Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain - Inglês (2024)

Prévia do material em texto

DRAWING ON THE RIGHTSIDE OF THE BRAINBETTY EDWARDSThe Definitive, 4th EditionSouvenir Press2DEDICATIONTo my granddaughters, who have taken todrawing the way fish take to swimming andbirds to flying, simply by sometimes sittingin on their Dad’s drawing workshops.Dear Sophie and Francesca,this book is for you,with thanks for all the joyyou have brought into my world.3Self-portrait by SophieBomeisler, July 29, 2011,when she was 11.Self-portrait by FrancescaBomeisler, July 29, 2010,when she was 8.4CONTENTSTitle PageDedicationAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1 Drawing and the Art of Bicycle RidingChapter 2 First Steps in DrawingChapter 3 Your Brain, the Right and Left of ItChapter 4 Crossing Over from Left to RightChapter 5 Drawing on Your Childhood ArtistryChapter 6 Perceiving EdgesChapter 7 Perceiving SpacesChapter 8 Perceiving RelationshipsChapter 9 Drawing a Profile PortraitChapter 10 Perceiving Lights, Shadows, and the GestaltChapter 11 Using Your New Perceptual Skills for CreativeProblem SolvingChapter 12 Drawing on the Artist in You5GlossaryBibliographyIndexPortfolio ComponentsPortfolio and DVD OrderingCopyright6ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI shall be forever grateful to Dr. Roger W. Sperry(1913–1994), neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, and Nobellaureate, for his generosity and kindness in discussing theoriginal text with me. At a time in 1978 when I was mostdiscouraged and doubtful about the manuscript I waswriting, I summoned the courage to send it to him. Notlong after that, I was filled with gratitude to receive hiskind response in a letter that began, “I have just read yoursplendid manuscript.” He suggested that we meet to reviewand clarify some errors in my layperson’s effort to writeabout his research. That invitation began a series ofonce-a-week meetings in his office at the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology, resulting in revision after revisionof Chapter Three of the manuscript, the chapter in which Iattempted to describe the “split-brain” studies.Most gratifyingly, when Drawing on the Right Side of theBrain was finally published in 1979, Dr. Sperry wrote astatement for the back cover:“… her application of the brain research findings todrawing conforms well with the available evidenceand in many places reinforces and advances the righthemisphere story with new observations.”7I asked him why he had used the “…” to begin hisstatement. He replied, with his usual sly humor, that if anyof his colleagues objected to his approval of thisnonscientific book, he could always say that something wasleft out. At that time, objectionsto Dr. Sperry’s findings were frequent, especially regardinghis demonstrations that the right-brain hemisphere wascapable of fully human, high-level cognition. Theseobjections diminished over the years, as corroboration ofhis insights became undeniable. The Nobel Prize inMedicine in 1981 ensured Dr. Sperry’s eminent position inthe history of science.Many other people have contributed greatly to my book. Inthis brief acknowledgment, I wish to thank at least a few.My publisher, Jeremy Tarcher, for his enthusiastic supportover more than thirty years.My representative, Robert B. Barnett of the law firmWilliams & Connolly, Washington, DC, for always being agreat advocate and friend.Joel Fotinos, Vice-President and Publisher of Tarcher/Penguin, for setting this project in motion and for hislongtime friendship.Sara Carder, my Tarcher/Penguin Executive Editor, for herenthusiastic support, help, and encouragement.Dr. J. William Bergquist, for his generous assistance withthe first edition of the book and with my doctoral researchthat preceded it.8Joe Molloy, my longtime friend, who has designed all ofmy books for publication. Somehow, he makes superbdesign appear to be effortless, and it isn’t.Anne Bomeisler Farrell, my daughter, who as editor hasbrought her great writing skills to help me with this project.Throughout, she has been my anchor and support.Brian Bomeisler, my son, for his long years of workhelping me to revise, refine, and clarify these lessons indrawing. His skills as an artist and as our lead workshopteacher have enabled countless students to succeed atdrawing.Sandra Manning, who so ably manages the Drawing on theRight Side of the Brain office and workshops. Herwonderful contribution was in researching and obtaininginternational permissionsto reproduce the many new illustrations found in thisedition.My son-in-law, John Farrell, and my granddaughtersSophie Bomeisler and Francesca Bomeisler, who have beenmy enthusiastic cheerleaders.My thanks also go to the many art teachers and artistsacross the country and in many other parts of the worldwho have used the ideas in my book to help bring drawingskills to their students.And last, I wish to express my gratitude to all of thestudents whom I have been privileged to know over thedecades. It was they who enabled me to form the ideas forthe original book and who have since guided me in refiningthe teaching sequences. Most of all, it has been the students9who have made my work so personally rewarding. Thankyou!10INTRODUCTIONDrawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading andwriting.It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic.It was a boon to happiness.1—MICHAEL KIMMELMANFor more than thirty years, Drawing on the Right Side ofthe Brain has been a work in progress. Since the originalpublication in 1979, I have revised the book three times,with each revision about a decade apart: the first in 1989,the second, 1999, and now a third, 2012 version. In eachrevision, my main purpose has been to incorporateinstructional improvements that my group of teachers and Ihad gleaned from continuously teaching drawing over theintervening years, as well as bringing up-to-date ideas andinformation from education and neuroscience that relate todrawing. As you will see in this new version, much of theoriginal material remains, as it has passed the test of time,while I continue to refine the lessons and clarifyinstructions. In addition, I make some new points aboutemergent right-brain significance and the astonishing,relatively new science called neuroplasticity. I make a case11for my life’s goal, the possibility that public schools willonce again teach drawing, not only as a civilized thing todo and a boon to happiness, but also as perceptual trainingfor improving creative thinking.The power of perceptionMany of my readers have intuitively understood that thisbook is not only about learning to draw, and it is certainlynot about Art with a capital A. The true subject isperception. Yes, the lessons have helped many peopleattain the basic ability to draw, and that is a main purposeof the book. But the larger underlying purpose was alwaysto bring right hemisphere functions into focus