The Secret of Drawing episode 3
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00:00This is the room where I do most of my work, writing about art. When I'm working
00:05I'm thinking in words but the artists I write about think in pictures. Over
00:10there on the wall there's a vast composite drawing by the artist John
00:13Virtue. I think of it as a map of his mind or perhaps it's more like a
00:18labyrinth, one I often find myself drawn into, trying to find my way through it.
00:24I think the same can be said of any drawing really worth its salt. It puts us
00:29into direct contact with the conscious mind and sometimes even more
00:33disconcertingly with the unconscious one. That's one of the great strengths of
00:39drawing, the way in which it makes us think about what the artist is thinking.
00:43It's a medium that speaks more freshly and directly and immediately than any
00:48other about the mystery of what goes on in here.
01:29If you want to get up close and personal with some of the world's greatest
01:33artists this is the place to start. The British Museum's Department of Prints
01:38and Drawings. It's not just a repository of art, it's a wonderful museum of the
01:43creative mind. Over 500 years of artistic inspiration you can study at
01:49thrillingly close range.
01:54Looking at a finished painting or a monumental sculpture can be like
01:58listening to an artist lecture the full public performance, but looking at
02:03drawing is like talking to them or reading their diary.
02:08Drawing is inherently intimate, it's where genius is off-duty and because of
02:13that it's where artists really dwell on what they love, revealing themselves in
02:18the process. So behind the delicate wispy shades of this great Botticelli drawing
02:22of a woman clothed in clinging transparent veils you can see his
02:27immensely erotic imagination in its raw and naked state.
02:36There's a distinctly more practical and ordered part of the mind at work in this
02:41picture, an intricate design for a fountain made around 1500 by the great
02:46German artist Albrecht Dürer. Or is there? It's more than simply a sketch for a
02:56luxury object, look at the delicacy of the watercolour, the filigrees and fancy
03:01adornments, that's Dürer to a T. He was foppish, flamboyant, always beautifully
03:07dressed. This drawing is a wonderful example of his flourish, the artist
03:15magician who plucks beautiful objects out of thin air. But turn to a different
03:23artistic sensibility altogether, the mind that sees the world as a far darker
03:28place. And what kind of drawing emerges if that mind is beginning to unravel?
03:34This brilliant but strange composition by Britain's greatest satirist James
03:39Gilray absolutely captures that. Gilray's genius, his quivering nervous line and
03:45ability to transform his subject into something at once real and yet sarcastic
03:51and distorted leaps off this surface. The marks put us at the heart of a kind
03:56of wandering psychosis. It's a drawing of a man called George Humphrey who was the
04:05nephew of Gilray's landlady and it's interesting that the person whom it was
04:11made of has actually felt driven to write on it. This portrait of George
04:15Humphrey Jr. was drawn by James Gilray on the 1st of July 1811, he being at that
04:22time insane. One of the things I love most about great drawings is the way in
04:29which each one seems to transport you to a different chamber of the human mind. In
04:34recent times artists have self-consciously adopted styles
04:39suggesting madness. This frenetic barroom scene by the German expressionist George
04:44Gross whirls you to the heart of Berlin in the 20s. A culture gone mad, a society
04:51collectively deranged by its own decadence. Its frenzied line suggests
04:57that Gross might well have thrown himself into the indulgences it depicts.
05:03This collection has more than 50,000 drawings. These few examples are enough
05:08to demonstrate that pretty much all of human emotion is here. Desire, fear,
05:13self-loathing, even self-transcendence. The American minimalist Sol LeWitt
05:19created this according to a formula of mind-numbing repetitiveness, using a
05:24ruler to cover the paper with a dense mathematical sequence of the thinnest
05:28yellow lines. The result's surprisingly beautiful. I think of him like a Buddhist
05:33monk singing the same repetitive mantra in the hope that enlightenment will
05:38suddenly strike. From banal gesture emerges a mist of colour, an eccentric
05:44attempt to picture infinity.
05:57Drawing is an inherently instinctive activity. In fact you could argue that
06:02it's one of the first ways we make sense of the world. Look at how easily drawing
06:07comes to children. Every child will be found scribbling away by the time
06:11they're just two years old. And by the age of three or four, they can work out
06:15shape and colour. And since drawing is a way of defining who we are, it's hardly
06:21surprising that the human figure is almost always the first realistic
06:25pictorial drawing a child does.
06:37The child's feel for line is like their mind, intuitive and playful. Even though
06:44by age five or six their pages are often telling stories, they're still intriguing
06:48and abstract. And then something happens. We grow up and the ability to draw
06:56carefree and uninhibited disappears. Can we ever get it back again?
07:08This is one of the high temples of the classical drawing tradition, a life
07:13class in the Ruskin School at Oxford University. Many different students
07:17making many different studies of the same model. Few art schools nowadays
07:25concentrate on drawing from the model, perhaps seeing it as an old-fashioned
07:29academic exercise, like mastering a mathematical equation. Not so for the
07:36professor here, Sarah Simblett. Inspiring her pupils to master the human form
07:41isn't about scholarly precision, but about freeing the mind from inhibition,
07:47harnessing the childlike expressive instinct. There's a fundamental drive in
07:54us all to want to make a mark. And it's a very important means of, well, language of
08:00communication. And people will draw for many different reasons. And those who
08:05come to my classes will have an enormous range of motivations for
08:08wanting to draw. And then it's important to me that if there are 20 people in the
08:13room, that every single one of them is doing something different and doing what
08:16they want to do. Although I teach life classes, I often forget that it is a life
08:24class. There is the model, there is the subject, but the people who are actually
08:29coming to the class are coming because they want to learn how to draw. And it
08:31doesn't matter what the subject is, doesn't matter that it's a life model.
08:34And so I will have a great range of activities going on within the room.
