Drawing Beats Painting

Sumo notes, Tokyo, graphte, ink, watercolor wash

Drawing Beats Painting

Jon Donlon


My upright Episcopal aunt enrolled me in a summer art enrichment class as a boy. By extraordinary good luck it was taught by Elmore Morgan Jr. in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was young in his own career and it was decades before he was acknowledged as one of America’s finest artists. He exposed us children to his ideas of color and line and marking with the same mix of kindness and discipline I found again, eight or ten years later, when I enjoyed his instruction in drawing class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Last summer the New York Times had a wonderful review by Michael Kimmelman, “An Exhibition about Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth” (July 19, 2006). I enjoyed it because of my interests in old travel narratives and memoirs, some done back when the diarists did their own illustrations. And I enjoyed it because I have a special fondness for the great age of amateurism, the Victorian period with its explosion of Henry Higginsises collecting syllables or shells or whatnot. And it brought back such lodged memories of my own efforts to learn how to draw.

Now I reflect on the great good luck evidenced by those events in my life. As Kimmelman says, used to be that “drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness,” Michael Kimmelman goes on in The Times review, “From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations... Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.” Matthew Perry, who had close ties to the Slidell’s for whom the New Orleans’s suburb is named, is most famous for “opening” Japan. But he was a great one for education. He helped develop America’s naval academy, recommending a curriculum including such practical subjects as “drawing, mapping, and gunnery tactics…” according to his biographer John Schroeder.

For decades, like Jack Kerouac, I lugged about cheap notebooks, writing notes and making little illustrations in whatever pen or pencil was handy. In fact, the very first day the Louisiana government offices were opened again in Baton Rouge after Katrina, I was chewing on a bureaucrat’s ear, suggesting we get a few cases of note books to hand out to the displaced and at the various shelters. Let people write and draw about their experiences. “It’s self-directed,” I pointed out, “and it’s quiet” a special benefit of journalizing. That ear was tin. I ran into folks with the tourism section, and suggested that narratives from journals filled as they were with heart and bravery would be an antidote to the news coverage of “toxic soup.” There was no traction there for handing out note books for journalizing and recuperative drawing, either. Now, of course, there are wonderful Post-Katrina books and photo projects and the State has come fully aboard collecting personal narratives and archiving them for the future. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t able to get some journalizing and drawing sessions going way back there in the breach.

I don’t ape Kerouac’s nickel notebooks and bic pens anymore. His notebooks are, after all, important cultural artifacts while mine are merely repositories of information for my later use. Most of what I do, now, most of the time, are small, palm-sized water colors or India ink pen renderings in an ongoing series of bound, illustrated journals with thick acid-free paper (black ones I order from San Francisco, red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, accordion-pleated page ones I get in Kyoto). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.

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