Drawing on Air
You were there when it happened.
You were that first ancient ancestor who took a finger and drew something in the sand. Deliberately. I was there too. We all were. It was nothing less than the transfer of reality to a flat surface.
Imagine the explosion of wonder. Maybe fear. Your mind simply wasn’t prepared for that. The confusion was overwhelming. What you did had never been done before. You were creative and there was no practical reason for it. How could you explain it...even to yourself? What did that do to your brain?
Was it just you? Just me? Or was it happening all over the world at the same time? Did it allow us to think in ways that made us human? Or maybe we were already made human and that’s why we could deliberately make a mark—and more marks.
You could even demonstrate it to others...perform magic. It was the very beginning of written language, and the beginning of art. A little thing? NO! It was a spectacular thing. Something never seen before—probably in the whole universe.
So, why are we human? The gurus of Artificial Intelligence talk about the “uniqueness of man.” They say that we are just sufficiently above the critical threshold necessary to scale our own ability to unrestricted heights of creative power. But they don’t know why.
This is why. We saw beauty for the sake of beauty, quality over quantity, and our minds went wild. Exponentially.
Markings expanded to etchings in rock or on bones—and eventually drawings and carvings on cave walls. The whole experience was powerful. Yes, the marks became art and drawing took off. We could see what’s there, and even what is not there.
Michelangelo could look at a block of marble and see the waiting statue inside. He could visualize an entire theology on a ceiling and “The Last Judgment” on a flat wall. People, the saved and the damned, come alive in apparent space.
When drawing took off, so did imagination and insight. Without imagination, there is no art. We could see pictures in our minds like never before. Not decoration, but meaning. We were reaching beyond the real—for the supernatural.
Ellen Cornett draws hidden reality. She draws ideas. These are things you can see, in ways you will never see them...and the meanings are a riddle.
Draw a circle. Put two dots in it. Then draw an arc underneath. You have a smiling face. Every person sees that. Now do the same thing in the air. We still see it as a face in nothing but space. It’s a miracle—a miraculous gift we all share. It is pure imagination. Maybe the most powerful gift of all.
A drawing is a visual prayer we can say when all is dark and seemingly hopeless. When PTSD is dragging you down, a drawing, regardless of how primitive, can lift you into the spirit world. With just marks on a flat surface you enter the world of human imagination and weightlessness. Try it. It could join us all together as people, if we let it. Imagine that.
1. Engraved shell - Indonesia.
2. Sleeping Antelope -Tassili n'Ajjer, Algeria
3. Michelangelo Buonarroti: Studies for the Libyan Sibyl
4. Ellen Cornett. “Another Awkward Moment on the Ark” www.ellencornett.com