and to teachreaders how to see in new ways, with hopes that theywould discover how to transfer perceptual skills to thinkingand problem solving. In education, this is called “transferof learning,” which has always been regarded as difficult toteach, and often teachers, myself included, hope that it willjust happen. Transfer of learning, however, is bestaccomplished by direct teaching, and therefore, in Chapter11 of this revised edition, I encourage that transfer byincluding some direct instruction on how perceptual skills,learned through drawing, can be used for thinking andproblem solving in other fields.The book’s drawing exercises are truly on a basic level,intended for a beginner in drawing. The course is designedfor persons who cannot draw at all, who feel that they haveno talent for drawing, and who believe that they probablycan never learn to draw. Over the years, I have said manytimes that the lessons in this book are not on the level ofart, but are rather more like learning howto read—morelike the ABCs of reading: learning the alphabet, phonics,12syllabification, vocabulary, and so on. And just as learningbasic reading is a vitally important goal, because the skillsof reading transfer to every other kind of learning, frommath and science to philosophy and astronomy, I believethat in time learning to draw will emerge as an equally vitalskill, one that provides equally transferrable powers ofperception to guide and promote insight into the meaningof visual and verbal information. I will even go out on alimb and say that we mistakenlymay have been putting all our educational eggs into onebasket only, while shortchanging other truly valuablecapabilities of the human brain, namely perception,intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps AlbertEinstein put it best: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, andthe rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created asociety that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”“Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.”—Mark TwainThe hidden contentAbout six months after publication of the original book in1979, I had the odd experience of suddenly realizing thatthe book I thought I had written contained another contentof which I was unaware. That hidden content wassomething I didn’t know I knew: I had inadvertentlydefined the basic component skills of the global skill ofdrawing. I think part of the reason this content was hiddenfrom me was the very nature of art education at the time,where beginning drawing classes focused on subjectmatter, such as “Still Life Drawing,” “LandscapeDrawing,” or “Figure Drawing,” or on drawing mediums,13such as charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, ink wash, or mixturesof mediums.But my aim was different: I needed to provide my readerswith exercises that would cause a cognitive shift to theright hemisphere—a shift similar to that caused byUpside-Down Drawing: “tricking” the dominant lefthemisphere into dropping out of the task. I settled on fivesubskills that seemed to have the same effect, but at thetime, I thought that there must be other basic skills—maybedozens of them.Then, months after the book had been published, in themidst of teaching a class, it hit me as an aha! that forlearning to draw realistic images of observed subjects, thefive subskills were it—there weren’t more. I hadinadvertently selected from the many aspects of drawing afew fundamental subskills that I thought might be closelyaligned to the effect of Upside-Down Drawing. And thefive skills, I realized, were not drawing skills in the usualsense; they were rock-bottom, fundamental seeing skills:how to perceive edges, spaces, relationship, lights andshadows, and the gestalt. As with the ABCs of reading,these were the skills you had to have in order to draw anysubject.14I was elated by this discovery. I discussed it at length withmy colleagues and searched through old and new textbookson drawing, but we did not find any additional fundamentalbasic components of the global skill of basic realisticdrawing—drawing one’s perceptions. With this discovery,it occurred to me that perhaps drawing could be quicklyand easily taught and learned—not strung out over yearsand years, as was the current practice in art schools. Myaim suddenly became “drawing for everyone,” not just forartists in training. Clearly, the basic ability to draw does notnecessarily lead to the “fine art” found in museums andgalleries any more than the basic ability to read and writeinevitably leads to literary greatness and published worksof literature. But learning to draw was something I knewwas valued by children and adults. Thus, my discovery ledme in new directions, resulting in a 1989 revision ofDrawing on the Right Side of the Brain, in which I focusedon explaining my insight and proposing that individualswho had never been able to draw could learn to draw wellvery rapidly.Subsequently, my colleagues and I developed a five-dayworkshop of forty hours of teaching and learning (eighthours a day for five days), which proved to be surprisinglyeffective: students acquired quite high-level basic drawingskills in that brief time, and gained all the information theyneeded to go on making progress in drawing. Sincedrawing perceived subjects is always the same task, alwaysrequiring the five basic component skills, they couldproceed to any subject matter, learn to use any or alldrawing mediums, and take the skill as far as they wished.They could also apply their new visual skills to thinking.The parallels to learning to read were becoming obvious.15Over the next decade, from 1989 to 1999, the connection ofperceptual skills to general thinking, problem solving, andcreativity became a more central focus for me, especiallyafter publicationof my 1986 book, Drawing on the Artist Within. In thisbook, I proposed a “written” language for the righthemisphere: the language of line, the expressive languageof art itself. This idea of using drawing to aid thinkingproved to be quite useful in a class on creativity that Ideveloped for university students and in small corporateseminars on problem solving.Then, in 1999, I again revised Drawing on the Right Side ofthe Brain, again incorporating what we had learned overthe years of teaching the five basic skills and refining thelessons. I especially focused on the skill of sighting(proportion and perspective), which is perhaps the mostdifficult component skill to teach in words, because of itscomplexity and its reliance on students’ acceptance ofparadox, always anathema to the logical, concept-boundleft brain. In addition, I urged using perceptual skills to“see” problems.