Morales 1

Mark Morales
Professor Glover
English 114B
6 May 2015
Drawing: A Universal Language
The saying goes; A picture holds a thousand words. Drawings and pictures are a way of
communication. A way of telling your audience what the artist is thinking and feeling, it is a
rhetorical device that has endless possibilities. At one point or another, life is going to be
tremendously difficult, or stressful, and finding a place of sanctuary to gather yourself and regain
control of a situation is essential. For most of my life, I have had physical places where I can go
to be free. However, as I proceed in my life I become more and more busy with the
responsibilities I choose to take on. Finding the time to get to the places that I would like to be
becomes harder and harder to schedule in. The one thing I always find myself doing, no matter
the situation, is drawing. Leaving a physical impressing on a surface, even if it makes logical
sense or not, has a way of capturing exactly what is happening in the moment. It is a way to
express what I cannot say or do. It is my own form of a sanctuary
In many of lecture classes at California State University Northridge that I attend, I have a
pen and paper to take notes on, and much of the time I find myself doodling, and when I look
back at those doodles I remember a phrase or concept of the class because of what image was
produced. Other students and professors, advise against that practice because it can take focus off
what is being taught in the class room, and even if I do use it as a way of studying aside from my
notes, pictures are not as precise as the use of words. I agree, if pictures hold a thousand words,

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then every picture I draw is like a four to five page essay, and I can easily lose sight of what the
purpose of the drawing was. Interpretation is heavily based on the eye of the beholder. The way I
feel can be completely different form how I feel a week later, and I can have two different
interpretations of what I was trying to capture from the same drawing. Although drawing can
express ideas, they are only symbols to be interprtted.
I understand not everyone has a gift for drawing or even have the drive to make a doodle,
but I know it helps decide how to handle a situation. For example if we take a look at doodles
that run through many of the pages of The Absolutely True Diary of a part-Time Indian, by
Sherman Alexie, I do not want to say I find all of the drawing one hundred percent parallel with
his writing; it is not a graphic novel, but it definitely gives you a perspective that could not be
seen before, it communicates with the brain in a different way. I, for example, am more of
visual learner and this made me see the main characters, Junior, perspective more clearly. It
make him look like a light hearted person that notices things that people would not connect prior
to him motioning it. An example of that is the cartoon of the Indian man with the skinny legs and
big belly and compared him to a chicken. He could have just said, He looks like a chicken and
gone with a simple simile, but he chose a rhetorical method that would show the humor the way
he saw it. Words can be more precise then pictures at times, like some of my fellow students and
professors may say, but in some situations picture can be more descriptive then words and allows
more people to understand it.
The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a graphic novel and while I could take
the time to talk about how this book is about real events, and a first hand source of a piece of
history in the middle east told largely in pictures, The part I really wanted top talk about what the

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single frame where Marjane drew her hand finishing a drawing. At this point of the story
Marjane is trying to get in to the college of art, and she has to have a something to represent her
abilities, she made a drawing of Michelangelos statue La Pieta. It is a statue of Jesus in the arms
of Mary, as he lay lifeless. She then added something from her life. she made Jesus look like a
soldier and put a black chador on Mary and added Tulips that represent the Martyrs. This
drawing, while it looks simple enough, impacted me. I am not religious myself, but comparing
the life of soldiers to the life of Jesus really shows the importance Marjane puts on the life of
those who stand for others, like Jesus did in his stories. Furthermore, putting the black chador on
Mary shows the pain that the women of her people also experience a great pain, like the mother
of Jesus did. The story in Persepolis is a dark one, I would say, and this drawing gave me an
insight on the phrase History repeats itself. Honestly reading it would not have made such an
impact on me, but seeing the comparison was stronger then the words, like the doodles in
shaman Alexis book.
Drawing is not only a way for people to express themselves but also a way for others to
find an understanding of what they dont fully understand. A team of Scholars in Greece did an
experiment where they asked teenagers between the ages of 13 to 16 to draw some impression of
people that have mental illness doing certain activities or in a certain setting like on a
playground. The first group was told to do this and they found that the reaction and behavior
toward people with mental illness was shown in the drawings. The adolescent group represented
those with mental illness as large, no specific sex, and usually alone and out casted from
whatever else was drawn. The group was then put through a lecture on what mental illness is and
what it really is doing to a person that has it. The drawing test was done again and the results

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were different from the first time around, the difference in character where less emphasized, each
character had an obvious sex and the drawing were closer together in the activities and with other
people. The drawing show what the teenagers learned in the lecture, they become more accepting
of what they didnt know prior to the lecture. I feel that people of that age would, have had more
trouble writing out what they learned without copying what they heard; instead I think the
drawings showed who became genuinely accepting, their drawings told the scholars more then
the words the adolescent people would say.
I feel drawing relives truth, and should not be undermined as an useful skill in a scholarly
environment. Authors like Sherman Alexie, and Marjane Satrapi made their point clearer to me
because of their drawings and the studies have shown that drawing is a language that all people
can understand.

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Work cited

Sakellari, Evanthia, Kimmo Lehtonen, Andre Sourander, Athena Kalokerinou

Anagnostopoulou, and Helena LeinoKilpi. "Greek Adolescents' Views of People
with Mental Illness Through Drawings: Mental Health Education's Impact."
Nursing & Health Sciences, 16.3 (2014): 358-364.

Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.

Alexie, Sherman, and Ellen Forney. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time
Indian. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.