08:38So that with each fresh, quick drawing, you're learning a little bit more about
08:41this particular pose, okay? You want to think about capturing just the most
08:46essential lines that describe her gesture, her stance, the distribution of
08:50weight on one leg or another. Make sure that you're placing the load bearing...
08:54I would encourage each individual to draw in a way that is natural to
08:58themselves. But in the end, the expressive content of the works got to
09:03come from them. So I'll help them with the technicalities, but the actual
09:07drawing and their purpose in making it has got to come from themselves.
09:14An artist in her own right, Simblett's drawings straddle various styles, from
09:18anatomically precise to large-scale fantastical compositions. What they all
09:24share is a visualisation of her sensibility, the expression of different
09:29aspects of the mind through line.
09:34I've noticed that there's a kind of split in your work between this very
09:39fine filigree drawing of what you see, whether it's plants or skulls. And then
09:46there are these other things, particularly up here, where if I didn't
09:51know, I'd say that they were by a completely different artist. What are
09:54these drawings?
09:55These drawings are made intuitively, drawing from my subconscious. They're
10:06made in a few seconds in response to a powerful emotion about something. And
10:13they're made without knowing what the image will be, but letting the momentum
10:19of the feeling or idea flow onto the paper through a brush. So they're made
10:24very, very quickly. So that's the drawing of the brain, and that's the
10:28drawing that comes out of the brain. With these, I suppose, it's a process
10:34of looking, seeing, thinking, understanding, gaining knowledge of
10:38something that exists in the world. With these, it's really drawing an
10:44emotion. Do you feel like you're pulling it out of yourself? Yes, in a
10:48way. It's like an outward breath.
10:50Sarah's art reminds me of her approach to teaching, her belief that there
10:57should be room both for control and spontaneity. And that's exemplified
11:02above all in the life class. Since the subjects are given, something the
11:07artists simply have to observe and study, they become all the more free to
11:11discover their own personal angle on the world, as artists have always done.
11:18The life drawings are as old as the tradition of illusionistic art, which is
11:22where Western art really begins. The tradition of trying to create figures
11:27that look like real, live human beings, as the mythical Pygmalion did when he
11:33created a statue so lifelike that she actually walked off her plinth.
11:38The ancient Greeks certainly studied from the live model when they created
11:42the muscular figures that animate the Parthenon frieze, and Renaissance
11:46art's full of it. There are drawings by Raphael where you can still see how this
11:51saint, or that crucified Christ, began life in a scene just like this one, a
11:56model posed before the artist.
12:05Life drawing has been fundamental to Western art, part of its DNA, but equally
12:11fundamental is a continuing argument about which part of the human mind, the
12:16artist should call on when drawing, how much of the inner self should be
12:20allowed in, and how much held back. For Renaissance artists, drawing was a
12:28crucial tool of the rational intellect, the very basis of the works by which we
12:33remember them, great paintings and frescoes, often worked on by assistants
12:38as much as the artists themselves. But this vast composition, eight meters long
12:44and two meters high, is without doubt the work of just one hand, that of
12:49Raphael, the great Renaissance master of harmony, balance and composition.
12:55Raphael's often been described as the single greatest draftsman in the entire
13:00tradition of Western art, and this is his greatest and most ambitious drawing, so
13:05you could say that, logically speaking, it's the number one drawing in the whole
13:09world. In its own time, it was brilliantly original as well as
13:14technically extraordinary. Raphael had been commissioned to paint a number of
13:21great frescoes for Pope Julius's library, and he was thinking about the idea of
13:26libraries, pantheons of the great learned men of the past.
13:32Raphael's big idea was to actually bring the great thinkers of the past into, say
13:39to speak, one space and have them interacting with each other. So at the
13:43centre of his picture of the progress of human learning, you see Plato and
13:48Aristotle conversing with one another, Plato pointing up to the sky, for him the
13:54source of true intellectual enlightenment, Aristotle pointing to the
13:58earth to indicate his preference for empirical knowledge, and all around them
14:02the great thinkers of antiquity engaged in debate. Down here on the left you've
14:08got Pythagoras demonstrating a theorem, while some people behind him seem to be
14:13actually pinching his ideas. It's a work of art about ideas, about the intellect,
14:19and as a work of art it absolutely embodies this idealised intellectual
14:25view of what art is that Raphael had. If you look at it very closely, you'll see
14:31that every little detail of that drawing has been pricked through so that it can
14:35be transferred perfectly onto the frescoed surface of the final work. His
14:41technique is designed to ensure that the drawing, which is his idea, his brain, his
14:47mind in action, that the drawing is perfectly preserved in the finished work.
14:54Raphael did more than any other Renaissance figure to put drawing at the
14:57very centre of the Western art tradition. The art academies that sprang up in his
15:02wake, first in Italy then across Europe, placed the ability to draw at the heart
15:08of their teaching curricula. Drawing was seen as the key skill in learning how to
15:15conjure a convincing illusion of form and space, but it was also valued as the
15:20medium that most accurately reflected man's highest faculty, his sacred, God-
15:26given ability to reason. It was a visual translation of our rational minds, the
15:31ordering of consciousness. But look elsewhere in the art of the Renaissance
15:37and scratch beneath the surface and we can see that even then there was another
15:43side to drawing, a side that reflected not the ordering mind but a very
15:49different, more instinctual part of us. To get a rare glimpse of it you have to go
15:55back to the very origins of the Renaissance and a series of vivid 14th
16:00century images that might never have surfaced had it not been for a 20th
16:04century act of war.
16:08In July 1944, American artillery dropped a firebomb in the heart of Pisa. It just
16:14missed the famous Leaning Tower, landing instead on the chapel of the Campo Santo.
16:18The lead roof melted, dripped down the walls and damaged the frescoes inside,
16:24which is how they now come to hang in this antechamber in their peeling
16:29perilous state. This would be a scandalous episode in the history of
16:35art, were it not for the unexpected by-product of this gung-ho Yankee
16:39attack. As the plaster from the frescoes came away, it revealed exuberantly
16:45detailed under drawings, or sinopia as they're known. The drawings were made by
16:51the artist Francesco da Triano, assuming that they'd never be seen again, and maybe
16:56because he thought they'd stay a secret, he really let his imagination run riot.
