{"id":14162,"date":"2025-09-11T14:21:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T18:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/?p=14162"},"modified":"2026-03-06T14:19:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:19:26","slug":"why-we-draw-iii-lighting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/?p=14162","title":{"rendered":"Why We Draw: IV Lighting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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1. First Photograph of lighting. Sept 2, 1882. William Nicholson Jennings (1860\u20131946).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Strike in the Forest, Lines Precipitate<\/h2>\n

A lighting bolt, we can imagine, flashes at dusk. We observe the strike just beyond a curtain of leaves. The leaves quake, as leaves do, before a rain. In the background a field of tall grass shifts back and forth. Beyond, grounding and limiting the storm, is the face of a forest. Above is the bottom face of a storm-cloud. Only the eerie cast of ambient light from the nearby town lends depth and perspective to the scene. A waxing moon looking to be racing the clouds struggles to appear. Far away, lighting flashes leaving a patchwork of recollections.<\/p>\n

Our attention is piqued by the thunder. Then, there is a flash just beyond the face of the forest and a crack of thunder. The event brings home the arrangement of things. Thunder lends an awareness of our surroundings; we need to pay attention. Lighting, Captain of the gods, the old man who steers the ship. The storm collects the cast: leaves, edge of forest, grass field and billowing cloud pregnant with electrical charges. They are image and pattern; the stage is set.<\/p>\n

The event contrasts to the prolonged mundane and expected pulse of day-time. In day-light things have neither the contrast nor the rounded definition brought by night time thunder and its scent of approaching rain. The mood of a thunderstorm lends us an increased ability to appreciate the scene.<\/p>\n

Similarly, drawings are understood in a flash. When our eyes meet an image of interest our eyes move without self awareness from one region of the image to the next in fractions of a second. Despite the rapidity of the process of visual perception we make decisions about the image’s significance and meaning. Most people are able to identify an image or a complex collection montage of images, in as little as 13 milliseconds or a little over 1\/100th of a second. For comparison’s sake, typical blink of an eye lasts between 100 to 150 milliseconds, around a tenth of a second.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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2. Drawing by Victor Furth.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Often our best drawings are quick and flow unencumbered by calculation. The architect Victor Furth, many years a professor at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio said \u201cFrom the eye to the hand…\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>When we are comfortable in our skill, lines shake onto paper with ease. Unlike our almost instantaneous grasp of an image, that quick hand is available to us only after many years of drawing. When we have developed a quick hand, drawing proceeds \u2013 to a large extent\u2013 without reflection. Then, after having learned the skills and grammar of drawing we are comfortable with what it takes to clarify a drawing in its grammar of edge, fore and background (space). As artists, we relish the meditative trance or \u201cthe zone\u201d of the quick \u201ceye to hand\u201d drawing, as we proceed within a life of drawing. Still, we need to be willing to take on challenges of drawing as they appear.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>When we have mastered drawing or a skill like drawing, we not only gain the ‘muscle memory’ attuned to the skill we will have also achieved preparation for further challenges embedded in drawing.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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4. Drawing of wild pig at Sulawesi, Indonesia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Instead of the deliberately paced tesserae of spoken language, the language of drawing and image involves immanent appearance. John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing<\/strong><\/em> begins his book with “Seeing comes before words.”<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Because of this immanence, a drawing transcends the comparatively narrow cultural grammars of written and spoken language; drawings are understandable despite an apparently intractable cultural distance. Anyone of us, for example, can easily put ourselves into the images painted within the Cheuvet or Sulawesi caves even though they were drawn thirty-five and fifty-five thousand years before the present.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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4. Drawings of animals at copy of the Chauvet Cave, France.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is not hard for us to imagine beasts drawn on those cave walls to be breathing at a distance. Likewise the Makapansgat manuport, picked up by an Australopithecus perhaps at some river bank, those 3 million years ago \u2013 still has the obvious likeness to a hominin face with its two eyes, nose and mouth. Despite the distance of generations later we can still identify the face through pareidolia.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>With pareidolia faithful catholics see the Virgin Mary in the toasted surface of a slice of bread. Picasso intentionally made a bicycle seat and handle bar to be understood as a bull.<\/p>\n

If, at 3 million years ago the individual that grasped the face-like pebble had an ability to think and imagine a figure from the abstract patterns of a stone; how old and how deeply rooted can the ability to gather abstract features into a figure be? Is figuration, or the ability collect edge and surface into a figure that corresponds to individuated things that we know or can be imagined, limited to species Hominin? Or, which may be more likely, is abstraction \u2013 the ability to sort out what is essential in what is sensed \u2013 part and parcel of sentient existence?<\/p>\n