“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”—Leonardo da VinciNow, with this third revision in 2012, I want to clarify tothe best of my ability the global nature of drawing and tolink drawing’s basic component skills to thinking ingeneral and to creativity in particular. Throughout manycultures, both in the United States and worldwide, there ismuch talk of creativity and our need for innovation andinvention. There are many suggestions to try this or try16that. But the nitty-gritty of precisely how to become morecreative is seriously lacking. Our education system seemsbent on eliminating every last bit of creative perceptualtraining of the right side of the brain, whileoveremphasizing the skills best accomplished by the leftside of the brain: memorizing dates, data, theorems, andevents with the goal of passing standardized tests. Todaywe are not only testing and grading our children into theground, but we are not teaching them how to see andunderstand the deep meaning of what they learn, or toperceive the connectedness of information about the world.It is indeed time to try something different.Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning, according to arecent news report. A small group of cognitive scientists atthe University of California at Los Angeles isrecommending somethingthey call “perceptual learning” as a remedy to our failingeducational practices. They express hope that such trainingwill transfer to other contexts, and they have had somesuccess with achieving transfer. Discouragingly, however,the news report ended: “In an education awash withcomputerized learning tools and pilot programs of allkinds, the future of such perceptual learning efforts is farfrom certain. Scientists still don’t know the best way totrain perceptual intuition, or which specific principles it’sbest suited for. And such tools, if they are incorporated intocurriculums in any real way, will be subject to thejudgment of teachers.”217I would like to suggest that we already have a best way totrain perceptual skills: it has been staring us in the face fordecades, and we haven’t (or wouldn’t, or couldn’t) acceptit. I think it is not a coincidence that as drawing andcreative arts in general have steadily diminishedin schoolcurricula since the mid-twentieth century, the educationalachievement of students in the United States has likewisediminished, to the point that we now rank behind18Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, the Republic of Korea, HongKong, Sweden, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Slovenia.In 1969, perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, one ofthe most widely read and respected scientists of thetwentieth century, wrote:In the history of inventions, many creative ideas began withsmall sketches. The examples above are by Galileo, Jefferson,Faraday, and Edison.—Henning Nelms, Thinking with a Pencil (New York: TenSpeed Press, 1981), p. xiv“The arts are neglected because they are based onperception, and perception is disdained because it isnot assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators andadministrators cannot justify giving the arts animportant position in the curriculum unless theyunderstand that the arts are the most powerful meansof strengthening the perceptual component withoutwhich productive thinking is impossible in every fieldof academic study.“What is most needed is not more aesthetics or moreesoteric manuals of art education but a convincingcase made for visual thinking quite in general. Oncewe understand intheory, we might try to heal in practice theunwholesome split which cripples the training ofreasoning power.”3Drawing does indeed involve thought, and it is an effectiveand efficient method for perceptual training. And19perceptual knowledge can impact learning in alldisciplines. We now know how to rapidly teach drawing.We know that learning to draw, like learning to read, is notdependent on something called “talent,” and that, givenproper instruction, every person is able to learn the skill.Furthermore, given proper instruction, people can learn totransfer the basic perceptual components of drawing toother learning and to general thinking. And, as MichaelKimmelman said, learning to draw is a boon tohappiness—a panacea for the stultifying and uncreativedrudgery of standardized testing that our schools haveembraced.Our two minds and modern multitaskingIn his wonderful book The Master and His Emissary, psychiatristand Oxford professor Iain McGilchrist proposes a tellingmetaphor to describe human history and human culture:“Over the centuries of history, The Master (the right hemisphere)has seen his empire and powers usurped and betrayed by hisEmissary (the left hemisphere).”—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (YaleUniversity Press, 2009), p. 14Today, as research expands and the information-processingstyles and proclivities of the hemispheres become everclearer, respected scientists are recognizing functionaldifferences as evident and real, despite the fact that bothhemispheres appear to be involved to a greater or lesserextent in every human activity. And there remains muchuncertainty about the reason for the profound asymmetry ofthe human brain, which we seem to be aware of at the levelof language. The expression “I am of two minds aboutthat” clearly states our human situation. Our two minds,20however, have not had an equal playing field: untilrecently, language has dominated worldwide, especially inmodern technological cultures like our own. Visualperception has been more or less taken for granted, withlittle requirement for special concern or education. Now,however, computer scientists who are trying to replicatehuman visual perception find it extremely complicated andslow going. After decades of efforts, scientists have finallyachieved facial recognition by computers, but reading themeaning of changes in facial expression, accomplishedinstantly andeffortlessly by the right hemisphere, will take much moretime and work.An example of extreme multitasking: For 12 hours a day, ayoung intelligence officer monitors 10 overhead televisionscreens, types computer responses to 30 different chats withcommanders, troops, and headquarters, has a phone in one ear,and communicates with a pilot on a headset in the other ear. “It’sintense,” he says.Reported in the New York Times by Thom Shanker andMatt Richtel, “In New Military, Data Overload Can BeDeadly,” January 17, 2011, p. 1Meanwhile, visual images are everywhere, and visual andverbal information compete for attention. Constantmultitasking linked to information overload is challengingthe brain’s ability to rapidly shift modes, or tosimultaneously deal with both modes of input. The recentbanning of texting while driving illustrates the problem ofthe brain’s difficulty in simultaneously processing twomodes of information. This recognition that we need to findproductive ways to use both modes perhaps explains why21replicating right hemisphere processes is only nowemerging as important and even, perhaps, critical.A complication: the brain that studies itselfAs a number of scientists have noted, research on thehuman brain is complicated by the fact that the brain isstruggling to understand itself. This three-pound organ isperhaps the only bit of matter in the our universe—at leastas far as we know—that observes and studies itself,wonders about itself, tries to analyze how it does what itdoes, and tries to maximize its capabilities. Thisparadoxical situation no doubt contributes to the deepmysteries that still remain despite rapidly expandingscientific knowledge. One of the most encouraging newdiscoveries that the human brain has made about itself isthat it can physically change itself by changing itsaccustomed ways of thinking, by deliberately exposingitself to new ideas and routines, and by learning new skills.This discovery has led to a new category of neuroscientists,neuroplasticians, who use microelectrodes and brain scansto track complex brain maps of neuronal communication,and who have observed the brain revising its neuronalmaps.