There’s no such thing as a line.
Lines are wholly conceptual. They are a thing that we perceive rather than a thing that exists. The lines that we see emerge wherever we perceive a division between one thing and another thing. When we see a yellow banana resting on a red tablecloth, we don’t see lines visually separating the two, but we conceptually understand they must be there. And, when we see a long thin black rectangle, we consider it to signify such a boundary – not so much to be a line itself as to be a marker which shows us where the line must lie.
And yet we can perceive a collection of lines as depicting something real, and this is fascinating to me. Lines become another language, where we encode what we have seen into a linear depiction of its bounds and the observer interprets back from that outline into a visual image – or, more likely they interpret it directly into a symbolic model without wholly parsing it as a true image. This is seemingly a language that does not have to be taught – or perhaps it is taught stealthily in the background, unrecognized as universal language, through the process of learning other forms of expression.
On at least a cursory search, I cannot find any information about when a human comes to be capable of interpreting a set of lines signifying the boundaries of an object as a representation of that object. I also cannot find whether any other animals are capable of doing so. Maybe I just don’t know where to look, but this seems like an oddly fundamental question to have seemingly no available answers to or information on. Everyone seems to assume that lines just make sense, and that everyone can understand what object those lines are meant to represent – even as certain optical illusions, such as the Impossible Trident, reveal that interpreting lines as visual representations can often be deceitful or nonsensical.
The steps of encoding and decoding images to and from lines is one that is seldom actually regarded as a discrete act of interpretation. Though, when we study drawing, we often discuss learning to see things as they are and not how we imagine them to be, it is quite rare to acknowledge that lines themselves are clearly incapable of directly reproducing that visual information, and that it’s only through an act of learned interpretation that we’re capable of making them do so. This cognitive leap may seem so obvious to many students of art that they never have to explicitly learn it (or explicitly notice that they’ve learned it, anyway): However, I personally am bad at lines, and have had to learn to improve at that skill specifically, and that has forced me to observe the process of interpreting line into shape into line, line into shape, very explicitly.
Broadly speaking there are two approaches to creating art: Blobs of color and value which reproduce the asymbolic image the eye perceives, and lines which reproduce the image through a symbolic representation of the represented objects’ boundaries. I tend to be better at the former approach, creating blobs and shaping and shading them until they approximate something I’d actually see, than in placing lines to create the bounds of what I want to portray. These aptitudes may have something to do with my nearsightedness. They may also have something to do with my tendency to see things as fundamentally unified and undifferentiated, as all part of the same greater structure. They may also have something to do with my fascination with continuity and continuum, and questioning of where the bounds actually lie between a thing we can generally agree is good and a thing we can generally agree is bad, where and how it flips over.
Sometimes our outlook is motivated by our abilities. Sometimes metaphor doesn’t have to reach very far. It turns out that some people are just better at seeing lines.
Some people, as well, are better at drawing them. Because the process of interpreting line as image is invisible to us, we will interpret any lines that are drawn without questioning whether there might, perhaps, be an alternate interpretation, an alternate set of lines, that would make just as much sense or more. If lines can contextualize a sea of difficult-to-interpret blobs of color and value into a picture that makes sense, we tend to believe that picture – even if one or two lines are out of place, that’s fine, we can still see it. Perhaps that’s what the role of the artist is: To take a sea of undifferentiated data, a mess of events and places and people and things, and to draw lines deciding where the boundaries lie and what they mean.
What a terrifying responsibility to bear.