Back to the senses: drawing and painting as a language of sensation

In this essay I will look at drawing as a language or ‘schema’: a structural framework for interpreting the world- and its potential to express and communicate preverbal sensation, in particular as the foundation of painting. The result of this essay would be ideally an explanation of drawing as a mode of thought that exists before words and is able to communicate sensation directly to the senses of the viewer, rather than triggering associations and verbal conceptualization. Throughout the history of Western painting, there exists arguably a tension between painting as mimesis and painting as schema. Mimesis is antithetical to sensation because it imitates the retinal image instead of the bodily response to the outside world. It works by disguising the paint in favour of the image- hiding its inherent abstraction. The illusion of objective ‘real’ representation is then perhaps connected with a retinal non-bodily perception of the world and I will analyse both the relationship of this to verbalising and show artists who through schemata have countered this way of seeing. Instead of retinal representation they extract from a complete sensory experience of the body and make evident the abstraction of the work. In this approach to painting which culminated in Twentieth century Abstract art, the subject becomes the paint, or its capacity to evoke elements of sensory perception such as depth, light and weight. This development coincided with the scientific discovery that the retinal and sensory macroscopic world was itself an abstraction by our nervous system of a complex, dynamic sub-microscopic process. As in Gombrich’s statement about schema, structure was found to be the only possible foundation of language because reality is structural at every level. If we consider the schema within Western art from the Renaissance to Modernism, the importance of structure as a language of preverbal perception seems to have been implicitly understood. This is because it communicates on a silent non-verbal level- it is observed, and translated into sensation, as opposed to recognised. If we develop a sensitivity to painting in this way, as a language of weight, mass, light, form, space and structure, then we can potentially return to the more real world of our immediate perceptions, before we label with verbal abstractions. Sensation cannot be explained through words but must register as a kind of shock to the senses, preventing logical explanation. This is the aim of my work.