Freedom from Dread: Can drawing in conversation help us explore how we meet and connect with others?

IntroductionEveryday we reconstitute ourselves in many different ways, in response to our experiences of the physical world and in relation to the beings that inhabit it. I suggest that drawing in conversation is one way to reveal these negotiations by making them material and visible. In doing this we have the opportunity to reflect on how we meet with our fellow human beings. By encountering each other in this way we renegotiate ourselves as individuals on the paper. Think about making a drawing together, whether it is a simple map of directions or a shared diagram of a tricky section of plumbing, there is always the physicality of the marks that have to be negotiated to fit within the paper.

If we are in drawing in conversation we cannot help but negotiate the space we need as individuals. In making marks we are making analogical signs, gestures that communicate our feelings whether we like it or not and we respond to the analogic communications we receive from our partner in conversation. I want to discuss drawing conversations as a means to examine being in the world with others, through aspects of Yalom’s notion of four existential psychodynamics and Spinelli’s model of three step phenomenology. I will present examples of drawing conversations that illuminate these concepts.

The world in a drawing At first, I want to ask you to look at the image below, top left, and imagine that within the drawn rectangle is the boundary of the world.

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Fig. 1. From left, top: the world, existence; bottom: beings, action. Author’s image.

In the second rectangle, top right, I have put a dot, imagine this dot is an existence. In the rectangle bottom left there are several existences, several beings. Bottom right we see lines coming from the dots, imagine these are beings in action and now we have beings in both time and space. In this way the drawing conversations presented here are like small shared worlds.

An existentialist viewI am sure that those of you who draw will have experienced the dread of the blank piece of paper – complete freedom. “Dread is the dizziness of freedom”, writes Soren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Dread. “ In dread there is the egoistic infinity of possibility which does not tempt like a definite choice, but alarms and fascinates with

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its sweet anxiety.” (Kierkegaard in Friedman, 1999:369). It is that feeling I can have when starting a drawing, I can do what I want – I could make this a great drawing, I could make this my best drawing; I could screw this up and see myself fail dismally. Anyone who has ever drawn will recognise how the blank sheet of paper, all the potential and all the possibilities can be intimidating.

Kierkegaard goes on to say that possibility weighs heavily on us, if we get to grips with the possibility of what we could do in the future, there are only so many things we can do before we die, we have to think about our mortality, our own death. He says when we learn that every dread that makes us feel angst might actually happen, then we interpret reality differently. Even when reality rests heavily on us we remember that after all it is far, far lighter than the possibility was (Kirkegaard in Friedman, 1999:371). I understand this as the relief in having made a decision. If I draw in conversation with another person decisions can be shared, neither of us has to bear the dread on our own.

Irvin Yalom suggests there are four givens to our existence, things we know intellectually but are not necessarily aware of day to day – death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness (Yalom, 1989). Each given presents us with an existential conflict. With death we have the tension between its inevitability and our wish to continue to be. Freedom gives us the responsibility to construct our own world, yet we fear uncertainty and crave structure. Fundamentally we are alone in the world. Yalom is not talking about loneliness but the fundamental sense of isolation from the world and everything in it, and our desire to belong and be connected to a larger whole. Meaningless raises the question, comes about because if we inevitably die and we are required to construct our own world and we are essentially alone what is the value of our lives and how should we live them? (Yalom,1989:4-5).

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We need to find an accommodation with these givens in order to live without an unbearable level of angst and distress. Yalom believes if we face up to the givens of existence we can move onwards in terms of personal change and growth (Yalom, 1989). Through conversations using drawing I believe we can begin to explore aspects of these givens and contemplate them with less dread.

Some backgroundI look back and see my desire to draw with others had existential roots. It was partly about having too much freedom, I couldn’t find something definitive on my own. My own drawing intentions felt predictable and meaningless. The marks I made were scared of failing, of dying so they could hardly live on the paper. I searched for how I could keep on drawing and I began to have drawing conversations with strangers and to facilitate conversations between people.

The examples I discuss here are drawings made in the mode of one-to-one, face-to-face, turn-taking conversation. The conventions of a conversation are familiar and I suggest that the social protocol of a conversation using drawing is immediately understood even if the specific activity is unfamiliar. Figure 2. shows the drawing conversation procedure.

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Fig. 2. Drawing conversation procedure. Author’s photos.

All the drawings that follow were made using modest materials, A4 paper and ink and brush-pens or fibre-tip pens. In terms of protocol each participant uses a different colour, there is no theme, the content emerges during the drawing and quietness is encouraged. One person starts the drawing and the other person ends it.

Edges and boundariesIn figure 3. I drew with V, an MA drawing student, she drew in black and I drew in red. She spoke about the marks and the arrangements of marks that stimulated particular emotions, rather than the marks being used to convey existing feelings. V said that, “Sometimes when you stretch over to the border with delicate lines – I’m not sure – it’s like a psychological reaction – kind of losing control. I feel so insecure, that’s why when you go through the border I always want to draw something to stabilise it. This is how I feel.”

She seems to be talking about a need for boundaries, going up to up to the edge is almost too much, a desire to feel contained and to have some structure to exist in. But drawing with me she has gone to the edge, to the unknown, she has faced her insecurities. She also described the warm and happy feelings that made her feel light hearted as we explored the space we shared, creating it together.

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Fig. 3. MA student and AR, brush pens, 20 minutes.

Separateness and connectionFigure 4. is a drawing conversation between J and L, two female colleagues who are not experienced drawers. J loved the exercise, for her it was, “An unusual form of communication where I was in relationship with 'the other' but without the usual mode of speech … Initially a little uncomfortable, eventually very revealing. We saw our differences and each changed a bit towards each other ...”.

