A Conversation about Drawing

Often, after a full day working as exterminators, Laura and I will sit on her couch. We’ll listen to music, order in a Fresco’s poutine or a teller box from Otto’s, and talk about what plagues us or what makes us light. The couch faces a window that peers out to Kensington Market; its back leans against a desk in the portion of Laura’s living room that comprises her studio. Small paintings and concrete poems constellate harmoniously on the wall to our right, making it easy to speak of art whenever planted here—it’s so present.

This time particularly, I thought to transcribe a conversation we were having about drawing. Through it we quip, and sometimes meditate on what draws us to draw, or why we believe in drawing. The dialogue maneuvers through both formal and socio-political concerns with equal weight, these emerging as we detail our respective conceptual commitments to the medium. I like talking to Laura about drawing because she shares an interest in its relegation to process, one which earns drawing a low status relative to other art forms. As well, we relish in its relationship to the body, to our free-verse thoughts, to the ephemeral and the mundane. Our conversation begins before I hit record, and follows an out loud reading of an essay called “Drawing toward Freedom” by Nicole L. Fleetwood, as it exists in a catalogue published alongside “The Pencil is a Key,” an exhibition of drawings by prisoners organized by The Drawing Center in New York in 2019.

Fleetwood highlights drawing’s viability as a tool for expression among incarcerated populations, whereby access is expressed foremost in material terms; namely, how drawing is possible with little means. From here, Laura and I wax poetic on the materials of drawing.

Lucas Regazzi: I think about the way that some materials can fall onto paper.

Laura McCoy: Stain it, impact it—even just dent it!—or crease it. Like paper, I’ve always been so stupidly interested in paper because it’s quite sensitive. I make these sculptures where I fill these spray bottles with blue water and then just spray the paper over and over and over again, and it doesn’t actually become hard like other material, it just freezes the paper? And gives it a bit more weight? It’s so odd. It’s like an even coating.

LR: You’re calling attention to the structure; its folds and creases.

LM: Its material expression…Sometimes I don’t even understand how it got there [Laura gestures to her studio with a head wag]. Like what the fuck is this? Why is this still here? I definitely love scraps, and the idea of making them a little sturdier.

LR: Thinking about the crinkles and creases of paper—its objectness—is important because paper is one of the few objects that every kind of person has access to. Papers just float around in the street. We’re constantly surrounded by paper.

LM: People have piles of paper lying around in their homes as you and I know. Endless, stupid papers. What are they? We are not paperless.

LR: Something’s changing, though. We’re using paper less and less bureaucratically, transitioning into a very digital…

LM: Archival practice. But then the digital feels far more vulnerable.

LR: Somehow the absence of representation makes it seem as though our body is subsumed by the digital because it hasn’t made room for form, only data. That’s what’s lost when paper’s lost—the form contains something else within it.

LM: It’s constantly referencing its form, because it’s bringing out the paper. Everything you do to it is bringing out the paper. Whereas a painting you actually build up. You try to not think about the canvas, you’re just submerged in the image of it. The painting is more of a window, and the drawing is more evidence of humanness—of stains, goop in your underwear, pit stains—it’s reminding us of that.

LR: Painting tries to put gloves on what drawing celebrates: our dirty little paws. That’s where exclusivity in the art form leaks in. A gross, illusory dominance comes through as it relates to class and background.

LM: There’s this thing in art that I hate, that I think most people love. Everyone can agree that if you make something that everyone else can’t make then that’s exciting. It’s the industrious feat that we care about, that you will always be in awe of, because someone expended those resources. Whether it’s you, or whoever it is, this industrious feat is what gives it value. Instead, I’m obsessed with how there can be value without relying on those stagings. I deeply want to be very close to the material. I want to sleep with it.

LR: More in your life and of your life rather than of the idea of you as an artistic genius, making moves through art history.

LM: Directing the production. I want the production to direct me. I want it to dominate me. I want to be bottomed by my art.

LR: Same. Fuck me.

LM: Right? I think that ideas now—how fast things can circulate, and all the information that we have access to—I think it’s weird that we prize the individual artist mostly. Like if you watch a person succeed, it’s because so many people are holding them up. There is so much you don’t see. In the same way that people rely on text so strictly to produce art’s meaning and value. I don’t know, is it right to take all that agency from the work?

LR: The point should never be to posture.

LM: Or even to own these ideas so cleanly, in a way that makes it so you get to maintain your position so comfortably. Maybe there should be more risk.

