I Picked Up a Pencil and My Body Came Alive
At 63, I was taking an art lesson. The first one in my life.
I’d signed up for the lesson because I wanted to do something that was not sitting at my computer or scrolling through my phone. I wanted to do something in the real world.
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“When we draw,” my teacher said, “we use our whole bodies.” He told me to hold the pencil as if I were shaking hands with it, the pencil lying across my curled fingers, my thumb resting near the tip. We moved together, swinging our shoulders, marching our legs, making arcs with our arms. Then we began drawing ellipses, ovals on the page, trying to press so lightly at first that the line was invisible, then harder as the line decided what it wanted to be. “Can you feel the drawing in your whole body,” he asked. “In your feet?”
I thought about it. I could.
Then my teacher firmly printed his name in block letters on the paper pinned to his easel. It was surprisingly noisy. It got my attention. As he did this, he talked about how natural this motion is, using a hand and fingers to write, to control the line. He asked me to write my name on the plain paper I had taped on my drawing board. Since I spent my days typing on a computer keyboard, writing with a pencil did not feel natural.
But I did it: JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL
Though it did not look nearly that neat.
I remembered how much I’d always loved pencils. Loved learning to write my name with a fat, eraserless pencil in kindergarten, the lead bumping across the rough, lined paper filled with wood splinters. Then, writing was drawing. Making an S was drawing a snake. Writing SUN was the same as drawing the sun, two different ways of bringing a star down to earth.
Blue Spring Girl, by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Then I stopped drawing. I chose letters, became a writer, and believed for long decades, until this first art class, that pictures and words were two completely different things. It was like choosing a door marked WORDS over one marked ART. And using a keyboard locked that door behind me. My fingers could only choose letters, the words they formed appearing on the screen in a font someone else had designed, identical to everyone else’s words. Like this, like how we are communicating now, perfectly legible, perfectly impersonal.
I remembered reading a study in Frontiers in Psychology about monitoring the brains of students taking notes by hand rather than on a keyboard. It had found those note taking by hand had activity across the parts of the brain responsible for vision, sensory processing, memory, and movement. The students’ brains lit up. Typing led to minimal activity in the same areas.
Pencil in hand, my brain lit up.
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When I was a kid, my older sister and I used to play a game we called Scribbles. Sprawled on our stomachs on the cool terrazzo floor of our shared bedroom in Florida, she would close her eyes, then, holding a pencil tight, make a scribble on a page of notebook paper. She would turn the page around to face me. Hand me the pencil. I had to turn the scribble into a cat. Or a woman in a feathered hat. Or the moon with a big nose. When I was done, she would nod with approval, acknowledging the transformation. Then it was my turn to close my eyes and make a scribble.
Try it. Look for a pencil on your desk. Or if you are someone, as I was, who writes virtually these days, look in your junk drawer. It can be any pencil. One of the short ones with no eraser they give you in Home Depot or Ikea to fill your order. One your son has chewed on. A souvenir pencil from Washington, D.C., someone brought you as a gift. Or a standard yellow #2 with its pink, fleshy eraser.
Pick it up. Think about how it feels in your hand. Now find a scrap of paper. Close your eyes and write—draw—your name. Can you feel the movement all the way up your arm, in your shoulder, the muscles tightening, working, as if you were swinging a racket or throwing a ball?
Now, open your eyes and turn the letters into a monster. A monster because, as any kid knows, the possibilities for monsters are infinite, no set number of heads or eyes or feet. Only you can draw this monster.
Goldfish, by Jesse Lee Kercheval
I’ve kept drawing for four years now. Spending time using my whole body to draw has been like taking up a sport. Or maybe more like learning to dance. Hand raised over my head, leaning back, feeling the muscles in my calves. Then pencil in hand, moving, weight shifting onto my toes. I like to draw barefoot. I like to feel the floor. I like to feel the line on the paper. And more and more, lines are lines, pictures and words blending together, becoming the same thing. Each day I leave my screens behind and I stand in front of the easel, paper ready, and move.
But in that first class, as I stood drawing ellipses my body felt like something I hadn’t used in a long time.
I drew fat ellipses, tiny ones, some dark, some where the pencil barely kissed the paper. I drew hard, as if my life depended on it. I kept going, letting the ellipses intersect, running off the page. “Now,” my teacher said, “pretend there is water coming in from the upper left-hand corner of the page and making its way toward the bottom. Use the side of your pencil to shade in the water. This will create a sense of movement.”
I followed the water down to the edge of the page, let it spread out, a dark flood. I felt it in my feet. I felt the water spread across the floor, down the stairs of my house, and across my sloping lawn to the lake behind my house, to the small river that drains that lake into the next lake, to the wide sandy Wisconsin River which flows into the Mississippi River at the western corner of my state, down the Mississippi to the warm Gulf of Mexico washing the beaches of Florida where I grew up.
My screens show me pictures of the world other people have taken. My pencil draws a map of the world I can move through, swim through. And for one of those moments that is too rare in this life, I feel adrenaline pouring through my body, not fear, but joy.
Check out Jesse Lee Kercheval’s French Girl here:
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