Oblique Drawing and Empathetic Immersion

Viewing a drawing is an active act of reading and immersion, that draws on pre-conceptions, commentary and annotation, cultural knowledges of the viewer as well as of the draftsman, as well as their imaginaries. A bird in a drawing can be understood in many ways, as an occurrence of everyday life or an exotic spectacle. The negotiations between mentor and mentee, parallel those of viewer and draftsman; importantly, active negotiations play out socially between people, as well as in the mind of each viewer and drawer. Things in the drawing and beyond the drawing register and are actively evaluated in the mind and imagination to form what has variously been termed a ‟spatial construct” (August Schmarsow ), or a ‟percept” (Rudolf Arnheim ), which is different in the mind of each viewer. Plotinus wrote about an ‟inner eye”; today we understand that the human mind formulates working hypotheses that are continually updated and refined with new information transmitted from the retina of the eye to the brain.