Simultaneous Drawing
Ways of exploring connection
We sit to draw, to inhabit the same space and to create together. It is a test, an exploration, just to see how present we can be and discover how to occupy the same moment and experience.
As a way of exploring our developing ideas around collaborative drawing we took to the page together. I proposed that we sit opposite each other with our drawing hands tied together and our eyes closed. In that moment we discovered the magic of not looking, the freedom to make marks together with no hierarchy or dominant lead. It was an expansive and somatic experience, the resulting drawing much smaller than was expected.
By engaging in the same activity at the same time we could truly, in that moment experience what the other was experiencing and seeing the world from each other’s perspectives. This drawing activity created physical movement that literally expressed the action of seeing from another person’s vantage point.
Together (Simultaneous Drawing no.1)
Maija writes,
No thought
But the spill of movement
No voice
But the mark travelling
Colouring the field with glistening black
Tumbling through the air
And exchange of linear starts and stops
My arm an extension of me
Reaching beyond words
Into the field between us
Elizabeth writes,
Moments of connection
An exchange of marks
The energy contained
In the rush of the moment
A stillness in the pauses
Watching with an aesthetic eye
Aware of the parameters of the page
And the intersections
Feeling the fizzing energy
Electric before the ink hits the page
As a warm up exercise and as a way to connect to the moment and each other I invited Maija to create a blind continuous line drawing of me while I drew her in the same way. We gazed intently at each other, learning the others face, connecting through the intense process of looking. This was our first dual encounter with the idea of staying with the line, that has since developed into a mantra of sorts. To stay with the line has become so much more than a material physically not leaving the page but about being present in the moment.
We repeated this exercise as our last drawing together before the exhibition, drawing each other with a continuous line drawing, staring at each others faces and not taking pen or pencil off the page.
untitled (Simultaneous Drawing no.2)
Maija writes:
Sitting across from each other
(Lined up, backs straight)
“Let’s draw one continuous flowing line”
The hand describes what I see through this line
I am mapping your face
I control not the image
The simultaneous drawing emerges:
SURPRISE!
You can see two of these works at the current exhibition Fallow Fields at God’s House Tower in Southampton. At the exhibition we extend an invitation to you to participate in your own collaborative simultaneous drawing with our work The Tower and the Well.
