Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)

Jim Dine

I've always had a wish to put down marks. As a boy, who knew he was going to be an artist, I was continually drawing. When I was twelve years old, I realized I couldn't do what I wanted to do with my hands. I not only could not draw what I saw, I could not sit with the drawing. I am talking about when I was in the seventh grade. There was a boy in the class who could draw caricatures of people and I was very envious of him. He already had developed a style, a line. I had a passion but it was thwarted by personal things. At the time, my mother had just died and I was in deep unhappiness. I felt I had been slugged. I couldn't concentrate on anything, not even drawing. I knew I had this calling but I couldn't do anything with it, just store it. All I could do was doodle. I was aimlessly moving the pencil on my mathematics pad, in the margin of books, on everything, making people's faces, geometric designs, etc. My mind was going and so was my hand. When I was sixteen, I bought some oil paint and a board and I set up a still life in my grandma's house and I immediately painted the objects accurately. I was totally shocked by it, particularly the way I painted a piece of rye bread. Now, maybe if I saw this little painting today it would look awful, but then I was amazed by what I could do. It wasn't drawing, it was painting, and with oil paint you can hide a lot, but still it was a beginning. I started painting in adult classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati at night, but really I didn't know what I was doing. I knew Picasso had done something, something to do with abstraction. I sort of was trying to paint shapes and things, attempting to be a modernist, and then for my eighteenth birthday, I bought myself a book called Modern Prints and Drawings by Paul Sachs. It was a survey of the modern prints and drawings he loved. I used it like a Bible. At first I gravitated to the German expressionist printmakers--Kirchner, Nolde, and Beckmann--because they made big, big strong statements in black and white, but when I saw the Matisse lithograph from 1913, the one that's got her head sort of cut off on the bias and is just a line drawing, I thought, my God, to be able to do that in one line.

In 1955, I went to Ohio University, and the one thing I wanted to do was draw. I drew from my imagination, not from the model because in those days at Ohio University, which was in the so-called Bible Belt, there were no nude models. In fact, there weren't any models that I recall, and there certainly weren't nude models and I know that because we tried to get nude ones and a few years later got a big old woman to come down from Columbus and pose naked. I immediately was able to draw her in a rather stylish way. It wasn't accurate necessarily but because of all the close looking I had done in my life, suddenly I was able to focus and make my hand do what I wanted it to do. From that moment, I knew drawing was essential to me. It kept alive the need I have for family. It gave me a line of tradition that led from me back to artists I admired, not just Rembrandt and Picasso, Matisse and Degas, but others who are dismissed but who gave their lives to drawing, some in an academic way, some in a personal way. Everybody I looked at taught me something. When I left college, I went to New York City. This was in 1958. During those years (the early '60s, late '50s), I struggled to find my own voice through drawing objects that were familiar to me, hand tools I had loved since I was a boy, plain chairs and sink faucets, isolated in space. Usually it was a single object very intensely observed. I wanted to use objects that were not traditional but I also yearned to have my feet in historical drawing.

By the late '60s, because I was etching like crazy, I was starting to get closer to depicting objects the way I saw them. The making of hard-ground etchings really made me look at what I was squeezing out of my hand. In 1972, I made a series of drawings called 52 Drawings (for Cy Twombly). They were on individual sheets. It was a library of small hand tools. They were meant to be read serially around a room in a single row, like a movie.