17:08The subject of this particular under drawing is the Last Judgment, and it's a
17:14particularly vengeful scene of Last Judgment, in which three-quarters of the
17:18whole picture is given over to hell. It's probably no coincidence that this work
17:23was created during the same decade as the Black Death, and you can sense the
17:28pious terror that was rippling through society at the time. In fact, you can
17:33sense it, interestingly, much more vividly in the under drawing than you
17:38can in the fresco itself, because the under drawing is full of this much more
17:43vividly captured sense of emotion. These figures, who are utterly terrified as
17:48they're being dragged back into hell by these demons armed with hooks, there's
17:53the archangel dragging this reluctant pitiful woman towards hell, and yet when
18:00you compare that figure with what happened in the actual fresco, where
18:04these figures were replaced by an angel dragging a rather inert monk towards the
18:09flames of hell, it's lost all of its vigour, all of its energy. Something
18:14happens when the medieval artist draws. You see it in manuscript illumination, in
18:20the babooneries and grotesqueries that you find around the margins, and I think
18:24you find it absolutely here, in an image not at the margin, but underneath. It's
18:29like the id of medieval art, and it seethes with this kind of energy and
18:35imagination.
18:45The Sinopie and the frescoes seem to express quite different aspects of
18:51creativity. One liberated, the other far more contained.
18:59And looking at them got me thinking about the relationship between different
19:03parts of the mind, and about what actually happens in the consciousness
19:07when we set out to draw the things we see or imagine.
19:15So, perhaps foolishly, I agreed to take part in a kind of experiment.
19:27John Chalenko is the head of drawing and cognition at Camberwell Art School in
19:32London. For over ten years now he's been working with this scary, clockwork
19:37orange style contraption, the eye tracker. A device that measures with precise
19:44millisecond accuracy, the movements of my eyes, as I try in vain to draw the man
19:50with possibly the world's bushiest eyebrows.
19:54How do you shade? I blame the tools.
20:00Drawing isn't something I do, it's not really part of my life, so trying to
20:05render a real person's face into an accurate two-dimensional drawing was
20:10more than a challenge.
20:13And what's the aim of your research? Is there a particular Holy Grail that you're looking for?
20:17It's really a combination of two things. One is that I'm very curious as to the details of how
20:23drawing is produced, how it happens, and that's the eye and the hand, and the
20:27combination of the two with the brain in between. Just a detailed observation of
20:31the making of art, really. And narrowing down on this instant of creativity, which
20:37I think is absolutely fantastic, so that you can actually pinpoint that
20:41within a fraction of a second. That's where the line was made, you see,
20:45and that's the result of it.
20:51To enable Chilenko to explain to me how my naive and untrained eye compares with
20:57that of a skilled artist, I asked Ruskin College professor Sarah Simblett to come
21:02and tackle the same subject.
21:08From the outset, it was striking how effortless she seemed to find the
21:14process of translating life onto the page. The same process that I'd found so
21:20frustrating. When I was doing it, I felt an immense struggle to translate what my
21:25eye could see. I could see that what my eye could see was very complicated and I
21:29was thinking about the complexity of it, but I didn't have in my body a kind of
21:34set. I felt the absence of a set of codes, if you like, or a set of practices.
21:39So I was really... I almost felt frozen half the time.
21:43I think, in a way, what was... the element that is missing with you and which is
21:52present with Sarah is that when she draws a nose, the line doesn't exist.
21:58There is no line on the nose.
22:01You have to decide what the line is going to be.
22:04Is it going to be the light and shade, the change in color?
22:07Is it what you want to do?
22:09All that has to come into a decision.
22:11But Sarah's been doing that decision all the time, so she...
22:14That's no problem.
22:17Whereas a beginner will look at the nose and say,
22:20well, what am I going to do with this now?
22:22And usually, there is, at that stage, a cop-out.
22:27Where you say, well, I'll just look very hard at it
22:30and hope that art flows through my hands.
22:33In fact, it's a very specific task.
22:36Decide what line you want.
22:39Pick it up visually, as we say.
22:42Vision is selective anyway.
22:44Decide what you want to do with it and draw it down.
22:47That's what the brain is doing for getting from one to the other.
22:50Chalenko has developed a complex system
22:52to analyse how the mind gathers information to produce a drawing.
22:58Feeding the video of the eye tracker into a computer,
23:01he produces a map of looks.
23:04These red lines show the number of times my eye went back and forth
23:08from the model to the page,
23:10as well as where I fixed my gaze, my focus throughout.
23:14A trained artist's eye travels to the subject
23:16with a constant sense of purpose,
23:18generating a mass of information-gathering looks,
23:21like so many bees gathering pollen.
23:24My look was more like a drunk going home from the pub.
23:28My eye was all over the place
23:30as I struggled simultaneously to pick up the details of the face
23:34and remember them as I moved back to the drawing board.
23:37It was as if I was in a dream.
23:39As I fumbled my way through,
23:41I became very conscious of different parts of myself
23:44being drawn upon in the act of trying to draw.
23:47And then, near the end,
23:49when I gave up trying to accurately capture the model
23:52and simply make a picture of a man's head,
23:55a sort of childlike instinct kicked in.
23:58I stopped making lines
24:00and started pushing the charcoal around in my fingers.
24:03It was as if I was in a dream.
24:05I stopped making lines
24:07and started pushing the charcoal around in my fingers,
24:10trying to feel form and light and shade rather than think it.
24:14And I had the impression, illusion maybe,
24:16of beginning to get somewhere.
24:25Perhaps this duality between instinct and intellect,
24:28to put it crudely,
24:30is as old as the human desire to create images.
