“Hey make a mark with me.” This I request of the person across to me at the table. I am doodling in my sketchbook. Big blank pages. I’ve started drawing nothing in particular. It’s not a stranger across from me. Maybe I know them well. Maybe only a little. I’ve done this many times. I have a two dozen or so pens sprawled out next to the notebook.
“I can’t draw.”
“I don’t want to ruin your notebook.”
I use the enthusiasm I learned when trying to get stubborn patients to take the breathing treatment they just refused. Sometimes it works. I do not coerce, I encourage.
Some people take to it immediately. They grab a pen. The Curlicues play out in a corner of the page. Some people test each pen and marker. They examine the line and color and maybe how they mix. Many are skeptical. Their eyes communicate something like “is this a trick?” A few have answered the call by drawing a single dot. It’s a ver specific kind of minimum viable product in response to the prompt “make a mark.” It’s common enough I get to tell those folks they are not the first or second person to do that. But that’s cool! Thanks for playing! Some can’t be convinced, and that’s fine too.
“You did so well!” “I love the colors!” is what we tell kids about their drawings. I think we teach kids that the final product of drawing is what matters. We don’t praise them for going for it, for making a mistake. In sports we teach kids that “you win some / you lose some.” We don’t teach good sportsmanship in drawing. We don’t praise the process, or the practice.
What I see when I ask people to draw with me, my favorite icebreaker, is fear. I see suspicion. I say “no rules, no grades, no deadlines.” I say people, but I mean adults. Children need no reassurance. They leap to choose the most interesting marker. The boldest color (hot pink) or the weirdest pen (calligraphy pen) or the thickest marker (a sharpie, usually). They go for it. I think they know that drawing is fun. I think they know I’ve offered an invitation to play.
Those kids become adults. Parents of those kids are usually skeptical. My notebook is big. I’ve had as many as 6 people drawing in it at the same time. We all fit. But parents are harder sell. What happened to them?
I think we taught those kids “you may draw if you are good at drawing.” If your drawing is “correct” it is good. If your drawing is “wrong” it is bad. And if you traced it you cheated and it is “bad.” All of that is bullshit. When I ask people to make a mark I make that page a safe space.
Drawing is a way to speak. It’s a way to dance. I wish there was a phrase for drawing like the cliche “dance like no one’s watching.” Draw. Maybe just draw a feeling. Maybe draw with the same energy of a fidget tool during a Zoom call. Drawings express.
I love to draw. I think I was 18, working at the Central Library in Downtown San Diego. It was in a fancy and expensive art magazine the library had a subscription to. Thick glossy paper is what it is in my memory. Jean Michel-Basquiat had died and I was reading about him. The article used the term “mark making.”
“Mark making”–what a wonderful phrase. It put into words what I knew intuitively but has no way to verbalize. “Mark making” implicitly told me that work of artists I loved–from Bob McCall to Frank Miller, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe, Syd Mead, Da Vinci, Bill Sienkiewicz–that they were maybe not the same, but they were linked. They might be utterly different. They might not seem like they came from the same kind of creatures. But they’re linked. We all make marks. And in so doing we are linked back to the beasts on the walls at Lascaux. And the doodles in my physics notebook were too. And once you see the world that way graffiti at the bus stop is linked. And a kid with chalk and a street is linked too.
This past weekend I was talking with friends, one old, one new. We talked about the weight of the world and the difficulties of health and welfare on planet earth. Old men yelling at clouds. We stood around miserablizing.
I took an empty seat at a nearby picnic table. I got out my notebook. I opened my bag of pens. I bade them to come make a mark. Being artists, I knew it would be a hard sell. It was. “I don’t have any ideas.” “I don’t have anything prepared.” “I’m too tired.”
They didn’t want to suck.
But I started making marks. I pointed out some of my more interesting pens. I told them there were no rules. No grades. Zero expectations. Feel free to start and not finish.
They sat down and drew.
And misery became inspiration.
The conversation didn’t change, but we had a new ways to converse.
Make a mark.