In Vermont in 1974, I started to make drawings of humans. I made four drawings of my wife. They were expressive drawings of her head. Then I made some nude drawings of her and they looked fully realized to me as drawings. I hired student models because there was a college in the town where I lived and I had four or five months of making academic studies. I wanted the anonymity of strangers. Two or three women came and they were perfectly charming and they happily sat while I drew them. Then I realized I had a neighbor, Jesse Heller, who was nineteen years old and had a very athletic body. I was able to see in her arms and her shoulders and the rest of her body how nature puts us together. I decided to use Jesse--she was my live anatomy book. When I started to draw her, this was 1974 or 5, I was doing nothing else. I gave it two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, just solid looking. So for the first year including drawing Nancy sometimes, I drew Jesse. I probably made ten drawings in a year but there were maybe one hundred or two hundred drawings underneath because I never trusted to leave a drawing. I always have to elaborate, unlike Matisse. I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away again. I trust my method of not trusting. I wanted the drawing always to be better. Drawing for me was and is such a specifically "non-lying" technique. With painting, you can move the matter around and it can be beautiful, but not in drawing. For me, drawing is all about looking--looking hard, seeing it, taking it out, putting it back again to see if I can rebuild it better. I can imagine that if I live two hundred years, I'll still be correcting. It's the corrections that are interesting. They are the history of each drawing. What draws me to Giacometti's drawings are the corrections, not the drawings themselves. I don't think he was a great draftsman. He was an excellent miniaturist. He's always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me. The best drawing of Giacometti's I ever saw wasn't a drawing. It was a plaster portrait about two inches high of Simone de Beauvoir. It's as good a drawing as I ever saw and all it was, was a little plaster, but he caught it right.

I thought and still do that to be able to draw the figure the way I wanted it to be was a goal to aspire to. I took five years out of my life to teach myself to draw. I set myself the task of learning how to reinvent the depiction of the human body. I wanted to express my romance about the organism in an emotional way but also with a degree of accuracy so the viewer could relate to it as a human. By this I mean that, if I draw a nose and mouth and imbue it with the drama and emotion that I feel about it and the viewer says, "Yes I've felt that way too," then I've succeeded.

After Vermont, I moved to New York and took a studio at Carnegie Hall in 1978. That's where I made the portraits of my friend Nelson Blitz. I'm proud of that work but since then there have been moments when I've made more beautiful drawings because I know more. By "know more," I mean because of all these years of "looking" at my subjects and of the work of those people who've informed me and because my eyes are old and have helped my hand dream of the thrill of making marks on the paper, I can say "know more." Or probably it would be more accurate to say I'm finally beginning to see. My eyes and my hands mark the paper without interference. The whole point is if you have the gift that I have, that I was born with, if I had been unencumbered or less encumbered with the psychological baggage I carry, I believe I could draw better because to draw, for me, I need to be in a "state of grace." I need to be without interior trauma. If I can only draw for ten minutes, that's enough. Then I do it another day for ten minutes. I find a way. When I did the Glyptotek Drawings, in the late '80s, it was a different deal. The museum was closed, there was no noise, there was nobody, no distractions, just a guard who let me in and out, and it was night so I relied on artificial light. I was focusing on something not alive. I was trying to bring the statues to life, but it was a lot easier than a live person, way easier. They didn't move and since they didn't move, and I was alone, I could look as long and as hard as I needed to in a place that was closed off and silent. In a certain way it was the optimal situation. But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I'm trying to do. That's all. I've got to be in that state when I make the drawing, then my heart and hand do the "looking."

I don't make sketches. I don't make studies. A drawing is a drawing, a painting is a painting. There are certain subjects I don't paint. I don't paint portraits. I don't believe I have ever painted a self-portrait, but I've drawn myself a lot with great elaborateness. There is a lot of rubbing out, a lot of bringing back, certainly working on it for many months. A drawing is a labor for me, not in a bad way, but in an intense way. I am able to search through drawing, for the age and personality. I look at the way the flesh falls. I want to get it right, but right doesn't mean just anatomically correct, it means to get it right so it's convincing to me as an invention of the face. I have a total connection between my hand and my eye--it's just that I can't see sometimes. Sometimes I can see perfectly--by seeing I mean it's like an inner eye. It's not just two eyes seeing, it's the memory of how things look or the memory of how I want them to look. I'm very ambitious for my drawing. When I'm taking out and putting back, I'm not building necessarily--I'm taking out, hoping the next pass across the page will be a touchdown. I am not erasing because I couldn't get the object accurately, but because I am hoping for grace to come to me. I don't think hard work makes a good drawing. I have had a lot of students who worked very hard and who really looked hard and after two weeks of drawing would turn out a drawing that was completely dead, even though it showed, rigorous looking. It's not what I want. If I erase, it's because I didn't get what I wanted the first time. If I don't get it by the twentieth time let's say, and the paper is halfway gone, then I start to patch the paper. Drawing is not an exercise. Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere. Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey. For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere. The quest is to keep the thing alive--the drawing and the state of grace. I get the endorphin high by the intensity of my looking and is then that I can leave my body.