24:35Travel right back in time
24:37and, by the perspective of the world's oldest art,
24:40the period we think of as art history,
24:43pretty much from antiquity to today,
24:45is comparatively small,
24:47just 2,500 years or so.
24:49It's only been in the last century
24:51that we've really come to appreciate
24:53just how ancient our primal impulse
24:55to capture the living world really is.
25:00When cave art was first introduced,
25:03when cave art was first discovered in the late 19th century,
25:07it shook up the whole canon of art history.
25:10This newly revealed prehistoric art was so old
25:14there was no criterion by which to judge it.
25:17Primitive as its aesthetic was,
25:19it turned out to be some of the freshest,
25:21most vibrant imagery ever seen.
25:24These are animals.
25:26For example, this is a horse.
25:30It's a horse, very beautiful.
25:32Yeah.
25:33This is the head.
25:35These relatively rudimentary sketches
25:37were inscribed 30,000 years ago
25:39on the walls of Las Monedas cave in Cantabria, northern Spain.
25:45They're the earliest evidence we have
25:47of the mind making faithful representations of the world.
25:53Their discovery was a breakthrough,
25:55not just in the history of art,
25:57but in the history of human evolution.
26:00These works were stunningly more sophisticated
26:03than arrowheads bashed from flint
26:05or other everyday objects made by primitive man.
26:09Pigments had been mixed, charcoal used to outline shapes.
26:13And there's composition too, composition at its most overwhelming,
26:17in this vast panorama of the celebrated Palaeolithic site
26:21at Altamira, where, quite literally,
26:24the hand of the artist is everywhere in evidence.
26:27The caves at Altamira were first discovered in 1879
26:30by a local landowner.
26:32Up until that time, archaeologists and historians
26:35had believed that Palaeolithic peoples
26:37were essentially primitive warriors
26:39whose consciousness was based purely on instinct.
26:43But the discovery of these extraordinary images,
26:46including some 30 large figures of bison and other wild animals
26:51in what's known as the polychrome chamber,
26:53suggested something far more sophisticated.
26:55But not straightaway.
26:57Great antiquity of this period and on this scale
27:00had never been experienced before.
27:03Many scholars thought it was a fraud
27:05and one even went so far as to suggest
27:07that the whole thing, this Sistine Chapel of cave art,
27:11had been faked up by fanatical Spanish clerics
27:14in an attempt to discredit Darwin's theories of evolution.
27:18The panorama of animals on the polychrome chamber
27:21is thought to be the work of just one artist.
27:24Why he or she made it, we'll never know.
27:27A backdrop to shamanistic ritual
27:30or some elaborate game of courtship?
27:33But even their very revelations about primitive man's mindset
27:37and the sophistication of his brain
27:39can be seen as an example of what could have been done.
27:43Since they were first discovered,
27:45what's blown people's minds about these cave paintings
27:48was that something so sophisticated, so extraordinary,
27:51could have emerged out of the culture of cavemen
27:5430,000, 40,000 years ago.
27:56What I've challenged is that idea at its base.
28:00What I think these cave paintings possibly show
28:03is the absolute opposite,
28:05is that here were demons, here were humans,
28:08and here were animals.
28:10What I think these cave paintings possibly show
28:13is the absolute opposite,
28:15is that here were dealing with painters, artists
28:18who actually had much more primitive minds, pre-modern minds.
28:21They may not even have had language.
28:23And the reason for saying that
28:25is because I see a remarkable resemblance
28:28between those cave paintings
28:30and the drawings of contemporary children
28:33who are in many ways backward.
28:35The most remarkable of them probably
28:37is a little girl called Nadia,
28:39she was severely autistic.
28:41She had only perhaps a dozen words of language.
28:44She was clumsy and unable to communicate.
28:48But she, from the age of 3 or so,
28:51would take up a paintbrush or a pencil
28:54and start drawing at the level of a young Picasso.
29:00This is a girl who seemed to have no motivation
29:03for wanting to draw or to communicate.
29:05She was just obsessed with the activity
29:08and putting what she saw onto paper.
29:10And when she'd done it,
29:12she'd push it away or draw over the top of it.
29:18Now, if a girl in that condition
29:21can produce drawings of the same quality
29:24as the drawings which we admire so much
29:27on the caves of Valtamira,
29:29then the question is wide open.
29:33Did these cave painters have what we always imagine they have?
29:37Did they have modern minds?
29:39Were they into symbolism and so on?
29:41Or were they perhaps in many ways different from us?
29:44The problem with pinning down cave art
29:46is there's no frame of reference
29:48to place these first acts of drawing.
29:50Personally, I believe they do represent
29:53some kind of structuring intelligence,
29:55seeking to give form to certain beliefs.
29:58Although I suppose it's possible
30:00they might simply reflect a basic human drive.
30:03Until someone invents a time machine,
30:06a wondrous enigma.
30:22The relationship between the conscious and instinctive mind
30:26is easier to trace
30:28when we re-enter the charted waters of art history.
30:31In fact, for the last 100 years or so,
30:33it's been one of the principal concerns of the modern artist.
30:37So though this looks like it could be a drawing by Nadia
30:40or a cave painter,
30:42it is in fact that of a truly modern mind, Pablo Picasso,
30:46sketching in real time, straight from his brain to the page.
30:50The similarity isn't a coincidence.
30:53When Picasso saw cave art for himself,
30:55it had a profound effect.
30:57He dismissed academic art as decadent
31:00and felt we all had to get back to the very roots of image-making.
31:05And that's why Picasso experimented with drawing throughout his life.
31:09Je suis le cahier, he famously said.
31:12I am the sketchbook.
31:14As the prime inventor of what we think of as modern art,
31:17his drawings contain a great lesson,
31:19revealing the vast chasm between old master and modern drawing.
