Hi everyone. It has been some months since I made a piece of writing to send out, which feels worth noting. In the meanwhile I have been drawing a lot, traveling some, and running. This is a newsletter about drawing. Please read and enjoy, and if you like it, share it with someone else who might.
January, February, March I sit at the big desk. From outside, light falls on my back, casting a shadow shape I copy onto paper with a felt tip pen. On the trail to the ridge, a mushroom pushes up from the earth under a dry old oak tree, and it goes on the page too (disc for a cap, sturdy line for the stem). Always posing, Marcel is a repeat character in my sketchbook, curved line back whiskers, two checkmark ears perked up listening out the window.
My drawing renaissance started suddenly after making a four panel comic about which I felt pleased. I made another and another and then I registered for a class in children’s book illustration, which sent me into a swiftly flowing drawing-for-homework river which I half expected to hate but did not. I like building pictures and telling stories in the form of comics and illustrations, but it’s a tender process. Sometimes I become frustrated with the way I draw. Why does it look like that? You don’t even know how to draw a tree with leaves. These 15 million people from Instagram are better at drawing than you.
I’ve had a complicated relationship to drawing as long as I can remember. When I was very young, I used to walk across the street to my neighbor J’s house and ask if she wanted to “paper play”. Paper play meant that we sat in her bedroom and drew pictures for a while, then we cut them out with scissors and they became the dolls for our make-believe games. J was older than me and more skilled at drawing and using scissors, so her paper play dolls were inevitably better than mine. Also, I got bored of drawing faster than she did. I much preferred the part where the drawings came to life and danced around. Even now, drawing can be quiet and slow and hard, though it feels more and more like that is what I am looking for in an art practice.
So here I am, intermittently delighted by the silence, lines, and story that come into existence through drawing and intermittently frustrated by how I draw. My pictures don’t look like any of the professional children’s book illustrators that I know of, or any of the 15 million people from Instagram, or like my neighbor J’s drawings. They look characteristically mine. Meaning, the drawing always looks like I made it, even when I don’t want it to. This is a quality I’d like to explore.
Because I am a renaissance soul (read: generalist), my newly reinvigorated practice of drawing has been punctuated by other activities, hobbies, social engagements, and creative practices. One such activity is singing.
Every Tuesday, I gather with a few friends and newcomers at S’s house to sing old hymns and harmonies from The Sacred Harp. Forget reading music. I usually just follow R or S in the treble section. Unlike drawing, singing is a practice I entered into with no preexisting knowledge. I don’t know how to sing; I don’t pretend to know. Before I joined this group, I just knew that when I hum a tune along with my guitar or figure out how to harmonize my voice with the radio, it brings me joy. In this context, I have no qualms about being a total beginner.
In an effort to grasp more of what’s going on, I’m teaching myself a little music theory here and there about sounds and songs and singing. One word from my learnings sticks in my mind, even after I leave S’s house into the dark street on Tuesday nights, and that word is timbre.
Timbre (pronounced tamber) refers to the “tonal quality” of a music note, or the part of a sound that tells you about the organism or instrument from whence it came. For example, the note of G is a sound. Whatever source makes the G note sound brings with it a certain timbre, or quality, to that sound, letting you know that it comes from a vintage trombone, a cheap kazoo, or Taylor Swift’s larynx.
Why can’t drawing have timbre too?
Just like my singing voice, my drawings have a voice that only I can create and which is the only one I can create. Though less obvious than singing, the way I make marks on paper is affected by the body that I have. Sure, I could learn to copy another style, but I’m not really trying to do that. I just want to make pictures honestly and from a real soul-place. Moving toward that goal means drawing in my own voice and timbre.1
The timbre of my drawings is sort of cute even when trying not to be. It’s generally limited to grayscale because I’m still afraid of color. It’s based on shapes I feel drawn to, like stumps and mountains and mushrooms and people walking around.
Children are experts at leaning into their own timbre when it comes to self expression. There’s no self-criticism at first. Even though my drawings are not scribbles and splashes of color, I can still get get quiet and listen for which creative decisions to make next, following my own intuition the way a little kid might. When I draw like this, I feel like an instrument, expressing my own beingness through building an image with hand and pen.
This feels like a sacred thing. Sacred is an awkward word, but it’s pertinent in describing a unique and unavoidable aspect of my being.2 My body draws with a certain timbre; I can choose to squirm away from that or not. I can’t make somebody else’s art, so I might as well make my own and imbue the process with sacredness.
It’s helpful to think of my timbre as a part of my body: something that I’m getting to know and learning to work with, as opposed to something entirely within my control. In this way, the timbre of drawing is a spiritual practice. It is radical self acceptance and a radical love for what we make, and a recognition that my body makes art with some input from me but a lot of input from that third thing which permeates all life and motion and energy (god) (also a very awkward word). This notion releases pressure to make something particular and good, and instead I can sit down and draw and think to myself, “what a beautifully weird thing the universe just created through my voice!”
When the timbre of my voice is sacred, singing is fun even if I don’t hit all the right notes. When the timbre of my artistic output is sacred, mark making becomes a thrill even when I don’t know how to draw a car or feet. What will this body and mind come up with today? How is she going to express it on the page? Curiosity and true creativity (from that soul place) can bloom.
My friend Nicole Lavelle just wrote an essay that is really beautiful and smart about the “meaning or energetic quality” of the term vernacular. It helped me to realize that what I am reaching toward with words like timbre and voice is actually also my own person drawing vernacular. Please go read her essay right now.
The book we sing out of at S’s house is called the Sacred Harp. It refers to the human voice as the holiest of all instruments. Pertinent.
Thanks for the inspiration. It can be hard to quiet that inner critic, but it’s all just a process of discovery and honing the practice.