“The mystery is the human faculty of perception, the act ofknowing what our senses have discovered.”—Edmund Bolles, A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle ofHuman Perception (Prentice Hall, 1991)Brain plasticity: a new way to think about talentThis conception of a plastic brain, a brain that constantlychanges with experience, that can reorganize and transmute22and even develop new cells and new cell connections, is indirect contrastto previous judgments of the human brain as being moreakin to a hard-wired machine, with its parts geneticallydetermined and unchangeable except for development inearly childhood and deterioration in old age. For teacherslike myself, the science of brain plasticity is both excitingand reaffirming—exciting because it opens vast newpossibilities, and reaffirming because the idea that learningcan change the way people live and think has always beena goal of education. Now, at last, we can move beyond theideas of fixed intelligence limits and special gifts for thelucky few, and look for new ways to enhance potentialbrain power.One of the exciting new horizons that brain plasticity opensis the possibility of questioning the concept of talent,especially the concepts of artistic talent and creative talent.Nowhere has the idea of the hard-wired brain, with itsnotion of given or not-given talent, been as widespread asin the field of art, and especially in drawing, becausedrawing is the entry-level skill for all the visual arts. Thecommon remark, “Drawing? Not on your life! I can’t evendraw a straight line!” is still routinely announced with fullconviction by many adults and even more distressingly, bymany children as young as eight or nine, who have triedand sadly judged as failures their attempts to draw theirperceptions. The reason given for this situation is often aflat-out statement: “I have no artistic talent.” And yet weknow now, from knowledge of brain plasticity and fromdecades of work by me and many others in the field, thatdrawing is simply a skill that can be taught and learned by23anyone ofsound mind who has learned other skills, such asreading, writing, and arithmetic.Drawing, however, is not regarded as an essential skill inthe way the three Rs are viewed as necessary life skills. Itis seen as perhaps a peripheral skill, nice to have as apastime or hobby, but certainly not indispensable. And yet,somehow, at some level, we sense that somethingimportant is being ignored. Surprisingly, people oftenequate their lack of drawing skill with a lack of creativity,even though they may be highly creative in other areas oftheir lives. And the importance of perception often showsupin the words we speak, phrases that speak of seeing andperceiving. When we finally understand something, weexclaim, “Now I see it!” Or when someone fails tounderstand, we say the person “can’t see the forest for thetrees,” or “doesn’t get the picture.” This implies thatperception is important to understanding, and we hope thatwe somehow learn to perceive, but it is a skill without aclassroom and without a curriculum. I propose that drawingcan be that curriculum.“Now, more than ever, many of our elected officials viewspending on the arts not just as an extravagance but also as adrain on resources that are best used for other purposes. To them,the arts are expendable and a distraction.”—Robert Lynch, President, Americans for the Arts/Action Fund,December 16, 2010Ironically, a report from the May 2009 “Learning, Arts, and theBrain” conference sponsored by the Johns Hopkins UniversitySchool of Education in collaboration with the Dana Foundation24included the “preliminary but intriguing suggestion that skillslearned via arts training could carry over to learning in otherdomains.”—Mariale M. Hardiman, Ed.D., and Martha B. Denckla, M.D.,“The Science of Education,” “Informing Teaching and Learningthrough the Brain Sciences,” Cerebrum, Emerging Ideas inBrain Science, The Dana Foundation, 2010, p. 9Public education and the artsDrawing, of course, is not the only art that trains perceptualthinking. Music, dance, drama, painting, design, sculpture,and ceramics are all vitally important and should all berestored to public schools. But I’ll be blunt: even if therewere the will, there is no way that will happen because itwould cost too much in this era of ever-diminishingresources for public education. Music requires costlyinstruments, dance and drama require staging andcostumes, sculpture and ceramics require equipment andsupplies. Although I wish it were otherwise, high-costvisual and performing arts programs that were terminatedlong ago will not be reinstated. And cost is not the onlydeterrent. Over the last forty years, many educators,decision-makers, and even some parents have come toregard the arts as peripheral, and, let’s face it,frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotationof “the starving artist” and the mistaken concept ofnecessary talent.The one art subject that we could easily afford is drawing,the skill that is basic to training visual perception and istherefore the entry-level subject—the ABCs—of perceptualskill-building. Among people who oppose arts education,drawing doesn’t escape the frivolity label, but it is25affordable to teach. Drawing requires the simplest ofmaterials—paper and pencils. It requires a minimum ofsimple equipment and no special rooms or buildings. Themost significant requirement is a teacher who knows howto draw, knows how to teach the basic perceptual skills ofdrawing, and knows how to transfer those skills to otherdomains. Of all the arts, drawing is the one that can fit intotoday’s rapidly shrinking school budgets. And most parentsare very supportive if their children acquire real,substantive drawing skills as opposed to the more usual“expressive” manipulation of materials in vogue in recentdecades. At around ages seven to nine, children long tolearn “how to make things look real” in their drawings, andthey are well able to learn to draw, given appropriateteaching. If educators would find the will, there would be away.Trying something