31:26Old master drawing showed, if you like,
31:28a conscious, rational mind at the peak of its powers,
31:31the mind that grasps reality,
31:33how light and shade works, how the body and the muscles work,
31:37and retransmits that infinitude of subtle observations
31:41into images that reflect the visible world.
31:44Modern drawing, by contrast,
31:46seems to represent the triumph of the irrational mind.
31:49So many modern drawings seem to aspire to the expression of the id,
31:53to the expression of order breaking down or mental strangeness.
31:57Many modern drawings even look like the drawings of children.
32:00Children, that is,
32:01before they've acquired the inhibitions of self-conscious thought.
32:07And Picasso lived right on the cusp
32:09between these two traditions, the old and the new.
32:12He's the absolute turning point of drawing,
32:15moving from the conscious mind to the unconscious one.
32:18In his youth, he was an academic draftsman par excellence,
32:22but as he matured, he rejected that.
32:26Indeed, he once said,
32:27when I was young I could draw like Raphael,
32:30but it's taken me all my life to learn, once more,
32:33how to draw like a five-year-old child.
32:38It's terribly difficult to undo
32:40the ways we have learned to look at the world.
32:43A child of five or six was once famously said,
32:46when he was asked how he made his drawings,
32:49he said, well, first I have a think and then I draw my think.
32:53And that's exactly the problem.
32:55The training of an artist is, in many ways,
32:58the training to overcome growing up,
33:00overcome the development of your mind,
33:02which makes this sort of way of looking at the world so difficult.
33:07In Picasso's wake, many 20th-century avant-garde artists
33:11became obsessed with getting back
33:13to drawing spontaneous childlike scribbling,
33:16freed from adult inhibition.
33:20None more so than the perpetually bonkers Surrealists.
33:24In the 1930s, they even came up with a formula
33:28that would assist an artist in drawing his think.
33:32The rules were simple.
33:34A, entry into a state similar to a trance.
33:37B, abandonment to interior tumult.
33:41C, rapidity of writing.
33:45No, it's not the template for writing a blockbuster novel.
33:48This was the artist André Masson's formula for Surrealist art,
33:52art that went directly from the unconscious mind onto the page.
33:56The idea of the game was to produce so-called automatic drawings,
34:00part of the Surrealist manifesto.
34:02Doodle and be enlightened.
34:04Draw and find elements of your repressed self
34:08in the free-flowing realm of calligraphy.
34:14These are some of Masson's drawings,
34:16made largely throughout the 1930s and 40s.
34:19They look, at first glance,
34:21as if spiders with ink on their legs have walked all over the pages.
34:25Closer inspection shows that these linear flicks and swirls
34:29make up odd landscapes, cascades and orgies.
34:33Mostly orgies, in fact,
34:35for even the landscapes have a phallic or gynaecological aspect to them.
34:41There's a freedom to his lines,
34:43darting across the page in all manner of directions,
34:46the eye darting with them.
34:48But stop to think carefully about this draughtsman's spaghetti
34:52and ask yourself, just how automatic is it?
34:57Free expression is not really ever free, we can be sure of that.
35:01You can loosen the reins a bit,
35:03but it's always going to reveal the kind of ruts and furrows
35:07which our minds follow because of history,
35:10just because of the way minds work.
35:12So it's not free.
35:13It would be totally uninteresting if it was completely free.
35:16What's most obvious about those
35:18is that they are clearly representations
35:20of what people thought their subconscious ought to be up to,
35:24heavily influenced by Freud.
35:27Here's Masson himself.
35:29Like almost all of the other notable surrealists,
35:32he was a man and a Catholic.
35:34There was a lot of repressed sexuality going on in their project.
35:38Liberating their psyches often involved
35:40a very unliberating kind of male sexual fantasy.
35:44Free your mind and an ass will follow.
35:49Masson's mistake was to be shackled to his id
35:52or at least to a preconceived Freudian idea
35:55of what the unconscious might be,
35:57a dark place in the brain, seething with sexual fantasy.
36:02He couldn't quite escape the fact
36:04that drawing really does reveal the most intimate corners of the mind.
36:08The mind, you might say, of a dirty old man.
36:14SCREAMING
36:20It's been a long time since the heyday of surrealism
36:23but I'm curious to know why so much current drawing
36:26has a surrealist feel to it.
36:29Are contemporary artists still trying to connect with the unconscious?
36:37I wanted to get it from the horse's mouth
36:39so I went to meet one of the art world's
36:41brightest young masters of weirdness,
36:43David Shrigley.
36:50Do you believe in the old surrealist idea
36:54that somehow drawing is a line
36:58connecting your subconscious through your hand to the page
37:01and that if you just draw,
37:03your subconscious will miraculously appear?
37:06Yeah.
37:10You believe it?
37:12Oh, yeah.
37:15Yeah, I think so.
37:17I believe in remote viewing and the delta waves and all.
37:22I don't take any LSD or anything like that
37:25but I feel that I'm in touch
37:27with the human collective consciousness
37:29at the time when I'm drawing.
37:31It does depend on my...
37:33Are you winding me up?
37:35No, it does depend a little bit
37:37on my caffeine intake and the time of day.
37:40However, you know,
37:42I feel that I'm sometimes experiencing
37:44something slightly mystical
37:46at the time when I'm, you know,
37:48when I'm really in the zone
37:50and I'm making good things,
37:52I feel that I'm in touch
37:54with the very soul of,
37:56you know, stuff.
37:58Why don't I believe you?
38:00Well, you know,
38:02you're an art critic,
38:04you're cynical by nature,
38:06but it's...
38:08I suppose if you say these things,
38:10it's hard to say things
38:12as stupid as that
38:14without implying some humour.
38:16But there is an element
38:18of that surrealist thing.
38:20Have you ever found yourself
38:22drawing something without realising
38:24that you were drawing it?
38:26Oh, yeah.
38:28Well, when you're on the phone to people,
38:30you always end up doing these drawings
38:32which are a bit like...