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Fig. 4. J and L, felt pens, 10 minutes.

L said, “I was looking to feel linked and to explore the ‘exercise’ as something that we were involved in together not separately. But I did have a feeling of our separateness for quite a lot of the time, despite our drawings being in the vicinity of one another and sometimes being linked … Towards the end, something changed and they drew their two co-created drawings, the two figures. It felt as if we found a rhythm in which we could work, but maybe this had more to do with trust”.

There’s clearly an attempt at relationship immediately, an explicit desire to be connected but not really knowing how to do this through drawing. By staying with the uncomfortableness of being separate and waiting to see if meaning would emerge, they found a way of being together on the paper.

Misinterpretation and meaning

Fig. 5. S and S, felt pens, 10 minutes.

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Figure 5. is a drawing between a male and female colleague, both of whom are not experienced drawers. S, the man, talked about the experience as a series of interpretations and reinterpretations that lead to the sense of co-constructing a reality, and the realisation the other had not always perceived what he had intended to portray. He had drawn the cookie top right and his partner thought it was a pac man being sick. He felt there was a joy in building upon these new understandings and creating something different than initially intended.

Does misinterpretation matter? I don’t think so, correct interpretation and explicitly shared meaning isn’t necessarily important. Emily van Deurzen says ‘In some ways all human communication is based on error and difference. Mishaps and confusions bind us together as well as keep us apart.’ (van Deurzen, 1997: 225).

These drawings imply there is a potential for exploring being in the world with others, in space and time, through the analogy of drawing. Within the constraints of the space we share how do we negotiate who goes where, how close we can be? As the drawings progress over time how do we make sense of the other’s marks in relation to our own and where might this be leading us? In nuanced ways we experience feelings of separateness, uncertainty, finiteness and a search for meaning in the small worlds on the paper.

A look at phenomenologyErnesto Spinelli writes about phenomenology, one of the tools of existential enquiry. It has been very popular as a research method in the visual arts because of its emphasis on perception, description and experience. Spinelli has made phenomenology more accessible by presenting it as a simplified three-step method. I’m going to

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outline the method and suggest that through a drawing conversation we can engage with each other in a manner that is close to phenomenology. The following is a summary from pages 20-22 of Spinelli’s book The Interpreted World, 1989. Step 1. Bracketing or epoché – aiming to set aside our prejudices and biases, while we focus on our immediate experience. When you’re drawing with someone it can be easier to suspend judgements because we are operating in an unfamiliar mode of one-to-one communication. Much of the exchange will be through analogy, gesture, pace, intensity and scale of mark making, communicating real feelings but few facts.

Step 2. Description – concentrating on description not analysis. This is about paying attention and being open to whatever happens without interpretation. People say they find a drawing conversation very engaging and revealing, because of the novelty of connecting in that way, uncertainty is not such a concern. Other comments suggest that because it is impossible to realise intentions individually there is not the same drive to analyse and judge.

Step 3. Horizontalisation – this is about not evaluating, not placing any particular importance or hierarchy on what we experience or describe. In the context of a drawing conversation, I think of this as giving all the imagery and all the possible meanings the same value, nothing has more status than anything else, all the marks can co-exist in the same place at the same time keeping the interpretations open and dynamic.

Making assumptions about a shared worldVery early on in my research, I drew with C. a stranger on a train, see figure 6.. I was excited by drawing with someone I felt in tune with; here we were on a train from Brighton to Birmingham creating

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some kind of eco-community. Looking at the left-hand side of the drawing - I drew a compost loo, I thought he drew the drainage, I added a reed-bed filtration system and I thought he drew a reed-bed swimming pool. Afterwards he told me it was a bull-dozer. There was more. What I thought were the gates to a community was a zebra crossing and why did he draw barbed wire and a skull and cross bones by my organic vegetable plot.

In phenomenological terms I was biased, analysing and imposing the hierarchy of my own meanings. I was not open to the possibility of what C. was bringing to the conversation. Later he wrote to tell me that despite feeling that there needed to be some shared icons, so the crudely drawn symbols could convey some purposeful meaning, he had enjoyed the playful interaction.

As I drew with more and more strangers I found myself changing. I was far less judgmental about my drawing partners’ drawings, I was more open to what was offered. Eventually I managed to surrender and lost the gestalt urge to see something recognisable appear on the paper, then I enjoyed being surprised by what we created between us.

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Fig. 6. C. and AR, felt pens, 20 minutes.

Am I claiming too much for such an unassuming activity? I don’t think so. Yalom describes how the repetition of a simple question, can evoke powerful feelings in groups of people. He gives an example of people asking each other “What do you want?” over and over again. Within minutes they expressed deeply held emotions about lost parents, absent children, their own loneliness or their longing to be remembered after death (Yalom, 1989:3). A simple group exercise, a poem, a work of art can remind us that our deepest wants might never be filled.

Everyday we reconstitute ourselves in many different ways, reshaping ourselves in response to the physical world and in relation to the human beings that inhabit it. I hope to have shown that drawing in conversation is one way to reveal these engagements by making them material and visible by marks on paper.

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ReferencesDeurzen, E. Van (1997) Everyday Mysteries. London. Routledge

Kierkegaard, S. (1944) The Concept of Dread. Princeton. Translated

by Lowrie, W. Princeton University Press. Friedman, M. (ed.) (1999)

The Worlds of Existentialism. New York. Humanity Books. Pp 369-

371.

Spinelli, E. (1989) The Interpreted World. London. SAGE

Yalom, I. (1989) Love’s Executioner. London. Penguin.

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