Drawing Gesture

• In Event: Facilitating Collaboration Through Movement and Mark-Making

Abstract

From developmental and evolutionary perspectives, verbal communication begins with gesture. Animals began to use gesture as a means of communication when they developed the capacity to observe the response of other animals to their own actions. Dialogue seems to be grounded in an awareness of the other looking at us and trying to understand what we are doing and thinking. Intentional gestures, including facial expressions, signify actions, pre-figure the spoken word (Arbib et al., 2008). Infants learn to communicate through gesture months before their first words are spoken.

Gestural studies, a specific type of fast, scribbled drawing, have a long history in the quick sketches and preparatory drawings artists have used to explore ideas and solve problems for larger works. One of the most influential drawing instructors of the 20th century, Kimon Nicolaides, reported that his beginning students were often surprised at the success of their gesture studies, that somehow they were able to capture more than they were actively conscious of noticing. Artists, by learning to trust the movement of their hands, make new discoveries and inventions. As Nicolaides observed of his students’ drawings, “Often students do them well and are quite surprised at the results, which are far beyond any knowledge they have. The reason is that by working quickly they accidentally find the gesture. The gesture is a feeler which reaches out and guides them to knowledge” (1941/1969, p 14).  Infants’ cognitive development is also facilitated through their motor development (Adolph and Robinson, 2015).

Nicolaides’ observation strikingly coincides with the latest scientific understanding of the role of the hand gestures that accompany speech. Gesture not only helps others understand the spoken word, but helps the speaker extend his or her own conceptual reach (Goldin-Meadow, 2000). Gestures, which externalize thinking in a less structured form than words, can assist learners to “feel” their way through a difficult problem or concept (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Hands and bodies sometimes know what words may not yet be able to articulate. There are relatively strict rules (grammar, definitions, categories) governing the ways in which words may be used. This contrasts with the relatively unstructured improvisational nature of gesture.

There are a limited number of words to describe the height of an object (words like tall, short, medium), but one can physically describe the height of a thing by placing the hand at one of an infinite number of possible positions. This may be why hand gestures and gestural sketches can exhibit more advanced understandings than the words that might accompany them. Drawings can capture the fleeting gesture, to be examined, revisited and revised later, in the visible trace left behind.

Author

• Andrea Kantrowitz, SUNY - College at New Paltz