of experiences of physical motion.
By previewing is meant “drawing with [one’s] eyes¨ (Ibid). Drawing with one’s eyes involves previewing one’s “activity using a variety of tools […]¨ (Ibid). That is, it involves anticipating and envisioning the activity one is engaging in, rather than the outcome or result, which in this case would be the final sketch or drawing. Yet, the envisioning of the sketching aids the success of the actual sketching. In practice, this looks like repeating and successively pausing movement along the line to be drawn as one observes the object one wants to represent (see 20241102175313-Scale_and_Proportion_of_Drawing).
The linking of imagination to movement is exemplified by the following exercise:
Pretzel Preview Exercise from “Previewing¨ in Drawing for the Absolute Beginner
[…] 2. Imagine […] a curvy pretzel on […] paper 3. Looking at the imaginary pretzel, let your eyes actually move as they follow the path of its shape. 4. Your gaze won’t flow smoothly. It will feel something like a connect-the-dot exercise as your eye gathers information at points along a shape. […]
The eye movement emulates, due to its connection to the movement of the styli via hand-eye coordination, the motion or movement needed to be enacted by the hand, before any styli is applied to the available or opportune surface. The emulation of this movement depends upon the imagination, in that the eye does not actually follow anything extant out in the world.
Potentiality and the movement caused by the imaginary
The movements enacted by the eye in the aforementioned exercise are tapping into a potentiality or virtuality, a specifically defined field comprised of concrete possibilities that constrain, thus affect, the the motion.
Previewing and precise, detailed drawings
Given that the eye does not have a smooth gradient of movement from any given point to any other point, but rather quickly jolts, allowing for the light it takes in to be experienced as sequential discrete image moments, the detail with which the geometry or geometries of an an ongoing enclosed edge are perceived depends on the amount of points along that edge that have been gazed at in succession. To draw with different amounts of detailed conveyed about the edge of an object, the nature of the previewing matters. So does it matter to the degree of precision in the resulting drawing’s reflection of the imagined object.
Kinesthesia of the imagination (or imaginative kinesthesia), then, is why iterative sketching and the principle of observation are important for improving drawing skills.
philosophy aesthetics epistemology psychology psychology_of_space psychology_of_art cognitive_psychology sketches sketching cognitive_science science art visual_art kinesthesia conditioning drawings potentiality virtuality metaphysics hand-eye_coordination hand-eye_co-ordination possibility kinesis social_science
bibliography
- Capp, Robbie, ed. “Previewing.” In Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, 37. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2003.