Drawing during lockdown: Observing the ‘unquantifiable, but speculatively knowable’ dimensions of residential landscapes

Goethe used the term ‘delicate empiricism’ to describe a disciplined process of prolonged empathetic observation, grounded in direct experience, using imagination, inspiration and intuition to encounter phenomena.1 Observational drawing, as an epistemological tool, can facilitate this kind of encounter. As design and drawing practitioner Laurie Olin asserts, drawing enables us to carefully observe ‘unquantifiable, but speculatively knowable, things: the nature of various places, the quality of light at different times, the manner of other people (or ourselves) . . . We learn through seeing, thinking about what we see, studying, and recording it in various ways by drawing.’2 In recent years there has been ‘a modest resurgence of interest within academia in the methodological affordance of observational sketching’,3 mostly in social sciences, anthropological fieldwork, geography and design schools. While drawing is regarded as a means of generating and recording knowledge of place—its past, present and potential future state—artist Gemma Anderson laments that ‘the kind of meditative space needed’ to concentrate purely on observational drawing as a professional scholarly practice ‘is increasingly constrained’.4 This project set out to reclaim observational drawing as a method to capture the ‘unquantifiable’ but ‘knowable’ dimensions of everyday residential landscapes during lockdown.