Now that I am a photographer, it's making me a better draftsman. I'm less interested in focused looking. I'm more interested in being able to draw the feeling I have, and to compose something that's harmonious on the page. What helps me because of my age is that I can't see as well as I did or I see differently or I don't look as hard as I did or my bifocals mess me up or I'll sometimes look through the top part, the far vision part of my glasses, when I'm close up. Some things in the drawing are in focus and some are out, and I've allowed that. It's freed me and allowed my drawings a range of emotions. Anybody can be emotional with a tool like a pencil or a piece of charcoal. You can fake it or make it real, you can be emotional and you can be trite, but to have a range of emotions in just one specific drawing is something I hope for. In my earlier drawings, I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in everything in focus, hard looking, being delicate, making something beautiful. Now, I'm more interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things. This range of emotions is not about anger and fear and love and hate. It's about the emotions that come from looking at something visually. And these emotions don't have words. They really don't. They are not descriptive. Because of my recent intense use of the camera, in my drawings I trust "clicking of the shutter," so to speak. I want to get my drawings out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images.

For the most part, I draw things that I've drawn before because I've chosen those objects as mine, the tools for example. So already I have a relationship with the objects because I've drawn them before and I've chosen them because they appeal to me in some primal way. They don't appeal to me necessarily as objects to be glorified but they're familiar and I want to draw them. The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that's a primary emotion for me. If I don't have that sense of wanting to capture, then I don't touch it. When I was a boy, and I discovered hand tools, I knew I wanted to do something with them. I didn't know what. I just felt they were useful things and also they were objects to be captured. I can't be more specific than that. It's what I wanted from these things. I wanted to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them. The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless. You could say the tools could be a Rorschach test for my psychology but I don't mean that--although I think there is something in that idea--but it's just too limiting and reductive to me and the work.

I used to think drawings were things done with pencil, ink, charcoal on paper, and in fact the works on paper that I venerated as a child and then as an artist have been classically monochromatic. But I am such an artistically "rabid" personality once I start to draw with the classical mediums on paper, I always have to take a bite out of color or the stuff you spray the trunks of automobiles with (the speckled paint) or I have to put my foot on the paper and smear the unfixed marks. I always assume the support I am drawing on (paper, wood, or the wall) is a "petri dish" where the eventual product is hatched and I do anything I can to help it be born.

I need a lot of time to make a drawing. I always needed time for my incubation process, but now I need more time because I want so much more from the work and from my romantic unconscious. Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life. It allows me and others who are open to human emotion to experience a straightforward view without artifice, but with poetry. I'm loosening my grip on the high contrast image, and I no longer care about highlights to delineate the image. I'm more interested in the coming and going of the image in the blink of an eye. I sometimes want (surprisingly) to misplace the image completely and just have the full mass of the object within the rectangle. I am working through the specificity of the image and losing the illustrative quality of specific subject matter i.e. a man laughing about a certain thing he's remembered. Now, I'm looking at everything without giving importance to any one thing. As I've said before, it's "about looking." The privilege of looking.

-- Excerpted from the upcoming exhibition catalogue Drawings of Jim Dine co-published by the National Gallery of Art and Steidl, March 2004.

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