LR: What an art school education might provide someone is the ability to understand the structure of an argument, so one can approach questions in a practice with an assured style and rhetoric. The art market celebrates high production value, warranting higher price points…

LM: And a brand! And repeating certain ideas for years and years, and having those ideas travel. Are those ideas really that worthy? It’s kind of just about that person’s career. I just want more ideas. More voices. I don’t actually care about “your career” unfortunately.

LR: In valuing ingenuity—in qualifying the art object’s value by the myth of a genius maker—we separate a large constituency from what should otherwise be an intimate feature of their life, which is art. The way that things are going now, it’s clear that people can barely access art without an expensive degree.

LM: And a 600 dollar studio, and so on. And you’re to know the right people, and show up at the right places. It’s not actually ever just about the art. Everyone knows that.

LR: The reason why drawing is interesting, then, is that it doesn’t seem to require all that; you don’t really need a studio to make a drawing. I draw in my bedroom. Also, there’s this immediate connection to the body. There is an immediate intimacy facilitated by the act.

LM: Why is that? Why does it call on the body? Why does it feel like evidence of a body more than other works inherently?

LR: There is a steadied application with a drawing utensil that highlights duration more acutely than a painter’s brush might? Because it’s so pared down. The mark versus the stroke.

LM: And I guess the thing with the mark on paper is that most of us have a relationship with it outside of art, whereas the brush stroke isn’t bodily familiar to the everyday person. 

Remember when there’d be like a notepad beside the phone?

LR: I do!

LM: You’d be talking to, like, grandma or someone, scribbling. Secretly I just want to see everyone’s scribbles.

LR: Me too.

LM: Not that I think every artist should be a little scribbler, obviously that’s not what I’m saying.

LR: I wrote something down that reminds me of this. Everyone can draw. Drawing is this text and image space that facilitates the visualization of thought. Because everyone thinks and is different from one another, it permits a highly nuanced visual realm of subjectivity. Scribbles as such are documents of mundane, anti-performative moments, where one allows the mind to guide the hand and the pen on the paper.

LM: Like when it comes to paper and pen-in-hand, the hand will truly, freely dance.

LR: There are fewer barriers to its dancing.

LM: It’s about death, too. Because the paper will become death sooner than anything else. Catch fire, you know? So quickly and it’s gone.

LR: We don’t have conservators for to-do lists; we don’t have conservators for math equations scrawled on the back of take-out menus.

LM: Maybe we should—I mean I would love that deeply. But maybe it’s nice that it’s not conserved because it’s about highlighting time, because it has to end. It has to end, because we have to end. 

I think people want an impenetrable art, an art that is so industrious and strong that it will never die. We think we need an impenetrable art more than ever because the world is incredibly unstable and all of its seams are showing. But I’m obsessed with the weak art. I want the people that can’t hold it up, that can’t hold it together. It feels they’re more connected to some truth.

LR: They have no choice but to be in the world.

LM: On average, marginalized people face shorter life spans. Maybe I have just developed a different relationship to permanence. Why do things have to last forever? Maybe my art should die when I die.

LR: It makes sense for capital in art to make things last forever because it ascribes fiscal value to the object, projects its value’s growth over time.

Laura McCoy: I’m curious: what are the formal considerations of your drawing?

Lucas Regazzi: Strategically, it has to feel like I’m about to write something. I begin wondering what my thoughts would look like as an infinite draft of all the wrong words all the time.

LM: Why are they wrong?

LR: I feel intimidated by the act of writing, poetry specifically. I fear that my lack of formal knowledge in creative writing challenges my ability to communicate something beyond my own feeling or understanding of things. In trying to formalize when I’m writing, often I lose all hope in my ability to make a poem.

LM: What’s that about? Why do you believe you can’t write a good poem?

LR: What intimidates me comes through the intention of writing a good poem. I don’t usually write poems that I’m excited about. I fear that when I’m writing a poem I won’t end up with some magic. 

When I take my unfettered thoughts, and place them in an image-world through drawing, I’m able to host those words in abstraction instead—in the company of marks and images—as if to permit them their chaos, and accept them for it.

LM: Why are they not formalizing?

LR: They’re drawing. Maybe that’s what the drawing is, inasmuch as it lies at the periphery of a finished product. Like a sketch or a draft or something.

LM: Like it can’t be formal because it’s a drawing?