38:34I suppose they're a bit like the surreal.
38:36You know, it's a picture you hate
38:38and you're just like,
38:40OK, yeah, and you're drawing pictures
38:42of, like, owls.
38:44You think, why did I draw an owl?
38:46I don't know.
38:48What I really like
38:50about Shrigley's drawings
38:52is the way they capture
38:54random, unexpected thoughts.
38:56But where most of us dismiss
38:58and forget those thoughts,
39:00Shrigley holds on,
39:02stops something slight from passing
39:04and otherworldly.
39:08I don't think he really taps
39:10into his unconscious.
39:12He's more Monty Python than Sigmund Freud
39:14for my money.
39:16But he certainly pulls all kinds of fascinating
39:18flotsam and jetsam from the stream
39:20of consciousness.
39:22There's something unchained,
39:24even an element of the automatic,
39:26in all that he does.
39:28I've got to keep moving.
39:30I've got to keep drawing.
39:32The things that I like the most
39:34that I've made are the things that surprise me
39:36that come from some other place
39:38where I can't really retrace
39:40that train of thought to how I got to that place.
39:58Having met Shrigley,
40:00I wonder if a trained artist
40:02can ever truly sabotage conscious thought
40:04and create drawings
40:06that plumb the deepest recesses of the mind.
40:12The most extreme attempt I can think of
40:14to uncover this holy grail
40:16of the would-be instinctive draftsman
40:18was a series of positively loopy
40:20pseudo-scientific experiments
40:22which used hard drugs
40:24but took place here,
40:26at London's Bethlehem Psychiatric Hospital
40:28in the 1930s.
40:33Stored away in an air-controlled chamber
40:35is a series of drawings
40:37made at that time
40:39under the influence of the powerful psychedelic drug
40:41mescaline.
40:47In those days, it was perfectly acceptable
40:49to give seriously mind-bending substances
40:51to vulnerable people,
40:53so two psychiatrists, McClay and Gutmann,
40:55used mescaline to investigate
40:57the disorientating,
40:59hallucinatory side effects
41:01of the mental illness depersonalisation.
41:03After experimenting
41:05with actual patients
41:07coherent enough to describe their visions,
41:09they hit on the idea
41:11of doing the same with artists
41:13who could make direct and accurate pictures
41:15of out-of-body experiences.
41:19One of them was, in fact,
41:21a surrealist, an English one,
41:23Julian Trevelyan.
41:25In one of his drawings, he claimed
41:27he couldn't recall the line touching the surface
41:29of the paper, but rather
41:31it had floated in space like a wire.
41:37Trevelyan described the experience
41:39of taking mescaline in his autobiography
41:41Indigo Days.
41:43To me, it is above all, he said,
41:45the hyper-awareness of the beauty of things.
41:47To a painter, a rubbish dump
41:49is potentially as beautiful
41:51as the Garden of Eden.
41:53Trevelyan, fallen in love
41:55with a sausage roll
41:57and with a crumpled piece of newspaper
41:59out of the pig bucket.
42:01Maclay and Gutmann's experiments
42:03ended pretty much as soon as they'd begun,
42:05perhaps because they realised
42:07that drawings made on drugs
42:09are like conversations with people who are stoned.
42:11The lines of communication
42:13are all mixed up.
42:15It's a bit like listening to a radio
42:17that's out of tune.
42:19But there's always been
42:21a deep connection between drawing
42:23and the mentally disturbed patients of Bethlehem
42:25or Bedlam, as it was once known.
42:27This collection
42:29is full of work which really does
42:31seem to open a door onto all kinds
42:33of distinctly uncontrolled forms
42:35of consciousness, drawings that
42:37really lay the mind bare
42:39and make visible states of mind
42:41that many of us can only guess at.
42:45Among the most well-known
42:47are those of Louis Wayne,
42:49famous as the man who drew cats.
42:51Frightening, frazzled cats
42:53in these examples,
42:55made during his last years at Bethlehem
42:57when he was suffering from schizophrenia.
43:05But the work I find
43:07most painful here is the large collection
43:09of drawings by Cynthia Pell.
43:11A trained artist, Pell had been
43:13in and out of psychiatric hospitals
43:15for around ten years
43:17before being fully committed in 1973.
43:19For the rest of her life,
43:21she would vividly reveal
43:23her mental condition
43:25on these frequently stark,
43:27bleak pieces of paper.
43:31She was a hugely interesting
43:33and unhappy person
43:35who seemed to find
43:37confirmation for existence
43:39in drawing, and it seemed to be
43:41really quite necessary for her.
43:43She drew all the time.
43:45She drew on anything,
43:47little pieces of paper,
43:49envelopes, scraps of card,
43:51anything, anything at all
43:53she could find.
43:55Drawing seemed absolutely necessary
43:57to her.
43:59It was kind of like breathing.
44:01It was part of her.
44:03It was innate.
44:05She became very depressed
44:07and didn't draw
44:09during the last year of her life.
44:11But her work became a lot darker.
44:13She'd started shaving her head
44:15and it looked rather as if
44:17she'd come from a concentration camp
44:19during particularly the last year.
44:21And a lot of her images
44:23were quite skeletal,
44:25quite dark,
44:27and hugely melancholy.
44:31There's an ages-old tradition
44:33that links art to madness,
44:35that sees art as a window
44:37onto the disordered mind.
44:40Goya's paintings were too dangerous
44:42and irresponsible to be allowed
44:44into his ideal republic,
44:46and it resurfaced again
44:48in the Renaissance view
44:50of the artist as a melancholic
44:52born under the sign of Saturn,
44:54his creativity inextricably linked
44:56to depression and a habit
44:58of morbid introversion.
45:00It was most brilliantly expressed
45:02by Dürer in his famous print Melancholia.
45:04And the idea persisted
45:06into the Romantic period
45:08when Goya drew his famous
45:10The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
45:12seeing the artist's feverish imaginings
45:14as the dreams that come
45:16when we suspend
45:18or lose control.
