Grace Space

My interest in drawing began in childhood, when I first learned to read and write.  I was so impressed that marks could mean something.  Calligraphy became my hobby.

When I was a teenager in Akron, Ohio, each Wednesday after school I went to our largest department store and took lettering lessons from the man who made all of the store’s signs.  After two years of lessons, I got a summer job as a signpainter and had an experience that hooked me on drawing.

It was 1964.  A rock-n-roll show was coming to Akron.  Some pop-stars were going to drive around the city performing on the back of a flatbed truck, and I had to paint the signs that would decorate the truck.  But that weekend, I also wanted to go to a party in another city, which meant I had to get the rock show signs done as quickly as possible.  The signs’ design included a very thin straight line about 5 meters long under the names of the performers.  Painting a line that long freehand (without a straight-edge) is not easy.  One’s normal impulse is to do it carefully, exercising tight control.  But I learned that day that when you control the brush tightly, you overcorrect and make the line waver.  The only way to do it perfectly is by painting faster than you can control.  This was my first taste of “the state of grace”:  attaining mastery by giving up conscious control.  Great athletes know about this.  So did Jackson Pollock.  So do Zen masters and animals that hunt.  Maybe it’s what exhilarates them.  It exhilarated me, and one of the main reasons I draw is to revisit that state.  Each mark is a tiny leap into grace.  And when I’m deep into improvization, when the drawing starts to draw itself, I can slip into “grace space” for days at a time.

Blind Scribbles

I started to draw seriously in the summer of 1967.  It was a classic case of Freudian sublimation.  My girlfriend and I were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on different floors of the same apartment building.  We both had roommates.  One night I came home and found her in bed with one of mine.  I was so angry and hurt that I moved out right away and started to pour all of my energy into drawing. I wrote back then:

“…it was like seeing for the first time.  Everything was so clear and sharp and tangible.  I feel the vast infinity of very small bits of matter–they are all over, for there are no holes in vision, no blanks or left-out portions, and everything is not just a total, but a group of very small individual items, like sand or atoms even….I was so moved by this vividness & clarity that…I knew this vividness would have to be my expressive aim in art...”

A few months later, I did a series of drawings inspired by television static–what you see on a TV channel when there’s no signal.  I was attracted to this image as uniquely modern, specific to the electronic era.  Not coincidentally, it is entirely made of “very small bits.” Colored dots, all the same size, filled these TV drawings from edge to edge.

Then I started making drawings where the whole image was built out of repeated parallel “scan lines,” again inspired by television.  I would move the pen along a ruler so fast that the ink skipped and broke into tiny dots and dashes.  I started using a technical drafting pen like architects use (and like I still use today).  Before that I had mainly used signpainting brushes, calligraphy pens and felt-tipped markers.

Over the next two years (1967-69) I developed this idea of drawing-fast-enough-to-fragment-the-inkline into a set of freehand gestures:  scribbles, zigzags, hatches and swirls.  I didn’t like the way these drawings looked and I threw them away.  But they were fun to make so I kept at it.  And I began drawing with my eyes closed, to see what actions felt right regardless of the visual result.

I had just graduated from college (1969).  Drawing with my eyes shut was part of a process of unlearning what I had been taught.  My teachers got me to look at my work “objectively,” like a viewer.  But in fact, I’m the only person whose relationship to the work is not as a viewer.  It was a lie to deny that, and I felt I had to go the opposite way, toward the primacy of the experience of making the drawing.

So in late 1969/early 1970, I drew mostly with my eyes closed.  Gradually my blind scribbles and zigzags converged to a few basic gestures, and eventually to just one type of mark:  an “escapement” made by putting the pen on the paper and flicking it.  The split-second acceleration of the point attenuates the flow of ink so that the mark tapers, then breaks into tiny skips, and then disappears completely.  It leaves a straight comet-shaped track about 1-2 cm long.  No two ink marks are exactly the same, but their diversity is strictly limited.

