The form of the message

A young boy is learning how to draw. He idolizes his older sister who at 13 draws quite well. She helps her parents with some of their art projects. Recently they did caricatures for some doctors. Sister did the preliminary sketches which were invaluable in producing the final image that would form in her father’s head, which finally he would translate into real drawings.

Since they were comic caricatures of real people based on many photographs, the issue of likeness was essential. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote something about this. He proposed the idea, “the horse-ness of the horse.” The idea was to look at many horses and then discover what are common about horses which make a horse a horse and not something else. In other words, what makes up their “horse-ness”

As with all things coming from Plato, the idea includes the deepest profundities. The ancient classical visual artists, mostly sculptors, were not interested in copying a real horse. They were instead after imitating it. Suggesting that the act of imitating incorporates a deeper involvement than just putting down into real form what a particular horse looks like. They were more interested in the form of a perfectly beautiful horse. And to get at this idea they would have to apprehend the horse in the sense of its nobility. What after all do we mean when we say, a beautiful horse? What is in the horse that makes it beautiful?

Is it the fact of the horse? How powerful it is? How difficult its power is to contain for the human rider? What is the horse-ness of horses? The boy is still too young to fully understand this question. He is only 9 years old. But he has ridden a horse. Since he wants to become a veterinarian, it’s likely he will in due course come to understand this question in its fuller sense, albeit slowly. Perhaps it will take him the rest of his life if he also becomes an artist.

But since he is learning to draw, he is making a good start at confronting the question. He is pre-plotting his own individual route at learning how to draw. It is a route unlike his sister’s. The older one went very quickly into drawing “realistic” forms. She likes drawing people and getting their natural likenesses. She is only beginning to learn the ability to deviate from forms as they naturally appear. Now she must learn to make a drawing beautiful by releasing herself from the constraints of objects as they naturally appear. In other words to strike at the “true” beauty of the object and realize that this is always a reality which is invisible to the eyes.

The young boy, like most other children, makes beautiful drawings already. They are not entrapped by natural appearance. He likes to draw people and animals. But his drawings indicate that he does not take issues of proportion and surface details too seriously. And yet he is definitely able to capture likeness. And he knows what he is doing. He can tell when his drawings are “abstract” rather than “realistic.” And of course his artist-parents are always careful not to intervene too much in their children’s natural artistic growth. They are also art teachers and so they know that with kids younger than 9 years old, the best lesson often involves nothing more than just leaving the kids alone with paper and pencil and just encouraging them to draw as often as possible.

Pablo Picasso in his late age suggested that every artist ought to try eventually to learn how to draw like a little child. Most young children naturally make beautiful drawings. There must be empirical explanations for this. They make their lines naturally without too much self consciousness. They do not suffer the burden of making “beautiful” lines and so they succeed in making naturally beautiful drawings.

And they might even understand Plato better than we credit them for. What Plato was telling us was that it was not the horse itself which makes it beautiful but the forms it carries around it. A horse is beautiful because if one were to draw it or make it into sculpture, one would need to make the most beautiful horse-lines. The lines are there on the real horse. But you would have to know a bit of art to see it.

The young boy is still too young to understand how subversive this idea is. If one were to apply it into contemporary conditions, it translates into this concept: It is the form of the message which makes it beautiful and consequently acceptable. NOT the message itself. This means that if you could only master the skill of making anything beautiful in the sense of forms (for the visual arts: line, value, color, texture, etc.) then you can make even the most offensive things appear beautiful and therefore acceptable. Even a big lie can be made to appear like a beautiful truth if you knew how.

This message is of course not strange for us of contemporary times. It is practically a no-brainer inside the light of new media. And yet a father contemplating his son learning how to draw beautiful things that do not appear the way they do in nature cannot help being bothered by the pure magic of it.