A Return to the Cave: Drawing as an Essential Tool for Thought and Reflection

Daniel Hill

April 2020

From March 27 to April 16 2020, I made a chalkboard drawing a day as an intuitional response to the virus induced chaos upending our lives. I have always loved chalkboards, those dusty impermanent embodiments of visual thought and learning. I salvaged this particular chalkboard (a kid’s toy) along with a box of chalk from the trash and resolved to make an impermanent drawing everyday while in quarantine. I also resolved to post the drawing on social media daily, whether I liked it or not. In addition to helping maintain the ritual, the internet would also provide the drawings a place to live, as they would get erased. During one of the most difficult three week periods in memory as my family and I dealt with coronavirus-like symptoms, this chalkboard ritual emerged as a fundamentally grounding practice which instilled doses of discipline, reflection, and meditation so necessary during this very stressful time. Each day I would meditate before the drawing, having it function as my personal mandala. Then I would erase a section of the previous day’s drawing and begin anew. Many days I wanted to quit, but soon their aesthetic transformations occupied my mind even when not drawing. The honesty and impermanence of the practice led me to rediscover foundational motivations for choosing the artist’s path long ago. I stopped at three weeks with twenty-one drawings, as this seemed a good spot to reflect and analyze the experiment. The last drawing, number 21, will be sealed and preserved. This essay is my reflection on this chalkboard drawing practice, which will now become a regular element of my overall system of making.

Drawing on a chalkboard daily invited thoughts of our prehistoric ancestors standing before a smooth cave wall with drawing tool in hand. We will never know for sure what motivated them to make their stunning images but perhaps the very existence of their drawing is all we need to know. Drawing is a fundamental modality of communication for our species and perhaps our first human language. These prehistoric drawings are evidence of the rise of symbolic thinking as a problem solving and communication tool. In addition to the stunning animal drawings, I have long been fascinated by the presence of visual abstraction found at prehistoric sites around the world. There is an interesting correlation between this abstraction and the similarity to entoptic phenomena, or visual experiences derived from within the eye itself or even the brain. This imagery is most evident to a person in a deep state of concentration or a heightened state of consciousness. In a more recent example, mandalas also display entoptic qualities with self repeating, nested, and radiating central forms. The presence of visual abstraction in caves displays an advanced form of symbolic thinking. Abstract art, like music, has the capacity of carrying no temporal, societal baggage and thus possesses the unique capability of being pure metaphor for those jewels of human experience that elude words. In this way, visual abstraction has significant value as a mirror for the viewer’s mind. A creative practice such as drawing then can reveal and record a symbolic form of our inner world, which can be examined as a complex web of the intellectual and emotional; of good habits and bad; of tendencies, strengths and weaknesses.

El Castillo Cave: The Tectiform Corner ®The Wendel Collection Neanderthal Museum. Photo: Heinrich Wendel — El Castillo Cave: The Tectiform Corner
®The Wendel Collection Neanderthal Museum. Photo: Heinrich Wendel

Mandala of Six Chakravartins Photo: Wikipedia

With the ongoing effects of the pandemic, it feels like a return to the cave- a return to that hidden inner world. The cave is our cocoon of quarantine, from which comes a tantalizing opportunity for transformation. Even when the lockdown orders are raised, we will remain quarantined in our minds for months, even years and maybe permanently in some way. And yet this is an opportunity to take stock and make adjustments. We have been told to wash our hands, keep hydrated, and exercise. But what about our minds? That most precious and mysterious of all things, so taken for granted that it doesn’t even get a mention? Drawing as a practice engages the body and establishes an equivalency in the mind, which despite Descartes, neuroscience has proved the mind/body relationship to be both present and of value. A practice done with the hands, like drawing, has a noticeable effect cognitively: we can literally change our brain by using our hands. In this sense drawing is a form of extended cognition with our hands actually becoming extensions of the mind. Here, both process and visual outcome is conducive for concentration and reflection. As a type of thought, reflection is the engine of transformation and if this time is not ripe for reflection, then certainly no time ever will be. When we see the callous nature of human action while inebriated with ego and power; when we see the atrocities we are capable of when at war with another human tribe- then certainly we can see that this process of personal reflection becomes an absolute requirement if our species hopes to move safely through it’s self absorbed adolescence. The fires of science have burned through the dense fog of ignorance and superstition that dominated our past, but even science loses its way in this subjective realm of the inner world. Here is where the value of the arts shines bright in the darkness, as a sturdy and trustworthy navigator for the unavoidable stormy seas of life.

Art is a way to gain and express types of knowledge. To know one’s self through a creative practice provides deep personal meaning, and when discovered with integrity and an altruistic motive, it might aid to transcend age old obstacles blocking our growth as a species. We must, like a nervous baby attempting her first unaided step, reach out through this darkness and touch the ground. We must grow, adapt, and change, or face likely extinction. We live in a world plagued not only by this virus but a world suffering from a severe deficiency of meaning. With many careers on hold right now, it is not so difficult to imagine a future world where the concept of working is very different due to technological advances. From there, it is a small step to imagine a world where we have finally begun to shed our skin of destructive tendencies. In that world, might not personal meaning become the new gold standard, a commodity of meaning?

There is a ritual in Tibetan Buddhism where monks make an incredibly intricate and beautiful mandala of colored sand and after several weeks of intense work, they sweep it away into the flowing currents of the nearest river. I always loved the gesture of this- the acknowledgement of the brevity of our time on this planet and indeed of all things. What questions were our ancestors thinking as they drew on cave walls? Are they really so different from the questions brought to light as a result of the pandemic? What really is the essential personal meaning of anyone of our lives? So fleeting, like sand or chalk, we make our mark, only to be whisked away. So precious, is our time- what do we do with the time we have?

It was an insightful experience to make drawings that would just get erased. There is a tension between their obvious impermanence and the implicit demands of our overbearing culture of commodification. The drawings erasure dissolved certain creative shackles which granted the freedom to rediscover my artistic origins and create in the spirit of focused play and invention. As artists, we can get lost too, thinking that success means ticking off a career check list. But ironically for many artists, that checklist if completed, would stifle the core motivations for making art in the first place. What does it mean to be an artist now? What should it mean? Only artists can be the cutting edge scientists of that subjective inner world; experimenting, innovating, inspiring, questioning, educating, provoking, and serving as the forerunner of new paradigms. In this way, we should all have an active creative practice done with integrity, reflection, and discipline. It is our neurological inheritance and a structure to rely upon for personal growth. If enough of us venture deeper into the cave, a tipping point in society can be achieved. Framed with a legitimately altruistic motive, this cannot fail to pay dividends for our species. Change is upon us, whether we want it or not. As we hibernate in our caves, let’s embrace this change creatively, with our bodies and minds linked together in a practice of seeing and making.