How to Draw a Line

Lately I’ve been researching how a lineage is born.

It was a rainy Saturday when I learned to draw. I turned on my lava lamp, turned off the overhead light, and sprawled out on my bed next to a vial of fruit flies and a photo of a microscopic image I took of one of them. I spend most of my nights like this, feverish and meditative, trying to piece together all the scattered advice my drawing teacher gave me in his studio in Lahore. He taught me how to hold my graphite pencil with confidence. I was gentle with it the first day. I held it with my left thumb and four fingers on my right as if ready to write a letter. By the end of the month it was sitting in my fist like it was a magic wand and my arm was telling it where to go.

This fall I’m trying to remember everything he taught me. I spend most of my days at the sculpting and puppetry studios near Swift, both of which are in close proximity to each other. Although I’m an avid museum visitor, I’ve never been to the studio. I’ve looked at countless pieces of art and been excited at not being able to see the process that created them. In museums there is a veil between the art and the viewer that is never completely lifted. The work of art rests coquettishly on the wall, never revealing the mysteries that led to its creation. There is no shyness in the sculpture studio. The work of art is divested of its readiness. There are unfinished pieces everywhere, not yet sanded or polished, some yet to carve, some yet to reach, the paperclay still wet and crumbling like a patch of clay waiting to be walked on.

I remember my teacher telling me to trust the process, letting out a line like vomit and allowing it to empty me. His words ring clear and true here, where unfinished is a constant state of being and where making is thinking without pretense. I don’t monitor here. I’m behind the scenes: in the dressing room, the girls’ restroom and the pregame.

For the class here I bring a picture of a fruit fly so I can shape it. In preparation, I sketch this little insect countless times, peeling a new layer of its tendons each time. I prepare by committing to this one image. Sometimes I feel stuck. There’s too much clutter in my head, dulling my ability to let the graphite breathe.

“How to draw,” I google. I don’t want to learn how to draw, how to take a pencil and trace it across paper. I mean in a more emotional sense: how to draw. How You think. How to get a clear head. How to dig it up for memory. How to satisfy hunger. Taking off my jacket, flexing my fingers and letting them twitch until they come to rest. How to be a better friend, how to tell my mom I love her so I don’t have to think about it at my desk. How to be silent. How I completely empty my mind so I can visualize where my hand wants to sit next.

I practice relentlessly until I make myself miserable. The lines are initially unstable and within a few days I become more aggressive. I enjoy the intimacy of everything. Where before I struggled to frame an image to marry in the style of the artists I admire so much, I now feel rooted. I know fruit flies very well, from vintage diagrams to 3D renderings and anatomically correct likenesses. I am learning slowness, patience and mindfulness.

By trying to be a better artist, I’m trying to become a better observer and a better friend. The pages of my sketchbook are heavier, rougher. The inside of my eyelids can depict any line, the trace of the iridescent wing stretching to meet the tanned exoskeleton and yellow underside. This is the closeness of the line on how to navigate like a cartographer through the bodies you want to perfect in your work. How to draw is how to play, how to be slow. how to be