45:20There's no smoke without fire
45:22and I do think there's some truth in it.
45:24The great artists
45:26from Caravaggio to Van Gogh and beyond
45:28have always been in touch
45:30with aspects of thought and feeling
45:32that other people tend to suppress
45:34or ignore.
45:38But ultimately I find it
45:40truly disturbing to look at the drawings
45:42of those who are, purely and simply,
45:44suffering from mental illness.
45:46They're beautiful and intriguing
45:48but in the end, how therapeutic
45:50are they?
45:52Cynthia Pell committed suicide
45:54not long after finishing this picture.
45:56She cut her throat,
45:58her throat, in the bath.
46:08Which prompts the question
46:10what can be gained from drawing
46:12as a therapeutic activity?
46:14One place that goes some way
46:16to answering that
46:18is in San Francisco,
46:20an art centre-cum-gallery
46:22that's given hundreds of people
46:24a unique opportunity to communicate
46:26with the world around them.
46:30It's called Creative Growth
46:32and is one of the world's biggest centres
46:34for art made by the developmentally disabled.
46:36People living with autism,
46:38cerebral palsy,
46:40motor neuron conditions.
46:42Since it opened in 1975,
46:44it's been home to almost
46:46a thousand different artists
46:48whose works have been collected
46:50by museums,
46:52as well as Hollywood actors,
46:54Bill Clinton,
46:56and even our own Royal Family.
46:58The work made at Creative Growth
47:00is usually referred to as
47:02outsider art.
47:04Artists usually have no formal training whatsoever.
47:06They're just immersed
47:08in the act of creating,
47:10the intuitive process of making their mark
47:12day after day.
47:16The fundamental action
47:18of putting a pen on paper
47:20or making that mark, that early graffiti,
47:22is very important.
47:24It happens for all artists,
47:26but I think that for people
47:28who might not be able to speak
47:30or who might communicate in other ways,
47:32it's fundamentally important
47:34to have a way
47:36to visually represent
47:38their thoughts
47:40or what they're thinking.
47:42Someone like Dan Miller
47:44isn't verbally articulate,
47:46although he uses words
47:48and he can spell some words.
47:50Dan uses a series of words
47:52in his drawings
47:54that often repeat words
47:56like on, off, click,
47:58light bulb, electricity,
48:00and he's revealing
48:02to us the way he thinks
48:04about things, the way his mind works
48:06or doesn't work, the way the synapses connect,
48:08the way ideas come on and off
48:10in his head, and I think
48:12the process of writing these words
48:14and having them turn into these large drawings
48:16is actually a kind of evidence
48:18of his thought process.
48:22To see just how closely
48:24drawing mirrors personality,
48:26take the example of William and Richard Tyler.
48:28Autistic since birth,
48:30they've been coming here
48:32for almost 30 years.
48:34And though they're identical twins,
48:36their drawings couldn't be more different.
48:38Their work has been different
48:40right from the start.
48:42William Tyler is fantastically precise
48:44and an incredible drawer,
48:46very verbal and more socially interactive.
48:48Richard's work is not.
48:50It's abstract, it's usually non-figurative,
48:52it's colourful,
48:54and Richard is largely non-verbal
48:56So even though these two brothers
48:58are identical twins,
49:00their work is quite different,
49:02and I think that also speaks
49:04to the way that artistic communication
49:06is really inherently different
49:08for each person.
49:10In William Tyler's work,
49:12you clearly see that his autism
49:14is at play in influencing
49:16the way that he draws,
49:18the idea of precision,
49:20of repetition,
49:22his fear of social situations
49:24and times and dates.
49:26Those are all a part
49:28of the way his brain functions
49:30and the way his thought process
49:32is influenced by his autism.
49:45For me, the term outsider art
49:47means that art doesn't respond
49:49to the history of art.
49:51You can't look to the person's training,
49:53you can't ask them for the theory behind it,
49:55you can't ask them for the conceptual meaning
49:57of the work.
49:59There it is.
50:01It's an immediate, primal response.
50:03In some ways, this is modern cave painting.
50:05Here it is.
50:07These are these marks on the wall
50:09that we discover.
50:11What do they mean to us?
50:13Are they ritualistic?
50:15Are they communication?
50:17Is it language?
50:19Are they words?
50:21In many ways, it's all of those things, I think.
50:25What's fascinating about the work here
50:27is that it so clearly shows
50:29the mind, however remote,
50:31drawn out on the page.
50:33These drawings do seem to
50:35represent the sheer instinctual
50:37joy of mark-making,
50:39taking drawing back to where we started,
50:41to its pure, childlike state.
50:45Creative growths artists may well be outside
50:47of art history, but in their
50:49frenzied repetition and optical oddness
50:51they mirror the surrealist
50:53idea of automatic drawing
50:55and Picasso casting aside
50:57his academic draftsmanship.
51:01This is about as free as drawing can ever get.
51:03And so to our final stop.
51:09Not sunny California,
51:11but London's East End,
51:13where so many of today's young artists
51:15live and work.
51:17Making art from photography,
51:19video, performance.
51:21Any artist
51:23can be seen here,
51:25but it's not the only place
51:27where art can be found.
51:29Photography, video, performance.
51:33Any old medium in fact,
51:35but rarely pencil and paper.
51:37One artist who seems to epitomise
51:39the current trends in art
51:41is Michael Landy.
51:43Like many of his peers,
51:45he's best known for sculpture and installations.
51:47He made headline news all over the world
51:49in 2001 with this show
51:51called Breakdown.
51:53The title was both metaphoric
51:55and literal.
51:57Over the course of two weeks,
51:59Landy destroyed every single thing he possessed.
52:01His car,
52:03his record collection,
52:05his passport,
52:07even his own sculptures.
