Drawing on the “Lived Experience” —An Investigation of Perception, Ideation and Praxis

Abstract

“When we do not have the words to say something, drawing can define both the real and unreal in visual terms” (Kovats, 2007: p. 8). The paper addresses the question: what is the relationship between perceptual experience and its interpretation through drawing? It is proposed that drawing, as knowledge and experience, is a particular way of coming to know the world that is explicated within artistic practice. The research examines how drawing, through its expression of the concrete and the imaginary, provides interconnected ways of orientating knowledge that contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the “lived experience” (Dilthey, 2010). The study draws on philosophy, in particular the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to consider the complexities and interconnections of mind, object and body that are experienced through drawing. A central tenet of the research is an examination of the role of the body in constituing and explicating experience. In considering how we, as objects, are integral to the world and its phenomena, it is proposed that our “sense experience” (Sentir) (Heidegger, 1962) furnishes us with the ability to enter into this world as sensate beings; to interact, affect and engage with the world in both time and space. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in an essay entitled “Eye and Mind”, first published in 1961 (Johnson, 1993), contends that it is through contemplating a connection between the “seer and the seen”, in a direct reference to artist and viewer, that our experience of the world is “opened up more fully” (Johnson, 1993: p. 124). That is, by being immersed in the visible, the concrete, through the body, the visible is not appropriated, but is instead revealed by the act of “looking”. The practice of drawing is a means through which the act of looking is evinced in a tangible form. Investigating practice: Drawing, it will be argued, can make the invisible visible; exploring through sensing, feeling, thinking and doing.