I didn’t have a rationale requiring the use of just one mark, so I tried combining the “winner” with non-gestural elements–ruled lines and ink spatters–but I dropped these experiments quickly.  From the summer of 1970 onward, I used just the one mark.

Breakthroughs

Almost as soon as I reduced my technique to the making of one mark, I wanted the drawings to show the actual sequence in which the marks were made.  The first drawing that did this is the one which begins the series A History of Ideas:  a square spiral done on 6 July 1970.  More and larger spirals followed.

The first two Calendars (August 1970) were breakthroughs. Calendar 1 was the first time that my marks were organized in a series of repetitions, alternations, bisections and symmetry groups.  In other words, my basic vocabulary crystallized in this drawing.  Calendar 2 pushed this vocabulary into “grace space.”  It turned the formalism of Calendar 1 into the metaphor of human memory and foresight.  And I couldn’t have done it without Miles Davis.  His album Bitches Brew had just come out.  It, too, was a breakthrough.  I listened to “Spanish Key,” the first song on the first side, over and over while making Calendar 2. Years later I realized that the form of the drawing is exactly like a gramophone disk:  an arithmetic spiral with harmonic patterns on either side of the groove.

Recording the experience of time was my main interest back then.  That’s why music was such an important model. Yet even drawings with strict sequencing, like the Calendars, showed that ink stops time.  Earlier marks co-exist on the paper with later ones.  They can all be seen together, or even read in reverse order (e.g., following the spiral back from finish to start;  a viewer often can’t know which end is the beginning).  In drawing, sequences always fade to coincidence, history foreshortens into structure, process becomes place.  Time’s foreshortening seemed not so much a problem, though, as a magic trick, an illusion hiding a space where I could move freely.  I quit insisting on visible chronologies and started exploring how time collapses into space, scattering symmetries around shifting axes of reflection.

Around the time of Calendar 6 I stumbled almost accidentally into the literature of particle physics.  I had been vaguely interested in the smallest “bits” of matter since 1967.  But I hadn’t learned more about them and I barely remembered anything from my high school science classes.  Reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, which itself was a powerful experience, made me eager to know more about the fundamentals of time and space, matter and energy.

Time-order ambiguities were a key to Einstein’s relativity.  The laws of Newton, Maxwell, Dirac and Heisenberg all treat past and future as interchangable.  Symmetry and its breaking seemed to be a major theme of physics, somehow defining the properties of the universe.

“…I was immersed in Pythagorean fantasy, reading up on natural proportions such as Planck’s constant, pi, Hubble’s constant, the gravitational constant.  I read an essay on Planck’s constant written by Erwin Schrodinger that was so brilliant and vivid in its description of the geometry of elemental matter that I am still immersed in the subject.

“But since the quantum concepts of physics came into my head months after I had reduced my drawing to combinations of a single element, I can’t say I do what I do because science says reality does it that way…”  (Journal entry, 27 December 1971)

Nonetheless, I did start thinking of my ink mark as a “quantum” act caught in a web of symmetries and assymmetries.  And just as modern science rejects the notion of an absolute metric for space and time separate from matter, I turned against “scaffolding.”

My Calendars were built on “scaffolds”:  spirals drawn with pencil and compass.  When I finished adding the ink marks, I erased the pencil lines.  I had also begun making drawings based on grids ruled in pencil.  (Grids have more ambiguous time-orders than spirals.)  But using and then erasing pencil lines struck me as dishonest.  It also imposed a geometry not immanent in the marks themselves.  It was a kind of “action at a distance,” a purely visual order that did not grow out of the mark-by-mark evolution of the drawing.  So in the spring of 1972 I stopped using measured/ruled/pencilled armatures.  It was a liberating decision that I never reversed.

