A View Too Large to Hold Alone

The moment I reach a summit.

I have been watching my feet the entire way, and then, in the last few steps, everything opens at once. The clouds sit level with my eyes. There is nothing but the sound of wind. In that moment I lose language. I do not even think that it is beautiful. I only feel my own body become very small.

After standing there a while, I always end up taking a photograph. I know the scale will not survive the frame, and I take it anyway. Then, somewhere on the way down, I notice I have already been deciding who to tell. When we see something we cannot hold by ourselves, I think we reach outward.

It is the same in front of a large painting. I am stopped by it, and then I want to hand the feeling to someone.

When I first began drawing, I wanted to make something like that with my own hands. More depth. More realism. Better work. Ambition is the flattering word for it, but what I really believed was that if I became skilled enough, I would eventually arrive.

I thought the answer waited somewhere past technique.

As I kept drawing, though, what I was looking at slowly changed. Each time I felt I had understood something, a deeper place opened behind it.

There was one drawing where the black refused to settle. I layered charcoal again and again, pressed it down with the pad of my finger, and still the black on the paper would not go quiet. It only grew stronger. Standing back from it, I understood that density was never what I had wanted. The shape of my question changed that day.

How much silence can the black of charcoal hold?

How much meaning can empty space carry?

What becomes visible only by not drawing it?

Every time an answer comes into view, a new question is born. It repeats.

I do not find this painful. If anything, I am drawn to the fact that it does not end.

There is a kind of satisfaction that comes from comparison. Being better than someone. Being recognized. Watching the numbers rise. These are good feelings, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise. They are simply not what keeps me drawing.

When I draw, I feel the presence of something larger than myself, over and over.

How deep does the act of seeing go? What is the presence that lives in a single sheet of paper? Why can black and white alone give rise to emotion?

The more I think about it, the more I notice how overwhelmingly much I do not know. In front of that feeling, whether I am better than anyone else becomes a very small problem. What I am facing is not a world where a winner is decided. It is a world where every step forward widens the territory of my own ignorance.

Inquiry, I suspect, keeps its joy and its fear in the same place. It resembles standing on that summit. Beautiful and slightly frightening at once. Larger than one person can carry.

Perhaps that is why I want to put it outside myself. Drawing, for me, is close to that gesture. I take what I cannot hold alone and set it down on paper. And once it is down, I see again how far short it falls.

There is no completion. Because there is no completion, I want to draw the next one.

There are views I will not reach in a lifetime. There is beauty I will not understand in a lifetime.

Strangely, this has never once disappointed me. The more I know, the wider and deeper the world becomes. Being able to keep looking at that endless view is, I think, the joy itself.

So today I sit down in front of the paper again.

I want these drawings and words to travel openly, and to reach the people who may need them.

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