Lineament: Drawing the Line
“Don’t say ‘um’ with a line,” I would instruct, “Um is inarticulate because unsure. Um is an embarrassment, an admission of ignorance. Don’t sketch. Don’t scribble. Draw. A line well drawn is a line well-spoken. Notice the similarities in the lines of Shakespeare and Raphael.”
A strong line is a thing of virtue. All works of art are things of virtue. The greater the virtue the greater the art. Vice diminishes all it touches, as in persons as in pictures. The more perfect the virtue the more perfect the art. Weak lines, as in the lines of Gaugin and Matisse, Angelou and Ginsburg, corrupt, confuse, and dull the mind because they lie low. “Be true, be certain in your lines.”
Understanding
The more one understands, the more one can create. Babies scream, masters speak with ease of comprehension, generously. The baby’s cry hurts, the master’s line pleases. Notice the lines of Tennyson and Leonardo, the pleasing mastery, the comprehension of Truth, the manifestation of Beauty. Consider: discipline in artistry causes ecstasy, participation in the divine as in Wagner’s Tristan Chord. A great work of art participates in the perfection of God’s beauty.
Because great art is transcendent, we in art (well, when the art is in us) bridge the chasm between flesh and spirit. The universe knows itself by the mind of man, a small thing contiguous with the All Good which is God. A work of art speaks of the universe transcendently from mind to mind through and beyond time. A work of art is a godlike making from mind into the universe of things. We understand lines because we are contiguous in God. And this is the nature of lines in thought, on paper, in people.
The Language of Line
Lines in language, on paper, and in silhouette are taught by drawing-out what is inside, which is the consciousness of beauty, goodness, and truth. Lines describe God’s Creation, and this is why we cannot describe nothingness and why the modernist is flummoxed. We cannot conceive nothingness because God is. When teaching the language of line, teach truth slowly in repetition, articulately in good models. Shakespeare and Raphael, the poet Pope and Pope the architect will serve.
Task a student with copying, mimicking lines, mimicking words, each word, each line to produce its created effect again and again, and again. Consistent in the way of Truth. Straight lines mimic constructed space, curved lines mimic growing space. Diagonal lines recede. One small line on a page will show itself greater than ten tall lines. Et cetera.
We speak. We breathe. Our heart follows beats. A clock tick, tick, tick, tick, tick’s, we “tock” when we talk, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock in verse. There is pattern in creation. A him a her, an over an under, a mating of this and that in making. This is good, this is true, this is God as God would have it be in you and in me.
A curved line repeated creates the idea of volume, a space containing energy. The human body, all organic bodies are the energy of life expanding. Notice an egg. Find its center. Draw lines from its center to its outer edge. Notice that the longer lines create movement, energy, that the shorter lines express stasis. Stasis and movement, the drama of all great art.
Describing Life
Set the student to copying, even tracing the lines of a master-drawing, repeatedly, an exercise which is like a push-up, the tasteful pleasure of a word repeated upon the tongue. What is a master-drawing? God’s beautiful creation virtuously repeated by created beings, pictures and statues and poems that live mind to mind in truthful lines that describe God’s goodness in God’s things. To understand life in the egg is to understand the first truth of life in His universe. The convex describes life. Strong, healthy life is convex. Death is concave into nothingness, into blackness. Drawing the Line.
There is spirit in light. When drawing negative death convex, positive life is diminished, its recedes and dies … nothing wins. Do not as did Darwin, Matisse and Marx route for nothing to win. If you take a death mask, as I have done, you will recognize that in the moment of death emptiness becomes convex and the body becomes concave until it is no more. And that, as we have seen in flesh and in culture, happens rather quickly.
Notice your hand, your arm … bone, tendon / muscle, tendon / bone, tendon / muscle, et cetera, patterned in swelling of life alike the rolling energy of waves visible and invisible. The bone is line-hard convex. The tendon is a pause in rest. The muscle is again convex swelling in the pattern repeated, bone, tendon / muscle, tendon / ad infinitum as in the song that never ends. We are double curve convexes, creatures that can move in an any direction, unlike a door hinge, a single curve convex that might open and close ad nauseam though never to move, never to enjoy God’s grant of liberty. Michelangelo is a master who understood the nature of convex and concave, Matisse did not and is not. Mondrian is not worthy of consideration and will, as will all mods, soon be forgotten because materialist, atheist, inarticulate and concave.
Great Lines
Because we are as God made us, creatures in His image, His greatness will again live through us into art. Great Ages of Art will come again, perhaps even in our own Age. The Progressives were wrong, we did not descend as Darwin would have us do into a reductive, finite conclusion. We are born, we ascend again and again toward God our maker. The patterns of Creation will pattern as they do in goodness, beauty, and truth as-long-as God chooses. Eternity, I would guess. Drawing the Line.
Progressives in media, academia, and the state have hidden great Classive artists from view because these disprove the lie, the narrative. There are great artists among us (a truth that cannot be much longer hidden), artists who in line and lines speak beautifully in truth. I have known many of these great artists because they and I cross paths in our crafts. Be heartened, God wins, beauty and truth will prevail, even in the Catholic Church.
Teachers, feed your students beauty in art that they might grow strong, desirous of truth as were David and Leonardo, master’s unlike the degenerates Duchamp and Picasso. Exercise your students in great themes, teach the pattern of virtue in history, as did Plutarch. And tell your students stories that their imaginations might grow from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, as in a charming syllogism or a logical quatrain. Teacher, if you would make a great artist, teach great lines and then teach the student, why. Make the student familiar with the best that has been thought, said, done, and make your student easy in greatness.
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List of Drawings for Copy when Learning Line
Younger Students, Trace then Draw from Nature
Casper David Frederick Study of Rocks (for drawing nature – draw a rock and flower)
William Morris Acanthus (for drawing nature in pattern)
Leonardo flower drawing (for drawing nature in generation)
Casper David Frederick’s Rock Quarry (for meaning in diagonal line)
Canaletto capriccio drawings (for drawing buildings – draw houses)
Peter Paul Rubens’ Head of Christ (for character in portraiture)
Raphael’s School of Athens to understand one-point perspective (find the receding lines)
Older Students, Copy from Art then from Nature
Sandro Botticelli, Abundance
François Boucher, Three Nymphs
Jacques Callot, print or drawing from the Comedia del Arte suite
Albrecht Durer, some simple figure, perhaps the Bagpiper
John Flaxman, Iliad, illustration 28 or some multi-figure equivalent
Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), Prometheus, David & Goliath, Perseus Returning the Eye of the Graii, et cetera
Leonardo, Bust of a Warrior
Leonardo, Deluge
The Sosias painter, Achilles and Patroclus, or some other red-figure ware
Drawing Lessons from the Famous Artists School: Classic Techniques and Expert Tips from the Golden Age of Illustration
is an excellent guide for beginners.
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DRAWING THE LINE
“Drawing the Line” featured image, Lamb of God mosaic, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy.
Michael J. Curtis
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