The drawing as a mind extension

By Abraham C. Millán

-The drawing is a plot of points into the space.-

Certain day in a comic convention I made a few portraits like a cartoon, the one who requested them to me remained astonished and said things like: "It's a gift… you have talent in the hands". He continued his road by the tours seeing the stands, he gave another tour and returned to my stand. Then they saw that I was making strange things like drawing with the left hand being I skillful (the products of such act can even let astonished to wichone who executes them) or even more, to draw without never seeing the support and the drawing instrument.

Of course they thought that I was insane or even that I never learn to draw. This anecdote makes me to reflect in how much has been demoted the drawing today, attributing it mythical and characteristics of "divine or lit beings that receive a gift". Results contradictory the fact that upon qualifying to the drawing as a previous resource to the "Greater Arts", it is reduced its importance as an extension of the thought. A myth very associate (an international level) is the fact of believing that someone that draws possesses "a prodigious hand" to be able of copying what is just in front near. That popular myth constitutes an example of how is denied to the drawing to be a product of a perceptive act.

Drawing is knowledge, drawing lets to know, and to know the things the man draws them. These inseparable and interlaced facts give standard to the man to be given account of himself, to take conscience of the fact that he is different from everything surrounds him. The reality is intangible, hardly noticeable, the man in an act of daring presumption masters it and traps it by middle of the outline, the texture and the color, reproduces the universe, creates records isolated of the nature. The one which draws is a translator of the world to images, creates a language.

Leonardo DaVinci himself was accomplishing this act from very child, to perceive and to summarize the knowledge and the accrued experience over the years by means of his drawings, with this anexiety and curiosity because of this he became the one he was. The drawing more than a trade is a form of thought, it is an activity that it is almost under all the human activities. The image that we represent ourselves of the world is a drawing that mentally we make ourselves of it to order it, to put to it at the level of understanding.

The same writing is made with letters that are drawn. The conventional signs are drawn. The drawing is a form of alternative and parallel knowledge to the words, it supposes a semiotic operation into which it converts to the objects into signs; it have made since we are conscious, since we watch to the sky and we see stars or luminous points in the universe for then to create what today are the constellations.

The persons with culture and visual education can draw without support neither matter upon finding points in the space and to join them with the pure will of their look. The drawing is an intellectual instance before than an artistic preparation state. The visual perception supposes a connection between what we see and what we know (we only see what we know). When is arrived to the point where what is sensitive is controlled by the thought (to know it), born a new process that demands the synthesis of all the perceptions in an active system that live by itself: The Art.

But we should know the difference between feeling and perceiving: A sensation is a stimulus that any of the five senses receive. The perception is to know what is being feeling (seeing, listening, smelling, flavoring, touching). To perceive supposes to explain what we felt, to have knowledge of this. Of this manner we all are capable of drawing in any way (as long as this way will be a cognocitive process that trip through the perception). We can create languages that operate as conventional codes that even may have a purpose (didactic?) such as the comic book.

Yet today in to beginnings of the 21th century, exist puritanists that reject to the comic book as a consecrated art of the past century. It's executors are not an artists, just a simple "illustrators", it seems like they would not be capable of transforming the drawing with their mind to tale a history. This maybe it is like that just because of the prostitution of the comic itself thanks to the capitalism, but that already would be other article.

I was wondering: Would be the drawing a universal language that a homogeneously join the thoughts of the human kind? Practice the drawing, do know better your own world by the means of the drawing…