THE DRAWER

Or: KAI, the draughtsman

Today I’m talking about one of my oldest and greatest passions: Drawing.

As a child, the human being wants to feel himself, to experience himself as active. Through the senses, the nose, the eyes, the hands, the skin, the ears, we receive information and experience the world.

And so, step by step, we feel our way through the world.

If, like me, a child has young and/or playful and/or curious and/or nurturing parents, they let their child do what it wants and stop it as little as possible in its urge to discover the world, to experience itself and to know itself.

I was lucky enough to have parents who let me do what I wanted. And so I left my mark everywhere: with the red tomato sauce on the dining table. With pee in the snow. With my hand in the dirt.

What I liked most was building, reading, listening to music, dancing, playing football, cycling or drawing. We didn’t have a television, computers were still few and far between in 1971, but the flat was full of vinyl records and books. And outside there was a garden, a tree and a pile of sand.

So I built castles and mountains in the sand, dug tunnels and created lakes and seas with a watering can. I built everything I saw. And I drew everything that was important to me: my dog, my brothers, my parents, my family, animals, trees, the sun, the sea, letters, numbers, strokes, leaves, mushrooms, ravens, elephants, tigers, whales, houses, towers, bicycles, cars, trucks, ships, planes, football, soccer players, handball players, volleyball players, car racers, ice hockey players, and sometime later women, women and women. Naked, with clothes, over and under each other, swearing, singing, dancing or playing football. The main thing was women.

And as it is with drawing: The result is always different from what one had hoped for, it never quite succeeds, it never becomes the perfect drawing. It is an eternal search, an eternal failure, an eternal struggle, an eternal cramp. Only in retrospect, years later, do you see that you are getting better. That you learn to draw.

Drawing is a difficult language, a complex language, a language that needs a lot of practice. And the last drawing you have just made is always “too little”: not good enough, not clear enough, not beautiful enough, not loose enough, not perfect enough, not realistic enough, not energetic enough.

But in fact one explores the world by drawing, by moving the pencil, the brush or the soap on the mirror with the movement of one’s hands and body and mind. And you always “realise” while drawing what you don’t (yet) know.

As a child, you intuitively draw a bicycle (in Switzerland we call it a velo). You see it, you understand it, you reproduce it as you see it, and everyone recognises from the drawing that it is a bicycle.

And then you start to really look at bicycles, to marvel at how sophisticated it all is. And so I first wanted to become a bicycle racer (bicycle world champion!), then a bicycle mechanic and finally a bicycle designer.

And the more one gets lost in the details of one’s own drawing, the object or the being drawn, the more one understands what one understands, the clearer it becomes what one does NOT understand. What one does not (yet) know, what one has not (yet) seen, not observed, not looked at, not studied and not understood.

And at some point you reach the moment, the age, the level of perfection, the state in which you can no longer draw a bicycle:
Because one gets lost in the small, in the detail, in the details. Because you see more and more how complex the world is. Because you learn in school and in science that you should break everything down into its individual parts in order to study and understand it.

Because one understands that reality is indeed so complex that a drawing is always a limitation, a simplification of reality, a reduction of the world around me. Because one (still) does not understand the details so well that one can reproduce them (anew) as abstractly as when one was a child. Because one has forgotten how to see like a child. Because one is overwhelmed by reality. Because one is ashamed of one’s inability as a draughtsman.

And a lifelong search begins for the light-heartedness one once had as a child, for the looseness with which one once drew, for the relaxed being with pencil and paper. You make a mark on the paper, you are completely in the moment, you are completely yourself, you are happy. And at some point you realise that you are only drawing for yourself, that it is precisely about this moment of drawing, that people who don’t look at a bicycle don’t see it on the drawing either. That it doesn’t matter how good the drawing is.

And the world is breath, is here and now, is perfect, is beautiful.

And the drawing becomes a secondary matter, a trace, a result that does not play the main role. The trace in the sand is blown away by the wind. The drawing goes into the wastepaper basket, into the pile, into the frame, into the book. And without a viewer it does not exist. It is not. It is insignificant.

The main role is played by the breath, by the here and now, the being, the white sheet of paper that lies in front of you: The present drawing, the present moment, the experience of the moment, the breath, the beautiful feeling in the here and now, the being, the facing presence, the meditation, the connection, the nothingness.

This is experienced by the drawing person, the singing person, the cooking person, the walking person, the sleeping person, the building person, the writing person, the dancing person, the kissing person, the being-in-the-moment person.

That is life. Being. Becoming, passing away, recreating, letting go, moving on. Breathing. Being. Life.

If there is one thing AI (Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, automated computer fuss) teaches us, or can teach us, it is this: BEING human has nothing to do with the product, nothing to do with the result. Being human is being here, being present.

It is about the path, about the moment, about the breath, about connection, about love. It is about the connection with the world, with the child within, with the partner, the wind, the sea, the thought. About the thoughts that are allowed to let go of everything in the here and now. Dancing light-heartedly with the now. Breathing that brings me completely to myself. I see myself through my drawing, just as I feel seen through my parents, my partner or my child. I see, I trace, I feel, I am. Through this in the first place I become and am.

I am because I am seen. I am because I leave traces. I am because I feel myself. I am.

Kai Jerzö, Drenthe, 24 March 2023

And now the exercise for you:
You have one minute.
Take a pencil and paper.
Draw a bicycle.
Look at your drawing. Show your drawing.
Tell what you see, what you did well.
What challenged you while drawing?
Did you learn the language of drawing?
Did you get the time to go through all the states that one goes through when one discovers the world by drawing?
Were you allowed to doodle, scribble, trace, draw round shapes and square shapes?
Is drawing a (natural) language for you?

Quote? Yes, with pleasure as follows:
– Jerzö, Kai (2023) ‘The drawer – Of: Kai, the draughtsman’. In: Illustration.world-Blog, 2023-03-24. URL: https://illustration.world/kai_draughtsman_en/

KAI – Skiing…