The necessary logic of drawing

Football is a study of the heroic act. Few realize this as much as a young child on a soccer field. A big attacker approaches, dribbling the ball in a resolute drive towards the goal. Imagine you are that little child, the last defender before the goal keeper. What should you do?

Your survival instincts tell you to step aside or make some show of trying to grab the ball with just your feet. But this is not how you have been taught. Instead you remember the coach saying: Keep your eyes on the ball. Put your body in between the shooter and the goal. Keep your body low, your head down and pretend you are willing to collide frontally with the shooter if he does not stop. Reduce all his options. Take away his nerve. Distract him from his resolve. Be quicker than him.

But all these are happening inside your head before they actually happen on the field. They are like quick drawings you sketch for yourself of an impending event. And you know from the beginning that whatever happens will happen after a very fixed logic. The shooter will either score or you will stop him from scoring. What it takes is for you to put yourself there, in front of the shooter and his “line of fire”. He looks huge and menacing, and you are not even a real teenager yet.

Drawing is a predictive act. A drawing is not the finished product. It merely illustrates what might come to be. It is the first simplified glimpse of a more complex idea that is as of yet developing in your head. This definition of drawing would seem simple enough but the true nature of drawing is often misunderstood.

This is because we think of drawing as art and not as a common life-skill. And artists themselves are often responsible for breeding this sort of misconception. They make nice, beautiful drawings copied from life. They co-conspire at presenting to everyone this wrong notion that you would have to know how to draw a face or a tree or a flower to prove that you really know how to draw. When the truth is that mimesis or copying what natural objects actually look like is only a small specialized part of the drawing skill.

The true nature of drawing needs to be clarified. Pen and paper are important in the act of drawing but it is not essential. The drawing can be made in the head. Drawing is more mathematical than we think. Indeed, we all draw to some extent just to go through the normal operations of everyday life.

The essential core of drawing is the predictive act. But to predict well one must learn how to simplify complex realities into their most fundamental parts, to learn to see first of all only the most important geometries. One must acquire the discipline to know what extraneous details to discount. Details distract, they overburden the thinking process and make it less efficient. The act of drawing requires that the essential is correctly separated from the extraneous. As designers often say, a good drawing is always a cheap sketch.

This cheap sketch is important. Armed with cheap mental sketches of possible outcomes, the creative person quickly acquires a full range of possible outcomes to any situation. He or she has the better grasp of possible options. The act of reducing a complex reality into a simplified arrangement of controllable symbolic cues is not just art, it is the soul of mathematics. It is practical algebra in its most intuitive everyday form.

Thus, the young football player confronting the attacking opponent is really producing many drawings in her or his head. It is a moving drawing incorporating even the travel of time like a quick narrative or a quick story of possible outcomes to an impending situation. It is important that he or she must be able to discount the extraneous and focus simply on the essential. If he or she moves here, this will happen. The opponent might get a clear shot of the goal. If he or she stays in place, a possible collision. There might be pain. But as the coach has said: Pain is temporary, winning  is forever! And so you discount all extraneous details. One of them is pain. You focus instead on the essential, which is to win or at least to defend your place in the scheme of this sometimes frightening game.

“Pain is temporary. Winning is forever.” That looks like a quick sketch for the rules of life. By the necessary logic of drawing, it seems also a good drawing for a small act of heroism, one that might lead to bigger more important acts.