Drawing Plants & Mindfulness by Ruth Rosengarten

Blind drawing — eyes completely shut. Feeling plant with non-dominant hand. 2 drawings — each different pen.

These drawings began with a Zoom workshop on drawing plants and mindfulness run by the London Drawing Group.  All drawings are on A3 cartidge paper.

 In the first drawing I used two water based felt tipped pens, first one, then the other. This first page consists of two drawings, one superimposed on the other. With my eyes closed I used my non-dominant hand (left hand for me) to feel carefully around the foliage of a plant I had on my table (you may not guess but this is a large peace lily!) and draw the plant from touch alone, twice.

Blind drawing/meditation through the body of a plant. A pencil in each hand.

For the remaining drawings I used Palomino Blackwing pencil/s and a pure pigment water-soluble woodless pencil crayon in an earthy green. Holding one implement in each hand, the drawings were made entirely blind (well, the final one was kind of short sighted rather than blind – my eyes kept popping open, it’s hard to get past the habit of drawing and looking if you’re used to that kind of practice – in fact the first lessons of drawing from life always have to do with looking, really looking).

Guided drawing/meditation through my body (upper body) with breathing — 2 pencils in each hand. 24-03-21

First, imagining a seed, and following my breathing in and out, mentally visualising my breathing as it rhythmically emerged from and returned to the seed, resulting, to my amazement, in a kind of plant. In the third drawing, again using two hands, I followed the rhythms of a breathing meditation, mentally visually the air going up and down my body and spreading out to fill all of me with oxygen. In the final drawing, the breathing meditation was similar to the previous one, but here I consciously imagined myself as a plant, growing both upwards and downward.

Blind drawing — body scan becoming vegetal.

I was amazed to find that holding a pencil in each hand and drawing with my eyes closed creates a strange body sensation, completely different from the usually visually centred activity of drawing. It provided me with an ability to identify my body with the process of drawing, creating an ability to move the body-drawing in a different way from the way I usually experience my body (as separate from the drawing). Then, even with eyes closed, there was a strong sense of symmetry that stemmed directly from my body’s (approximate) symmetry, though you can see that my left hand is less strong and has slightly less control of the implement. Nevertheless, I was amazed that as my non-dominant hand, my left hand (which normally can’t control any implement, can’t draw at all) somehow operates by bodily mimesis when mirroring my dominant hand. I say mirroring because we are so used to using visual metaphors for drawing).