newIn December 2010, the Organization for Economic Cooperationand Development released the highly regarded results of its 2009“Pisa” test, the Program for International Student Assessmenttest of fifteen-year-old students in sixty-five countries in science,reading, and math.Alarmingly, American students came in seventeenth in reading,twenty-third in science, and thirtieth in math, far behind China,Singapore, Finland, and Korea. The U.S. Secretary of Education,Arne Duncan said, “We have to see this as a wake-up call.”We could at least give it a try. Our American publicschools are failing fast. The more we double down onteaching facts and figures, the more we focus onstandardized testing, the more left-brained our schoolsbecome, the more our children are failing even our own26standardized tests, while the dropout rates rise ominously.Albert Einstein once defined insanity as “doing the samething over and over again and expecting different results.”He also said, “We can’t solve problems by using the samekind of thinking we used when we created them.”In light of the United States’ appalling worldwide standingin reading, math, and science, surely it is time to trysomething different—namely, to begin purposely educatingthe other half of the brain in order to maximize the powersof both hemispheres. I believe that the goal of educationshould be not only to pass necessary standardized tests butalso to enable our students to acquire and applyunderstanding to what they have learned. Ideally, ofcourse, students should develop rational, orderly thinkingprocesses—left-hemisphere skills that are compatible withinvestigation, dissection, reduction, examination, summary,and abstraction. If we also teach students right-hemisphereperceptual skills, they will help students “see things incontext,” “see the whole picture,” “see things in proportionand in perspective,” and observe and apprehend—in short,to intuit, to understand andbring meaning to the fragmented world of the lefthemisphere.Teaching for transfer of learningTransfer of learning can be “near transfer” or “far transfer.” Anexample of near transfer of drawing skills might be studentsdrawing various types of bird beaks in a science class tomemorize and identify them. An example of far transfer might bestudents extrapolating from that experience to study andunderstand the evolution of bird beaks.27Alan Kay, famed for his innovative computer sciencecontributions, has stated that the concept of negative spaces isessential to computer programming—an elegant example of “fartransfer.”To promote understanding, we could teach our childrenperceptual skills through drawing in elementary school,starting around the fourth or fifth grade—not with theintention of training future artists, but with the intention ofteaching students how to transfer perceptual skills learnedthrough drawing to general thinking skills andproblem-solving skills. After all, we do not teach childrento read and write with the goal of training future poets andauthors. With careful teaching for transfer, drawing andreading together can educate both halves of the brain.A further argument for perceptual training is theameliorative effect that a partial focus on right-hemispherelearning might have on our public school curriculum. Tohave even a small part of the school day free fromcontinuous left-brain, verbal discourse might provide somewelcome quiet time and relief from incessant competitiveverbal pressure. In days long past, when I attended ordinaryworking-class public schools, art classes, cooking classes,sewing classes, ceramics, woodworking, metal working,and gardening provided welcome breaks in the academicday, with time for solitary thought. Silence is a rarecommodity in modern classrooms, and drawing is anindividual, silent, timeless task.Two vital global skills:reading and drawingWhat are the skills you will learn through drawing, andhow do they transfer to general thinking? Drawing, likereading, is a global skill made up of component subskills28that are learned step by step. Then, with practice, thecomponents meld seamlessly into the smoothly functioningglobal activities of reading and drawing.For the global skill of drawing, the basic component skills,as I have defined them, are:The perception of edges (seeing where one thing endsand another starts)The perception of spaces (seeing what lies besideand beyond)The perception of relationships (seeing in perspectiveand in proportion)The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things indegrees of values)The perception of the gestalt (seeing the whole and itsparts)The first four skills require direct teaching. The fifth occursas an outcome or insight—a visual and mentalcomprehension of the perceived subject, resulting from thefocused attention of the first four. Most students experiencethese skills as new learning, seeing in ways they haven’tseen previously. As one student put it after drawing herown hand, “I never really looked at my hand before. Now Isee it differently.” Often students say, “Before I learned todraw, I think I was just naming things I saw. Now it’sdifferent.” And many students remark that seeing negativespaces, for example, is an entirely new experience.I am not an expert in reading instruction, but it worries me that“fluency” is consistently listed in educational literature as a basic29component of reading. It seems to me that fluency is betterdescribed as an outcome of learning to read. It also worries methat learning syllabification of words is rarely listed by readingexperts as a basic component, nor is basic sentencestructure—that is, finding the subject and verb in a sentence.The listing of fluency as a basic reading component calls to mindthe very common practice of art teachers insisting that beginnersin drawing, even before they have learned the most basiccomponents of the skill, draw a perceived subject very, veryrapidly (this is often called “scribble drawing”), which can leavestudents baffled and frustrated. After the fifth or sixth—ortenth—scribble drawing, the left brain will have dropped out andstudents may come up with a “good” drawing, usually sodesignated by the teacher. They don’t know why it happened,how to replicate it, or why the teacher likes it. It does seem thatoften in American education, fast is judged to be better, evenwhen it isn’t.Turning to reading, specialists in teaching reading list thebasic component skills of reading, mainly taught inelementary school, as:Phonetic awareness (knowing that alphabet lettersrepresent sounds)Phonics (recognizing letter sounds in words)Vocabulary (knowing the meanings of words)Fluency (being able to read quickly and smoothly)Comprehension (grasping the meaning of what isread)As in drawing, the last skill of comprehension ideallyoccurs as an outcome or result of the preceding skills.30I am aware, of course, that many additional skills arerequired for drawing that leads to “Art with a capital A,”the world of