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Pareidolia and the ability to draw animals on caves walls lends evidence to a deeply embedded ability to make connections between other creatures and the phenomena of the world in general. Drawing resolves an urge to manifest in matter, those graphite lines, connections between things and creatures. Drawn lines connect similar and foreign worlds in a process that negotiates the tension between abstraction and figure.<\/p>\n

Drawings are \u201creadable\u201d because of these creature-abilities to recognize, interpret and represent principal features of things within the atmosphere of a world that we know. But, these abilities need to extend into other worlds.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>Indeed, we are able to draw precisely because of an ability of intuit and imagine intersections with other worlds. Imprisoned for a millennia by the biblical garden of eden story, that asks us to put a living cosmos at arms length, we are finding through the back door of modern science that we are little different than the plants, creatures and stones at our side. In other words, thinking \u2013 thinking through drawing in this case \u2013 cannot rightly be categorized as principally a human<\/p>\n

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5.Intersection of many worlds. Forest in front of the cabin in Indiana. By the author.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

projection into the world but, instead, a collaboration with many worlds.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Our individuation as a particular species, as well as our ability to think, draw, and recognize significance is dependent on a living chattering cosmos within which we participate.<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

With drawing the visual field that we can recognize to be drawable is drawable because of that chattering cosmos. A drawing puts under inspection interconnected worlds including everything illuminated by the lighting strike: clouds, an edge of trees, birds, fields of grass etc. All of these entities are resolved into figures that emerge out of that field. The draftsperson’s task is to discern edges, recognize figures out of apparent entropy and the chain of meaning \u2013 call it significance \u2013 within which these figures and edges participate. The edges of a drawing confirm to what is understood by the artist to have significance within a scene. An ability to discern edges is part and parcel of our ability for abstraction. Drawing out the edges is, of course, abstraction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By the fact that a number of animals, including chimpanzees, dogs, sheep, pigeons and honey bees are able to distinguish their fellow creatures from another, indeed \u00a0(if not all) can distinguish human faces, offers skepticism that species hominin is exceptional in its ability to participate in the intersubjective business of abstraction and language.<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Can we extend all that goes into the capacity to recognize distinct others and other things, which in large part needs to involve the ability to recognize edges, lines as well as to distinguish relationships within the figure of things, to the skill that allows modern hominin to draw? If bees and sheep distinguish faces by parsing the edges of the visual field before their eyes how deep within the evolutionary web can this ability extend? Could, for example, bacteria or virus have an ability to recognize lines and edges?<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

As it turns out there are bacteria that can ‘read’ what loosely can be understood to be a dividing line, edge, or a horizon. Recently a team of researchers described how Cyanobacteria use \u201cmicro-optics\u201d to sense light direction.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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6. Sharks Bay (Australia) Stromatolites, cyanobacteria colonies.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae, are one of the most ancient life forms on earth and played a decisive role in converting earth’s anaerobic atmosphere, through photosynthesis, into one that is oxygen rich. Though recent excavations have found cyanobacteria dating to 3.46 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began to appear on the earth in large numbers about 2.4 billion years ago. Then, in an era called by geologists the great oxygenation event, cyanobacteria existed in large numbers throughout the earth. Colonies of cyanobacteria exist as stromatolites on some ocean shores in Australia today.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Built on an observation made in 1883 by Theodor Engalmann that some bacteria move toward light sources, a team of researchers, including Nils Schuergers at the \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne, Germany, described the process used by bacteria, in their use of light, to be broadly similar to that of the human eye.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cyanobacteria cell walls, according to the team’s article, act as a lens to focus a light source onto photoreceptors at the interior wall opposite the source thereby informing the cell’s navigation of their landscape. Importantly, cyanobacteria act cooperatively. The line conceived by bacteria where darkness meets an illuminated field in their cooperative microcosm is little different from edge that we grasp the difference between forest and sky.<\/p>\n

These bacteria consume, respond, engage, call it dance-out, an edge of light. Though bacteria and other creatures do not behold the phenomena of edge and light with graphics they do evidence a means of beholding. In other words, while chimpanzees, dogs, sheep, pigeons and honey bees do not draw they do behold edges in a way particular to their relationship to their and intersecting worlds.<\/p>\n