LR: Maybe this confusion stems from distinctions between what’s colloquially “formal” in a poem versus what’s “formal” in an artwork and I should clarify; they possess different meanings in their respective discourses. In literature, there are identifiable approaches to structuring language that trigger different aesthetic effects as “form.” I’m thinking about drawing as historically informal despite what contemporary art’s democratizing force muddles. The drawing as it exists today is an invention of modern art.

LM: So drawing before this paradigm was confined to process. The preliminary. A step. Unfinished.

I’ve noticed that sometimes painters will mimic strokes of drawing, the way that marker or pen can pile up, recreated at a very large scale as painting.

LR: I think about Ryan Nord Kitchen.

LM: Yeah, that guy. He mimics like a thin, fine marker—like an almost dead marker—and there’s something very appealing about it. A lot of the time, the artists I’m following who make this way, they’re actually painters. They don’t necessarily have a commitment to drawing, or what those marks might be communicating.

LR: As if it’s something like pointillism, merely an image technique.

LM: An illusion, but a different kind of illusion. But maybe those scribbles are actually profound right now. Why do we mimic that? 

LR: There’s something about the mark in drawing—and I guess I’m thinking more so about drawings that highlight the mark, because drawing can be illusionary if you’re highly technically skilled or whatever. Still, there’s more distance from the subject because the materiality is starkly itself. 

The mark is drawing’s greatest feat. Graphite, pen, chalk, marker: they put out as much as you put out; you’re not really chasing the medium around like you would in say an oil painting.

LM: Yeah painting is a bit more unwieldy. You have to reign it in.

LR: You need certain conditions to make oil paintings. But the mark in drawing is consistent with the velocity, weight, and distance factors in its application. It transcribes the bodily interaction with a mere mark-making tool and a page.

LM: Even just thinking about drawing as a bodily orientation, working at your desk, top down. It feels similar to the act of looking down at your phone. 

I suppose painters can paint down, too.

LR: Conventionally that’s not the case, though. Often it’s a wall or an easel. 

LM: Right, and if it’s a large painting that you’re working on, you’re using really large tools, you’re getting up on a large crane, etc. There are a lot of American painters that work that way. So far away from the body.

What does it mean for a medium to be close to the body? I think about history painting, the highest form of art academic output, and how it claims objectivity by illusionary means. The effect of its realism resents any trace of its maker, serving the myth of its institutional commissioner—be it church or state—as some given omnipresence. By contrast, drawing “destabilizes mediation,” to quote a post-script iMessage from Laura, by making visible what’s otherwise not: its process of becoming. When I’m drawing, I find myself on the floor in my bedroom with paper and chalk; at my desk with pens and permanent markers; using my finger as a stylus on my phone’s touch screen. To be close to the body is to be urgent.

This conversation does not resolve to claim drawing is superior to painting; rather it celebrates drawing’s marginality, as it agitates the value art ascribes to the unreachable. Drawing, the way we’ve described it, hollows out large, strong-armed decisions, to accommodate our stains. A drawing is a plume-pensée, or thought feather, as Louis Bourgeois called it, and sheds from the body by the sheer fact of our being and consciousness.

In its potential to evolve alongside us, drawing becomes a “demand or claim on the world,” its resistance to “finish” and formality means it “continually suggest[s] change.” Karen Kurcynski’s essay “Drawing is the New Painting” touts drawing as a kind of contemporary contender to the genre of history painting. Drawing as a “refusal to envision results” allots space for collective participation in the work’s narrative unfurling, opposed to the one-way dictations embodied in history painting that render other possibilities moot. 

In the throes of 2020’s many upheavals, that “deskilling” rhetoric of the past century’s avant-gardism will finally make sense, as a call to love your marks and know their worth. These grant access to the deep recesses of a body’s containments, and the ideas within them for rethinking the world.

Laura McCoy (b. 1981) lives and works in Toronto. Her work spans a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance and has been included in various group shows in Canada and the United States since 2010. She lives with her cat, her dog, and chronic illness, and holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCADU. Her work can be found online at lauramccoy.com.

Lucas Regazzi (b. 1995) lives and works in Toronto. His practice mines form through feeling, at the intersection of drawing, writing and photography. His work has been exhibited in galleries, auctions and publications internationally including Guadalajara90210, Perros Negros, Mexico City; Pfeil Magazine, New York; The Plug-In Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; Calaboose, Amsterdam; Bad Nudes, Montreal; Detroit Research, Detroit; and Haunt Journal of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a BFA in Photography and Art History from Concordia University.

Feature image: Laura McCoy, much GJust, 2020. Acrylic paint marker on acid-free paper. 9 x 12 in.

This article is published in issue 37.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue