A Long Walk
“A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, is credited with saying this. I’ve not been able to track down where or when, but the phrase has traveled widely and is used in any number of exercise books for artists, catering to both children and adults. It calls attention to the hand and the page, the artist and the medium, and to questions of freedom and constraint or spontaneity and inheritance. In his Pedagogical Sketchbook, a book prepared for students at the Bauhaus School of Art, Klee wrote this version of that slogan: “An active line is a walk, moving freely, without a goal.”
A pilgrimage is as an active line, clearly. But the pilgrims we met on our walk were not moving freely. They were driven or compelled, and they were following a well-defined line marked by yellow blazes. They had... More...