artists, galleries, and museums. There remaincountless materials and mediums along with endlesspractice to achieve mastery, as well as that unknown sparkof originality and genius that marksthe truly great artist of any time. Once you have learnedbasic drawing skill, you can move on, if you wish, todrawing from memory, drawing from imagined images,and creating abstract or nonobjective images. But forskillful realistic drawing of one’s perceptions using pencilon paper, the five skills I will teach you in this bookprovide adequate basic perceptual training to enable you todraw what you see.The same is true of basic reading, of course. There aremany refinements of reading abilities, depending on subjectmatter and formats other than print on paper. But for both31skills, the basic components are the foundation. Once youcan read, your plastic brain has been forever changed. Youcan read anything, at least in your native language, and youcan read for life. Likewise, once you have learned to draw,your brain has again been changed: you can draw anythingthat you see with your own eyes, and the skill stays withyou for life.“Perhaps the best way of all ways of learning observation is todraw. Best not only because you have to look and look again(there are no hiding places for ignorance between pencil andpaper) but also because drawing demands a more or lessmethodical approach: a general sizing up of the whole subjectfollowed by more and more minute inspection of the details.”—Hugh Johnson, Principles of Gardening (Mitchell BeazleyPublishers Limited, 1979), p. 36Twin skills and their transfer: L-mode and R-modeThus, in a sense, reading and drawing might be thought ofas twin skills: verbal, analytical L-mode skills as a majorfunction of the left brain, and visual, perceptual R-modeskills as a major function of the right brain. Moreover,human history tells us that, like written language,portraying perceptions in drawings has been singularlyimportant in human development. Consider the fact that theastoundingly beautiful prehistoric cave drawings andpaintings preceded written languages by more thantwenty-five thousand years. Moreover, writing grew out ofpictographs or word pictures representing, for example,bird, fish, grain, and ox, thus illustrating the profoundlysignificant role of drawing in human development. Andconsider the fact that human beings are the only creatures32on our planet that write things down and make images ofthings seen in the world.Language dominatesIf an art student says, “Well, I am good at drawing still life, and Iam fairly good at figure drawing, but I am not good at landscape,and I can’t do portraits at all,” it means that one or more of thebasic component skills has not been learned. A comparablestatement about reading would be, “I am good at readingmagazines, and I am fairly good at instruction manuals, but I’mnot good at newspapers, and I can’t read books at all.” Hearingthis, one would know that some reading components were notlearned.These two cognitive twins, however, are not equal.Language is extremely powerful, and the left hemispheredoes not easily share its dominance with its silent partner.The left hemisphere deals with an explicit world, wherethings are named and counted, where time is kept, andstep-by-step plans remove uncertainty from the future. Theright hemisphere exists in the moment, in a timeless,implicit world, where things are buried in context, andcomplicated outlooks are constantly changing. Impatientwith the right hemisphere’s view of the complex whole, thecompetitive left hemisphere tends to jump quickly into atask, bringing language to bear, even though it may beunsuited to that particular task.This is true in drawing: using symbols from childhood toquickly draw an abstracted, notational image, the left brainwill rush in to take over a drawing task that is bestaccomplished by the visual right hemisphere. When writingthe original book, I needed to find a way to keep this fromhappening—a way to enable the right hemisphere to “come33forward” to draw. This required finding a strategy to setaside the left hemisphere. Taking my cue fromUpside-Down Drawing, and thinking hard, I laboriouslyarrived at a solution and stated it this way:I once saw a video of an elephant that had been trained to paint arough image of an elephant by holding a paintbrush in its trunkand painting line by line on paper. This is the nearest nonhumanapproximation of human drawing skills I am aware of. But, as faras I know, there are no elephants out in the wild spontaneouslydrawing images of other animals on stone surfaces or in the sand.In order to gain access to the right hemisphere, it isnecessary to present the lefthemisphere with a taskthat it will turn down.In other words, it is no use going up against the strong,verbal, domineering left brain to try to keep it out of a task.It can be tricked, however, into not wanting to do the task,and, once tricked, it tends to “fade out,” and will stay out,ending its interfering and usurping. As a side benefit, thiscognitive shift to a different-from-usual mode of thinkingresults in a marvelous state of being, a highly focused,singularly attentive, deeply engaging, wordless, timeless,productive, and mentally restorative state.34Paleolithic cave paintingfrom Altamira, Spain.Recently this strategy has been corroborated scientifically.Norman Doidge, in his fascinating book on human brainplasticity, The Brain That Changes Itself (Penguin Books,2007), cites Dr. Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology atthe University of California, San Francisco, who has shownthat people who lose language abilities due to left-braindementia damage spontaneously develop unusual artistic,musical, and rhyming abilities, including drawingabilities—skills attributed to the right hemisphere. Doidgereports that Miller argues that “the left hemispherenormally acts like a bully, inhibiting and suppressing theright. As the left hemisphere falters, the right’s uninhibitedpotential can emerge.”Doidge goes on to say of my main strategy: “Edwards’sbook, written in 1979, years before Miller’s discovery,taught people to draw by developing ways to stop theverbal, analytical left hemisphere from inhibiting the righthemisphere’s artistic tendencies. Edwards’s primary tactic35was to deactivate the left hemisphere’s inhibition of theright by giving students a task the left hemisphere would beunable to understand and so ‘turn down.’”How the strategy works in the drawing exercisesThe Vase/Faces exercise in Chapter 4 is designed toacquaint students with the possibility of conflict betweenthe hemispheres as they compete for the task. The exerciseis set up to strongly activate the verbal hemisphere(L-mode), but completion of the exercise requires theabilities of the visual hemisphere (R-mode). The resultingmental conflict is perceptible and instructive for students.The Upside-Down Drawing exercise in Chapter 4 isrejected by the left