52:09Left with nothing but the boiler suit
52:11he was wearing,
52:13he went back to his flat
52:15and started making art again.
52:17But not like a conceptual artist.
52:19More like a Renaissance one.
52:21I remember after you'd done Breakdown
52:23I came to see you
52:25and you said
52:27you were working on some drawings
52:29of weeds that grow out of the pavements.
52:31Why did you draw weeds?
52:33I guess because
52:35they're kind of forlorn things
52:37but also very optimistic things.
52:39I mean,
52:41in an urban context,
52:43they just grow in little cracks
52:45in the street
52:47and they can flourish
52:49without very much nourishment
52:51or water or soil
52:53and then you'll find
52:55lots of them growing.
52:57So I tried to grow them in pots
52:59and try and pamper them
53:01but they'd always end up dying on me
53:03but then the seeds would fly away
53:05and they would end up in the tarmac
53:07and they'd grow happily in the tarmac
53:09so I saw them as very optimistic
53:11signs really.
53:13And you yourself were
53:15a kind of urban weed
53:17at that point
53:19that you had no substructure whatsoever
53:21so I'd obviously
53:23after Breakdown I'd obviously set myself
53:25like, you know,
53:27I'd destroyed all my own artworks
53:29so suddenly it's like I negated
53:31everything and it was very difficult
53:33to start again actually.
53:37It strikes me that Landy himself
53:39was surprised by how intimately connected
53:41he felt with the process of drawing
53:43so much so that it was at the heart
53:45of his next project.
53:47Called Semi-Detached
53:49this consisted of a full-scale
53:51replica of his parents' home
53:53identical down to the smallest detail
53:55installed at Tate Britain.
53:59Alongside the house Landy projected a video
54:01depicting the day-to-day domestic life
54:03of his father, John Landy
54:05a former tunnel miner largely
54:07housebound since an industrial accident
54:09in the 1970s.
54:13The piece was a tribute to his father
54:15and perhaps because of that
54:17it was the catalyst
54:19for Landy's most emotionally charged
54:21drawings to date.
54:23I kind of thought about what I felt
54:25most passionate about and that was kind of
54:27the plight of my dad is when I went to visit
54:29my parents and I kind of left
54:31and feeling kind of frustrated
54:33that I was unable to
54:35but I'm a visual artist and I should be able
54:37to kind of deal with it
54:39I felt I should be able to deal with this kind of
54:41this kind of emotive family matter
54:43and being unable
54:45being unable to in a way
54:47and that's gone on for years
54:49and I wanted to do a project
54:51about my dad
54:53and so it's a kind of natural thing
54:55for me to do would be
54:57just to spend some time with him
54:59and draw him
55:01he let me draw
55:03because he'd recently had
55:05his leg operated on
55:07and he let me draw his scar
55:09which was nice because I was carrying
55:11my own scar at that time
55:13and it was very poignant in a way
55:15that it was just being
55:17stapled up together
55:19The one of the hand particularly
55:21seems very much to constitute
55:23the skin seems almost transparent
55:25like you can see through to what's underneath
55:27was that what you could actually see
55:29or was that what you were feeling?
55:31Well it's kind of what I can see
55:33but it's also my dad's hand
55:35because he had an industrial accident
55:37in the late 70s and his hand is more like
55:39a kind of clamp in a way
55:41than a cigarette so I wanted to get over
55:43that kind of feeling really
55:45Do you feel that by going back
55:47by starting again with drawing
55:49you're starting again with the sort of
55:51the basic element of art
55:53in it?
55:55Thought, paper, hand
55:57I don't know if it's even thought really
55:59it's some kind of
56:01I kind of meditate
56:03almost when I draw
56:05you kind of cut out
56:07everything else and it is a very
56:09simple kind of thing about to try
56:11and render something
56:13to the best of my ability
56:15I did life drawing between 16 and 18
56:17on my foundation course
56:19and I got to 18 and I could draw
56:21the human body without
56:23looking at my paper
56:25and then after that I didn't know what to do with it
56:27so I stopped, which is a shame actually
56:29I wish I'd kept it on
56:3120 years later then I'm drawing my dad
56:33I've had like
56:35intensive periods of drawing
56:37then I've had years
56:39of no draftsmanship at all
56:49If one thing's become clear to me
56:51while travelling through these interviews
56:53and studio visits
56:55therapy sessions, cave diving
56:57and trips to Bedlam
56:59it's that the drawings that move me the most
57:01are those where the conscious shaping mind
57:03and the instinctual
57:06and the imaginative mind
57:08seem to be working together
57:10in some moving
57:12not entirely explicable way
57:14and I think that's what I find
57:16so touching about Michael Landy's drawings
57:18especially his powerful
57:20drawings of London weeds
57:22done when he was in a state of crisis
57:24trying to recover
57:26from an almost total breakdown
57:28of himself
57:30They're beautiful drawings
57:32beautifully precise
57:34they would have made perfect sense
57:36to a Raphael or a Durer
57:38but there's also a deep instinctual
57:40quality about them
57:42they carry a strong emotional charge
57:44and deliver a basic
57:46defiant human message
57:48I think they were Michael's way of saying
57:50that no matter what happens
57:52I intend to survive
57:54just like these weeds growing through cracks
57:56in the pavement
57:58in the least hospitable of human environments
58:00the same message applies
58:02to itself as a medium
58:04it might have been pronounced dead
58:06in the conceptualist ghetto of one or two
58:08Mojish art schools
58:10but it isn't dead at all
58:12it's far too important a part of ourselves
58:14of our minds
58:16to die or disappear
58:18like Michael Landy's weeds
58:20drawing will always survive
58:28Well if you're inspired by the series
58:30visit bbc.co.uk
58:32forward slash secretofdrawing
58:34Next here tonight
58:36a drama guaranteed to make you squeamish
58:38and if you can't face that
58:40switch to BBC4 for a programme
58:42about saucy seaside postcards