Drawing and the Self

“Sketching and drawing are spatial and haptic exercises that fuse the external reality of space and matter, and the internal reality of perception, thought and mental imagery into singular and dialectic entities. As I sketch a contour of an object, human figure or landscape, I actually touch and feel the surface of the subject of my attention, and unconsciously I sense and internalise its character. In addition to the mere correspondence of the observed and depicted outline, I also mimic the line rhythm with my muscles, and eventually the image becomes recorded in the muscular memory. In fact, every act of sketching and drawing produces three different sets of images: the drawing that appears ion the paper, the visual image recorded in my cerebral memory, and the muscular memory of the act of drawing itself. All three images are not mere momentary snapshots, as they are recordings of a temporal process of successive perception, measuring, evaluation, correction and re-evaluation. A drawing is an image that compresses an entire process fusing a distinct duration into that image. A ketch is in fact a temporal image, a piece of cinematic action recorded as a graphic image.”

— Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.