Robert Horvitz, Form is the Language of Time (September 1970), reprinted by Columbia Records on the cover of Keith Jarrett’s Expectations album (1972, reissued in 2017 on compact disk)

Very quickly I saw that grids could be replaced by more general structures–arrays of cells, polygon tilings and froths.  Spirals could be floppy, as in Form is the Language of Time. Geometry not only could be but, according to modern science, MUST be elastic, topological, based on similarities rather than equalities.  This opened my mind to more dynamic forms:  flows, decays, rips, shards, close-packings, eruptions, etc.  These were more richly allegorical than the Euclidean motifs I had been using.

“I feel like the really great energy inside my head has almost connected with the paper receptor.  I can imagine the complete closing of the circuit coming within a month:  there are moments of contact, passages of complete synchronization already, some lasting minutes, a few lasting an hour or two.  It is only a matter of patience in pursuit…”   (Journal entry, 15 March 1972)

Many drawings made at this time were partial breakthroughs, exciting but flawed.  It was hard to get rid of old habits and often I failed to realize the implications of what I was doing.  One drawing does stand out, however:

Robert Horvitz, ‘A History of Ideas’ (22 September – 4 October 1972)

I worked on it for a relatively long time, pausing often to let new motifs appear.  The plan was for a polygon-tile structure to break apart.  Cellular eruption and overflowing ideas gave it a wild intensity that was quite new in my work.  Toward the end, the drawing dissolved into quantum lava.  Fortunately, that didn’t ruin the parts finished earlier.  The dissolve turned out to be a preview of the next drawing, which was also a peak experience:

Robert Horvitz, ‘A History of Ideas’ (9 October 1972)

The “complete closing of the circuit” finally came in January 1973, with the series called Personal Domains of Freedom and Ecstasy. The title says it all.  These are improvisations, dervish raptures.  I cannot find words to talk about them.  But the impulse seems to be the same as Keith Jarrett’s completely improvised piano concerts:

Robert Horvitz, ‘Personal Domain of Freedom and Ecstasy 1’, 6-10 January 1973

Organized

Perhaps I should pause to explain how my work is organized.  At the core is my diary.  I used to call it The Dialetics of Drawing, but that was too pretentious and implied a political content that simply is not there.  Now I call it A History of Ideas.  This series started in 1970 and is still underway.  I think of it as a single entity.  Ideally, all the drawings should be seen together in sequence, but in fact, each is strong enough to stand on its own.

To be part of my diary a drawing must be in the right format (14.5 x 14.5 inches).  It must be the first expression of some important new idea.  It must change my understanding of the diary’s trajectory.  And if it turned out to be the last drawing I ever did, it must make a plausible finish for the diary.  That means each drawing must simultaneously be a beginning, a fulcrum and an ending.  Those are difficult requirements.  In 50 years, only about 70 drawings have passed the test.

But it often happens that I want to explore in more depth an idea that first appeared in my diary.  Such drawings might be one-offs, or they might become long series, like the Calendars or Panta Rei.[1]   In any event, they are branches coming out from the diary.

It also happens that I get ideas for drawings whose size or shape excludes them from the diary even though they are otherwise original, mind-changing and final enough to be included (e.g., Gravity’s Radiance, Nova, Evolution).  These cannot be considered mere branches;  they are independent entities.

Judgement

Once I started using a more dynamic vocabulary (froths, melts, eruptions, etc.), I started paying more attention to the mental side of the drawing process.  The physical act of making the marks was already so routine that I hardly noticed it–it was like an eyeblink.  So my attention shifted inward.  When every drawing contains just one kind of mark, the important variable is how the marks are organized.  Deciding where to put the marks is thus the main task of drawing.  By systematically limiting my options, I could create specific ranges and types of freedom.  I use drawing as an introspective probe, to expose personal judgment and make it ponderable.  It is invaluable for analyzing situations in which I found myself, or which I could imagine.