hemisphere because it is too difficult toname parts of an image when it is upside down, and, inleft-brain terms, an inverted image is too unusual—that is,useless—to bother with. This rejection enables the righthemisphere to jump into the task (for which it is wellsuited) without competition from the left hemisphere.The Perception of Edges exercise (seeing complex edges)in Chapter 6 forces extreme slowness and extremeperception of tiny, inconsequential (in left-brain terms)details, where every detail becomes a fractal-like whole,with details within details. The left hemisphere quicklybecomes “fed up” because it is “too slow for words” anddrops out, enabling the right hemisphere to take up the task.The Perception of Spaces exercise (negative spaces) inChapter 7 is rejected by the left hemisphere because it willnot deal with “nothing,” that is, negative spaces that aren’tobjects and can’t be named. In its view, spaces are notimportant enough to bother with. The right hemisphere,36with its recognition of the whole (shapes and spaces), isthen free to pick up the task and seems to take antic delightin drawing negative spaces.The Perception of Relationships exercise (perspectiveand proportion in buildings or interiors) in Chapter 8 forcesthe left hemisphere to confront paradox and ambiguity,which it dislikes and rejects (“this is not how I know thingsto be”), and which are abundant in perspective drawing,with its angular and proportional spatial changes. Becausethe right hemisphere is willing to acknowledge perceptualreality, it accepts and will draw what it sees (“it is what itis”).This set of drawings by workshop participant James Vanreuselresulted from his work in a five-day class, November 13–17,2006. His Vase/Faces drawing and his Pure Contour drawing,both done on the Day 1 of the workshop, were not available.Each workshop day begins with an explanation of the componentskill to be explored and a demonstration drawing by theinstructor, after which the students apply the instructions to theirown drawings. James Vanreusel’s drawings illustrate theinstructional strategies described on pages xxviii to xxxii.(See additional Pre- and Post-instruction student drawings, pages19 to 20.)The Perception of Lights and Shadows exercise (valuesfrom dark to light) in Chapter 10 presents shapes (of lightsand shadows) that are infinitely complex, variable,unnamable, and not useful in terms of language. The lefthemisphere refuses the task, which the complexity-lovingright hemisphere then picks up, delighting in thethree-dimensionality that lights and shadows reveal.37The Perception of the Gestalt occurs during and at theclose of a drawing. The main effect is a right-hemisphereaha, as though in recognition of the whole that emergesfrom careful perception and recording of the parts, all inrelationship to each other and to the whole. This initialperception of the gestalt occurs largely without verbal inputor response from the left hemisphere, but later the left brainmay put into words a response that expresses the rightbrain’s aha. I believe that the perception of the gestaltclosely resembles the “aesthetic response,” our humandelight in beauty.Day 1: James’sPre-instruction“Self-Portrait.” November13, 200638Day 1: His “Upside-Downdrawing of Picasso’s Stravinski.”November 13, 200639Day 2: His drawing of his hand in“Modified Contour” (edges). Thefine detail of edges and wrinkles inthis drawing derives from the PureContour Drawing exercise.November 14, 200640Day 2: His negative space drawingof a stool. November 14, 200641Day 3: His drawing of an outsideview, “Sighting Perspective andProportion.” November 15, 200642Day 4: James’s profile drawing ofa fellow student, summarizingedges, spaces, and sightingrelationships. November 16, 200643Day 5: James’s Post-instruction“Self-Portrait,” summarizingedges, spaces, lights and shadows,and the gestalt. November 17,2006This, then, is the essence of Drawing on the Right Side ofthe Brain: five basic component perceptual skills ofdrawing, and an overall strategy to enable your brain tobring to bear the brain mode appropriate for drawing. In anew Chapter 11, I suggest specific ways you can apply thefive basic skills to general thinking and problem solving.Incidentally, for this edition, I have rewritten the chapter onthe Perception of Relationships (perspective andproportion, also called “sighting,” Chapter 8) with hopes ofsimplifying and clarifying this skill. Because theperceptions are complicated with aspects that seem44“left-brained,” putting this skill into words is somethinglike trying to teach someone in words how to dance thetango. Once sighting is understood, however, it is purelyperceptual and most engaging because it unlocksthree-dimensional space.The Great SaboteurA caution: as all of our students discover, sooner or later,the left hemisphere is the Great Saboteur of endeavors inart. When you draw, it will be set aside—left out of thegame. Therefore, it will find endless reasons for you not todraw: you need to go to the market, balance yourcheckbook, phone your mother, plan your vacation, or dothat work you brought home from the office.What is the strategy to combat that? The same strategy.Present your brain with a job that your left hemisphere willturn down. Copy an upside-down photograph, regard anegative space and draw it, or simply start a drawing.Jogging, meditation, games, music, cooking,gardening—countless activities also produce a cognitiveshift. The left hemisphere will drop out, again tricked outof its dominance. And oddly, giventhe great power andforce of the left hemisphere, it can be tricked over and overwith the same tricks.Over time, probably due to brain plasticity, the sabotagewill lessen and the need for trickery will diminish. I havesometimes wondered whether the left hemisphere becomesalarmed when it is first set aside for a period of time. Theright hemisphere state of mind is notably desirable andproductive—sometimes called the “zone” in athletic terms.I think it is possible that the left hemisphere may worry that45if you get “over there” long enough, you may not comeback. But this is a needless concern. The right-hemispherestate is extremely fragile, ending the instant the cell phonerings or someone asks you what you are doing or calls youto dinner. Immediately it is over, and you are back to yourmore usual mental state.Teaching methods that workOver the years, I have been rebuked occasionally byvarious scientists for overstepping the bounds of my field.In each edition, however, I have made the followingstatement: The methods presented in my book have provenempirically successful. From my own work with studentsand letters sent to me by thousands of readers and countlessart teachers, I know that my methods work in a variety ofenvironments, taught by teachers with undoubtedly variedteaching styles. Science has corroborated some of myideas, but we must depend on future science to confirmmore exactly the explanations and uses of ourstill-mysterious and asymmetrical, divided brain.Meanwhile, I venture to say that learning to draw alwaysseems to help and never to harm. My students’ mostfrequent comment after learning to draw is “Life seemsmuch richer now that I am seeing more.” That may bereason enough to learn to draw.1. From “An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time WhenAmateurs Roamed the Earth,” New York Times, July 19, 2006.Michael Kimmelman is an author and chief art critic for the NewYork Times.2. Benedict Carey. “Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas,” NewYork Times, June 7, 2011463. