Clear and Distinct

Raise your hand if you remember Bishop Berkeley:

His sermon on the non-existence of matter so infuriated Samuel Johnson that Johnson kicked a rock while exclaiming, "I refute it thus!" Fortunately, Boswell was on hand to write down Johnson's witticism in his Moleskine. The gesture was clever, but I am far from the first to note that it doesn't address Berkeley's argument.

Berkeley's denial of the existence of matter (claiming, if I have it correctly, that it's simpler for the entire universe to be an Idea simulcast directly into all minds) was a relatively direct one-upping of Descartes' inward-turning method. Descartes wanted to use radical skepticism to eliminate all assumptions and establish a solid foundation for philosophical proposals. Descartes' method reduces his universe temporarily to his own mind (I think, therefore I am), but he builds back up from there to things like the proton, the electron, and the income tax. Berkeley doesn't.

I was reminded of all this at Spring Street the other night, when the phrase "clear and distinct" intruded on my thoughts. "Clear and distinct" is a philosophy phrase, which seems to go back to Descartes. Like the legal principle of the "reasonable man" test, it is less definable than it is useful.

Here's what I was drawing:

This model, Gabriel, is extremely hunky, and also waxed.

Descartes feels compelled to cook up the concept of "clear and distinct" as a fancy way to import axioms - unprovable foundational propositions - into his system of logic. Axioms are troublesome in all logical systems, because no system is capable of generating its own axioms. They're the stones on which the rest of the system is built. The trick is to minimize their number and choose them well.

Descartes, whom you will recall made a big stinking fuss about eliminating assumptions from his reasoning, so that he could derive only the truest of truths, addressed the embarrassing detail of axiom selection by claiming that he was going to, ahem, *assume* the truth only of things that were "clear and distinct."

In the Principles (pasting a quotation from here), Descartes offers the following by way of explanation:

I call 'clear' that perception which is present and manifest to an attentive mind: just as we say that we clearly see those things which are present to our intent eye and act upon it sufficiently strongly and manifestly. On the other hand, I call 'distinct', that perception which, while clear, is so separated and delineated from all others that it contains absolutely nothing except what is clear.

This is pretty good work, and it seems to make sense, although subsequent philosophers have softened "clear and distinct" to mean approximately "stuff that I totally know what I'm talking about."

While I was drawing Gabriel, the concept of the "clear and distinct" returned to me after having taken a leave of absence of some years.

I was considering why it is that I draw men better than I draw women. It's not like I draw men more than I draw women. You show me a life drawing workshop which books more male than female models, and I will show you a life drawing workshop discoverable only to gay men by means of those mysterious channels of communication known exclusively to them.

So it's not a question of frequency. Let's approach the problem from another angle. Say you drag a civilian off the street into life drawing. In almost every case, the civilian will find it more congenial to draw a woman than a man. This is not entirely due to sexual preference; it holds true for the breederest of chicks and the homoest of dudes alike. Since I have personally dragged a few civilians off the street in my time, I can report that when asked why she preferred to draw women, Charlotte said, "Women are easier. You just have to make some curves."

I think this holds the key to the reversal in my own case. To a new draftsman, it is more congenial to draw curves, because you don't really have to get it right. You can get it in the right range, and it will read as more or less accurate, both to the draftsman and any person looking at the drawing. I am long past the point where this approximation is good enough for me when I'm in tight-drawing mode. I feel a need not just to get it right, but to get it absolutely perfect.

And yet, women, apart from Manou, are not clear and distinct.

 Manou, at whose approach swift-footed Achilles trembled

Consider a drawing I did only the night before I was drawing Gabriel:

This is Madison, who is in person a tiny little woman of fashion-model thinness. Even so, we can see here that her frame is constructed from a group of loose curves. There is no body of knowledge applicable to these curves. These curves are, one might say, akin to the cloud of unknowing. In fact, let us turn to The Cloude of Unknowyng itself, a bitchingly-titled medieval English treatise on how to come to know God:

For He can well be loved, but He cannot be thought. By love He can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.

This is a pretty good description of how to draw a woman properly. In order to reproduce the unclear and indistinct curves one sees, one may consider anatomy, perspective, and all that, but then must cast them aside. One must perceive the curves directly, and discipline mind and hand into transcribing them faithfully.

Now, I've pretty much done that in the drawing above, but it was hard as all hell. I am under no illusion that I do a good job every time.

Let us return to Gabriel:

Take a particular look at that shoulder on the top left. He had his arm twisted behind his back during this ten-minute pose. Since Gabriel has, oh, at a guess, 5-6% body fat, the torsion of his shoulder visibly separated the fibers of his well-developed deltoid muscle into individual structures wrapping around the tubercles of his humerus. These structures were clear and distinct. Each one had a broad flat face, and beveled edges. Each one was separate from the others, and had a different relationship with the light source. Drawing Gabriel's deltoid was not a question of getting a curve about right. It was a matter of getting it right, or getting it fucking wrong.

For me, at this point, that is ever so much easier to do. There is a clear and distinct external referent (the model) which leads your own work, and with which your own work can be compared. You draw, you check - you did it or you didn't. Moreover, the external referent can be compared with a pre-existing body of anatomical knowledge which, however explicit or intuitive it may be, helps to guide the eye. One might as well fill out a times table.

With women, on the other hand, you draw, you check - and who knows? It looks about right. Maybe the hip is a little wider. Maybe the breast goes down a bit less at the bottom. Men are fundamentally similar; women take one million forms. You have to achieve transcendental clarity to have the revelation that allows you to see a woman clearly once, and then you have to achieve it again in order to check your work. Transcendental clarity, it turns out, is tiring.

Anyhow, that's what I thought about at Spring Street.

This post is for long-time reader Synamore, a close friend in real life who remarked recently that my new shtick of "thinking about other artists" will do, but what she really likes about the blog are the investigations of the mechanics of my working process. I think she may be onto something, so I wrote this up all for her.

In general, while I know that this blog has a fair amount of traffic these days, I am going right on pretending that I am basically writing letters to a group of seven or eight people - you know who you are - who have been good enough to read them since nearly the start. You guys keep me from getting tongue-tied altogether; thanks for sticking around.