I developed an elaborate theory of decision-making based on rules or constraints.  A positive constraint is an obligation:  “You must do X.”  A negative constraint is a ban:  “Never do X.”  Constraints can be strong (“Always do X”) or weak (“Do X more often than not”).  They can be specific (“Bisect the distance between those two marks”) or fuzzy/general (“Make a great drawing”).  Constraints usually have relevence tests:  “When you come to a corner, do X.” One must also have priorities for checking or sacrificing constraints when they come into conflict.  Now that I am a parent, I see that much of what we call learning is actually the discovery of constraints, relevance tests and priorities as generalizations from experience.

From 1974 onward, drawing was about decision-making more than picture-making.  That let me define procedures for making a drawing without knowing what it would look like.  To see what it looked like was sometimes a reason to do it.  But more often my interest was simply in experiencing particular “judgment situations” regardless of the record left on paper.

I was learning how to think “amorphously,” without the filter of shape ideas, so my work between 1974 and 1977 was more analytical than expressive.  Avoiding classical geometry, I found a new vocabulary:  textures that were simultaneously ordered and disordered, like piles of leaves, stormy seas, patterned furs, fire.

Life and Death

In 1977 a big change occurred when my mother was diagnosed as having cancer.  I stopped teaching art at Yale University and moved back to Akron to take care of her.  Organic forms took over my drawings as I became preoccupied with questions of life and death.  I didn’t stop using decision systems–that method is so general it can accommodate any metaphor or inspiration, be it musical, quantum-mechanical, psychological, biological or cosmological.  What did change was what I thought about while drawing:  the emotional content increased, which affected both the look of my work and what I got out of doing it.  Healing became as important as learning.  The best examples of this are the large delicate drawing Life, made about 2 years after my mother died, and Nova, which helped me recover (more or less) from a failed love affair in 1984:

Robert Horvitz, ‘Nova’, 17 May 1984 – 22 August 1987

I worked on Nova intermittently for over 3 years, starting with no plan, no image, no metaphor.  It became a prolonged meditation on my relationships with other people.  It was the most intensely involving and NECESSARY drawing I had ever done–so much so that soon after finishing it, I quit drawing for 9 years.

I had always tried to treat every drawing as if it were the last I would ever do.  It’s like treating every word you speak as the last you will ever speak:  you think very carefully about what to say.  In fact I had previously stopped drawing for weeks and months at a time;  I resumed whenever I thought the next drawing would be better than the last one.  After Nova I just couldn’t go back to decision games and exercises…but I also couldn’t top Nova. So I quit.

Start again

I started again after getting married and our first child was born.  An idea came for a drawing more profound than Nova, and it has stayed.  But I don’t yet have the vocabulary, knowledge or confidence to attempt it.  Nonetheless, it started me drawing again, and my recent work is a series of preparatory steps toward that future project.

Which is not to suggest it has value only relative to that goal.  I am particularly proud of Evolution for its conceptual content and unusual appearance.  It holds much that I need to explore further.  It starts as a spiral.  As the marks get further from the center they deviate from a strictly radial orientation.  The deviations compound so that parts of the spiral start to bulge and pinch.  The pinching gets severe enough to crush the local patterns of marks, causing discontinuities in the spiral:  speciation.

Robert Horvitz, ‘Evolution’, 5-19 May 1999

I am more than a little surprised that I was able to resume drawing after so long a lapse–not just resume, but go beyond what I had done in the 1970s and 80s.  It’s as if the pause was a matter of days rather than years, refreshing rather than a loss of momentum.  I just hope that I live long enough to do the drawing that motivated me to start again.

Robert Horvitz, ‘At First Sight’, 14-16 January 2011

Robert Horvitz, ‘Double Bind’, 25 March – 1 April 2015

Robert Horvitz, ‘Cellularity’, 27 May -13 June 2017

Robert Horvitz, ‘Consequential’, 19-25 August 2021

[1] Heraclitus’ famous slogan:  “Everything flows.”

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https://horvitz.multiplace.org/

All images copyright and courtesy of Robert Horvitz

Art, Creativity, Drawing