📝 Visual Language
On communicating through drawing
‘(…) it cannot be described with words, but it can be drawn.’ — Christoph Niemann
Christoph Niemann is perhaps, no doubt, one of the most prolific and creative artists out there these days. It’s not a coincidence that he is also such a great communicator (I’ll avoid the abused term storyteller). He’s worked and communicated with different types of media and means - spoken, and visual - and his work always presents the paradox of having deep meaning while being witty and amusing.
In his TED talk - You are fluent in this language (and don't even know it) - which I strongly recommend watching, he says something I think implies what drawing means in essence: talking about the bad taste a night sleep during a flight leaves in his mouth, he says: ‘I have the most terrible taste in my mouth. It’s a taste that’s so bad, it cannot be described with words - but it can be drawn’.
I find this ‘but it can be drawn’ such a powerful affirmation.
Drawing is a language, a visual language, that helps us understand and communicate our reality and our ideas, when words can’t quite grasp the intensity, the energy of a specific meaning or feeling.
Martin Gayford writes in his fantastic book Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: ‘The most significant factors in an artist’s life — perhaps in anyone’s — are not easily accessible to conventional biography. They may be sights, sounds, impressions, or feelings: elusive and hard to put into words.’ But they can be drawn. And this is precisely what his book is about and what David Hockney did in 2019 and 2020: depicting the feelings and observations on the arrival of Spring in Normandy.
Ishbel Myerscough, an artist from London, puts it perfectly, stressing the correlation between capturing reality to communicate her observations on it: ‘Drawing is the purest form of art. It is the primary, the start line. For me, it is a means to explain things that cannot be explained with words.’
PS.
Go and watch Christoph Niemann’s TED talk! Everything else I could say in this post, he’s already communicated it beautifully in that talk. So much to learn from these great artists.
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Happy sketching!
Ana
Thanks for another interesting post. I really enjoyed listening to the TED talk, he is such a good presenter. Very good advice too. I like the idea of Sunday sketches.