Everybody’s gotta draw

Once a year, my grown daughter and I, minus her kids, take a long weekend off in New York City. We take in a show, walk miles, eat more than we should, and find delight in the endless surprises the Big Apple always supplies. We did this again last weekend, and the experience was, as always, punctuated by the unexpected.

But here’s one element of our jaunts through the Boroughs that, dazzling as it is, no longer takes us by surprise: art is everywhere. Literally everywhere. I’m not talking about the museums of the upper East Side – magnificent as they are. I don’t mean just the back-to-back galleries – flakey, friendly, futuristic and freaky – that seem to have colonized places like the 23rd Street and 25th Street on the West side. No; I really mean everywhere. Drawings are no less the surface and substance of New York than pavement and brick and gray slush. The act of drawing seems to be what New Yorkers do, as commonly and casually as they honk their horns, sing on the subways and call out to each other in all the languages of the planet.

Begin a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and look South at the projects and playgrounds. No wall is too small, too big, or too hard to access to be the canvas for an unofficial mural. Graffiti goes way beyond “Jake was here!!” to become brilliant chaotic expression of attitude, imagination and mood. (No money for paint, brushes, canvas or art school? So What! Steal a spray can.) Cross the Manhattan bridge and turn left on Bedford Street in Williamsburg and you’ll find the wall of a local jazz radio station filled with three differently styled renderings of musicians at work. Come back to the Carlton Arms Hotel on 25th Street and you’ll find what used to be a crumbling dangerous super-sketchy flop house – now reborn because a new owner handed over each of the fifty four rooms to a different artist. Each room is now a unique egocentric art installation whose walls, ceilings, furniture and lighting offer the guest a stay in an artist’s mind for $130 a night.

Of course none of this is unique to The City (as I learned to call it, growing up in the North Bronx). My regular re-immersion there just serves as a dramatic reminder of a general truth. Go anywhere, anytime, and you’ll observe irrepressible self-expression through drawing. Watch the child who passes a rainy Saturday afternoon with crayons; the grandchild doing art on the back of the diner placemat before the kiddie meal arrives; or the doodling uncle whose serenity seems to require a pen and the back of an envelope. And of course, there are those caves in France where our creative forebears (briefly bored between fighting off saber-tooted tiger attacks?) couldn’t resist drawing standing and leaping animals for which they didn’t  yet have spoken or written words.

And so to the point. As my buddies at E.A.S.Y. LLC and our friends and guides in the NFB community continue to observe and contemplate the roles of drawing and drawings in the world of blind and visually impaired children and adults, we often find ourselves focusing on the ways tactile graphics are important for meeting their communicative, educational and vocational needs. And certainly this is a critically important focus as we develop our new inTACT products and materials for raised-line drawing. But it may be just as important to remind ourselves that some people draw just because they have that urge. For these children, teens and adults, drawing is simply a personal expressive drive, and urgent itch that needs to be scratched. And as far as we know, this gravitation to graphics can be found just as commonly among the blind as among the sighted. I’d be willing to be that, with the right expectations and tactile tools in place, artists will show themselves in the ranks of the NFB more and more often.