Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing

A Creative Path to Awareness

Wendy Ann Greenhalgh

• Publisher: Leaping Hare Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781782403401
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Persönlichkeitsentwicklung

Everyone can draw. And everyone can be mindful. Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing is an engaging and enlightening insight into why the everyday process of setting pencil to paper is a meditative act by its innate nature. An enjoyable and discursive text offers an absorbing read and is accompanied by exercises that offer the reader practical experience in drawing mindfully. A lively, surprising and inspirational creative journey.

CHAPTER ONE

JUST DRAWING

The wonderful thing about the path of mindful drawing is that it is an entirely practical path. Young or old, rich or poor, irrespective of culture or gender – we can all experience this active, creative mindfulness practice. It’s a dynamic process, which invites us to engage with awareness not just with our minds, but with our bodies too, with our whole being. All we need do is – do it. Just draw, and all the rest follows.

JUST DRAWING

So how can we make a start on the path of mindful drawing? The truth is we’ve probably strayed onto it already through the act of doodling, and in this simple practice many of the profound truths of mindfulness and drawing are contained.

DOODLING MAKES IT ALL SOUND a little throw-away, though, doesn’t it? Perhaps just doodling doesn’t quite have the same ring for you as just drawing. Maybe it seems a little less Zen, a bit more mundane. But don’t underestimate doodling just because of the name. Instead, let’s get to the heart of doodling’s potential by asking the same question about it that we asked about drawing. What happens when we doodle? What is going on? The answer is that doodling is drawing without any particular object in mind, no destination, no aspiration. It’s a kind of mark-making that is completely instinctive and as such it has some distinct advantages, and much to teach us about mindfulness.

Doodling is drawing without any particular object in mind, no destination, no aspiration

Out of the Head & into the Body

Two things are principally happening when we doodle, which in combination make it a great mindfulness practice.

DRAWING EXERCISE

MINDFUL DOODLING

Let’s try a simple drawing exercise. I suggest you try it for five to ten minutes to start with.

• Get a piece of A4 paper and a pencil or a pen. Sit comfortably, holding your pencil as you would normally. Keep the tip resting on the page and close your eyes.

• Take a few moments to focus on the feeling of your pencil between your fingers. This is something we do almost every day – we write, we scribble notes, we sign our name, but very rarely do we pay attention to how it actually feels to hold a pen in our hand.

• See if you can notice the different places the pencil presses against your skin. Is it resting on a knuckle or on the soft pads of your fingers? Is the surface rough or smooth? How does it feel? Experiment with how you hold the pencil. Are you holding it tightly or with a loose and relaxed grip? Can you loosen or tighten your hold so that it feels poised and yet still relaxed?

• Start to make some simple shapes on the page – all the time keeping your eyes closed. Make shapes simply because it feels good to make them. They might be continuous circles or spirals, zig-zags, straight lines, wavy lines, geometric type shapes, anything at all, just one or a combination of all.

• Keep your eyes closed and resist the urge to peek. Don’t try to draw anything in particular; you’re not drawing either from life or from your imagination here, you’re just doodling, just making marks, just making marks that feel instinctive and enjoyable to make.

• When you feel yourself getting a little tired or bored with one shape, change your focus and draw another shape. Keep coming back to the sensation of your hand drawing, brushing against the paper, holding the pencil. Keep drawing – keep doodling just what feels good, the shapes you feel you instinctively want to.

Perfect Timing

It can be helpful with some of these drawing exercises to set a timer. Setting an alarm means you don’t have to keep an eye on the clock; you can just let yourself become absorbed in the activity. Without an alarm we can often get preoccupied with time. Have we done the activity for long enough? It feels like five minutes, but when we open our eyes, peeking at the clock – we find only one minute has gone by! And in wondering and peeking, we’ve lost that flow, that absorption in the activity we were moving towards.

Using a timer also replicates the experience of being in a workshop, and allows us to open to doing things in different ways, trying things for a longer or shorter time than we might normally. We might feel we could never draw the same thing for ten minutes, for example, but are then surprised to find – as the alarm goes – that we can, and not only that, but we wish we had more time. Likewise, we might deem it impossible to draw someone’s face in five minutes, and then discover we’ve done a pretty good job of it!

There are many free mindfulness timers and Apps online, which can be downloaded to computers or phones. Or you could set your alarm. Why not give it a try?

Firstly, freed from the requirement to make our drawing look like anything and immersed in doing only what feels good and natural, the voice in our head that can start up – telling us that we can’t draw, or that what we’re doing isn’t any good – is effectively silenced. There is nothing for our inner-critic to latch on to, because doodling is about the process of making marks, not a finished product. No one ever held up our doodles in class and pronounced, ‘Well, this simply isn’t good enough!’

This kind of abstract image, then, has no definitive means by which to judge it, and so our heads, our thinking-minds, are much less likely to get involved in the process. Of course, they might still try to get a word in, with little whispers like: You’re not doing this right. If this happens, the best thing to do is to notice that little story-telling voice, mentally give it a nod of acknowledgement: Yep, I hear you’re there, but listen, I’m just doodling, so you don’t need to get involved right now. Then you can go back to doodling.

The second thing that doodling does for us is bring us right back to the physical act of drawing; after all, there’s nothing else going on. We’re not looking at anything in particular. We’re not copying anything or transposing it to a page. We’re just making marks. In the exercise above, I suggested you pay particular attention to the sensations in your hand – of course, if you’re on the phone, doodling in the margins of the electricity bill, you may not be aware of this in quite the same way. But the truth is that our hand is still giving feedback to our brain even when we’re not consciously aware of it – and I believe that many of the shapes we make when we unconsciously doodle are the result of our subliminal enjoyment of the physical process of making them.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

PAUL KLEE (1879–1940)

SWISS-GERMAN ARTIST

When we practise the mindfulness of drawing, however, our aim is to become more aware, more alive to our experience of mark-making and how it affects us. So placing a particular focus on the hands can be a really useful thing to do – and it’s something that we will return to again and again throughout this book. Whenever we’re drawing, whether it’s because we’re following an exercise, or are just out and about with our sketchbook, we benefit from taking a few mindful moments, both before and while we draw, to connect with our hands. This reminds us that drawing involves the whole body and even the breath, not just eyes and hands.

Waking to the Body

I think my first really concrete experience of the physical nature of drawing came on a summer school I attended before I went to art college. It was my first time working in a proper artists’ studio...