Still, it is unfair to leave viruses out of the question of sensitivity, relation to and even dependence on edge. The beauty of the virus is their individual simplicity and dependence on numbers without which their ability to survive is nil. Further, the virus, due to its comparative weight in numbers and effect on the world deserves mention.<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span>Like bacteria, indeed the tigers of India, fish in a pond or stones along the sides of a brook, virus are creatures of niche, place and edge.<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The phenomena of edge and line could be understood to be fundamental to existence and functions to differentiate between the ‘stuff’ of the cosmos and non-stuff. Edges are what let us function one creature among others and allow drawings to be understood. We can grasp the story of a drawing because lines and edges are a matter-of-fact part of every-day life. Boundaries, edges or frontiers grant the definition of some-thing; the difference between nothing (perhaps something we don’t care about for the moment) and something. Lines, edge or frontier also indicate communities, origin and the point of \u201corigin\u201d within the broadest possible \u201ccosmological\u201d context; individuation in contrast to the unindividuated entropical stuff.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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In this sense, origin myths frequently describe an unindividuated world without edge; an unnaturally calm sea without wave, horizon or sunlight. Origin and individuation emerge through events from a point, an island for example, and world that grows into greater and greater complexity. A representative story is that of the North American, Algonquin speaking, people’s Earth Diver Myth. In this story creatures, beaver, muskrat, and others find themselves on the surface of a placid sea tiring of having to paddle all day. Animal after animal dive to the bottom of the sea to bring up soil so that they have a place to rest but, after diving, all struggle to the surface without results. Finally, The muskrat succeeds to bring earth to the surface with a little bit tucked between its claws. From that soil an island emerges into the sea and the plane of still water. Edges at the intersection between an emerging mound of earth and the sea appear (a circle). Upon this mound of earth in a sea, trees, rivers and other animals begin to appear as well as states of being and clans etc, etc. The story represents the beginning of the world the origin point being a no-place without horizon or edges. In a world without horizon or edge a drawing would be absurd.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span>A world without edges is unthinkable. Edges, for example, exist as river to river-bank, stone to sand, creek to river, root to soil, mountain to sky etc. Each one of these edges exist as life and power in their own right.<\/p>\n

Drawing, as a means to call our attention to a difference in things as well as how \u2018things\u2019 have articulated relationships, by way of an edge and line is on this basis \u201clanguage\u201d and a means of illuminating the logos. Here, the term logos, is in the context of that from ancient Greek philosophy offers a means of thinking about worlds and their constituent \u2013interconnected \u2013 elements revealed in language.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Drawing illuminates the logos as do words, dance, sculpture sport etc.<\/p>\n

To a curiously significant degree the history of the word \u2018language\u2019 misdirects us to put emphasis on speech. I say curiously because the voice appears dominant in our ability to interpret, grasp, and direct our attention in the world. Arguably, this is how our most explicit commerce, communications and illuminations come about. On the other hand, there are probably as many ways to capture, seize, play, craft with the stuff of the world as there is phenomena and stuff. Each \u2018engagement\u2019 having to be a kind of language with grammars and insights differing according the stuff we are engaged with.<\/p>\n

Image Attribution:<\/strong> 1. First Photograph of lighting. Sept 2, 1882. William Nicholson Jennings (1860\u20131946). Image source: Igoe, Laura Turner. \u201cCapturing \u2018Jove\u2019s Autograph\u2019: Late Nineteenth-Century Lightning Photography and Electrical Agency.\u201d, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 2 no. 1 (Summer, 2016). PDF https:\/\/doi.org\/10.24926\/24716839.1535. This image is in the public domain. 2. Drawing by Victor Furth. In possession of the author’s family. 4. Drawing of wild pig at Sulawesi, Indonesia. Leang Tedongnge rock art panel. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. 8 November 2017 (https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Leang_Tedongnge_rock_art_panel_credit_Basran_Burhan.jpg) 3. Drawings of animals at copy of the Chauvet Cave, France. Description from Wikicommons: “Lions Panel (center left), runaway rhinos (multiplied horn). Wooden charcoal drawings with fading, flint cropping with fading. Pont d’Arc cave ….” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. 16 March 2016 (https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:16_PanneauDesLions%28CentreGauche%29Rhinoc\u00e9rosEnFuite.jpg) 5.Intersection of many worlds. Forest in front of the cabin in Indiana. Drawing by the author. This is a drawing of a forest in the fall. The lake can be seen beyond. Simply because we draw a forest and lake does not mean that to draw “nature” offers the epitome of the “intersection of many worlds.” Many drawings will offer us this intersection provided the intersection is already part of the world of the artist and, if it is the drawing will have the possibility of offering an opening of that intersection to the drawing’s reader. There is not genre of line and edge \u2013 drawing \u2013 that will better offer that intersection. 6. Sharks Bay (Australia) Stromatolites. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. 8 June, 2007. (https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Shark_Bay_stromatolites.jpg)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Strike in the Forest, Lines Precipitate A lighting bolt, we can imagine, flashes at dusk. We observe the strike just beyond a curtain of leaves. The leaves quake, as leaves do, before a rain. In the background a field of tall grass shifts back and forth. Beyond, grounding and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clay-wood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Igoe_3-Jennings-First-Photograph-of-Lightning.jpg?fit=1024%2C853&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paTshs-3Gq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14162"}],"version-history":[{"count":81,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15190,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14162\/revisions\/15190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}