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (University of CaliforniaPress, 1969).47CHAPTER 1DRAWING AND THE ART OF BICYCLERIDING48Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher, DrawingHands, 1948. © 2011 The M. C. EscherCompany-Holland. All rights reserved.www.mcescher.comDrawing is a curious process, so intertwined with seeingthat the two can hardly be separated. The ability to drawdepends on one’s ability to see the way an artist sees. Thiskind of seeing, for most people, requires teaching, becausethe artist’s way of seeing is very specific and very differentfrom the ways we ordinarily use vision to navigate ourlives.49“Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see—to seecorrectly—and that means a good deal more than merely lookingwith the eye.”—Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw, 1941Because of this unusual requirement, teaching someone todraw has some special problems. It is very much liketeaching someone to ride a bicycle: both skills are difficultto explain in words. For bicycle riding, you might say,“Well, you just get on, push the pedals, balance yourself,and off you’ll go.” Of course, that doesn’t explain it at all,and you are likely to finally say, “I’ll get on the bike andshow you how. Watch and see how I do it.”And so it is with drawing. An art teacher may exhortstudents to “look more carefully,” or to “check therelationships,” or to “just keep trying and with practice,you will get it.” This does not help students solve theproblems of drawing. And it is fairly rare today for teachersto help by demonstrating a drawing, which is extremelyeffective. A well-kept secret of art education is that manyart teachers, having come up through the same system thatprevails today, where real skills in drawing are rarelytaught, cannot themselves draw well enough to demonstratethe process to a group of students.Drawing as a magical abilityAs a result, few people are skilled at drawing intwenty-first-century American culture. Since it is rare now,many people regard drawing as mysterious and evensomewhat magical. Artists who can draw often do little todispel the mystery. If you ask, “How do you drawsomething so that it looks real—say a portrait or a50landscape?” an artist is likely to reply, “Well, it is hard toexplain. I just look at the person or the landscape and Idraw what I see.” Thatseems like a logical and straightforward answer, yet, onreflection, doesn’t explain the process at all, and the sensepersists that drawing is a vaguely magical ability.This attitude of wonder at drawing skill does little toencourage individuals to try to learn to draw. Often, in fact,people hesitate to take a drawing class because they don’talready know how to draw. That is like deciding that youshouldn’t take a Spanish class because you don’t alreadyspeak the language. Moreover, because of changes intoday’s art world, a person who has never learned to drawnevertheless can become a successful university art studentor even a famous artist.Drawing as a learnable, teachable skillThe painter draws with his eyes, not with his hands. Whatever hesees, if he sees it clearly, he can put down. The putting of itdown requires, perhaps, much care and labor, but no moremuscular agility than it takes for him to write his name. Seeingclear [sic] is the important thing.”—Maurice Grosser, The Painter’s Eye, 1951I firmly believe that given good instruction, drawing is askill that can be learned by every normal person withaverage eyesight and average eye-hand coordination.Someone with sufficient ability, for example, to sign areceipt or to type out an e-mail or text message can learn todraw. Clearly, the long history of humans drawing picturesof their perceptions, from prehistoric times to now,51demonstrates that drawing perceptions is an innatepotential of our plastic, changeable brains.And learning to draw, without doubt, causes newconnections in the brain that can be useful over a lifetimefor general thinking. Learning to see in a different wayrequires that you use your brain differently. At the sametime, you will be learning something about how yourindividual brain handles visual information and about howto better control the process. One aspect of that control islearning to shift away from our more usual way ofthinking—mainly in words.Drawing attention to states of consciousness“If a certain kind of activity, such as painting, becomes thehabitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up thepainting materials and beginning work with them will actsuggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higherstate.”—Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, 1923I have designed the exercises and instructions in this bookspecifically for people who cannot draw at all, who mayfeel that they have little or no talent for drawing, and whomay feel doubtfulthat they could ever learn but who think they might like tolearn to draw.Roger N. Shepard, famed expert on perception, described hispersonal mode of creative thought during which research ideasemerged in his mind as unverbalized, essentially complete,long-sought solutions to problems.52“That in all of these sudden illuminations my ideas took shape ina primarily visual-spatial form without, so far as I can introspect,any verbal intervention, is in accordance with what has alwaysbeen my preferred mode of thinking …”—Roger N. Shepard, Visual Learning, Thinking, andCommunication, 1978Given proper instruction, drawing is not very difficult. Italmost seems that your brain already knows how to draw.You just don’t realize it. Helping people move past theblocks to drawing is, however, the difficult part. The brain,it seems, doesn’t easily give up its accustomed way ofseeing things. It helps, I think, to know that the slightchange in awareness or consciousness that occurs indrawing is not that unusual. You may have observed inyourself other slightly altered states. For example, mostpeople are aware that they occasionally slip from alertconsciousness to a state of daydreaming. As anotherexample, people often say that reading a good novel takesthem “out of themselves.” Other kinds of activities thatapparently produce a shift in consciousness are meditation,jogging, video games, sports of all varieties, and listeningto music.“We can chew gum and walk, but we can’t do two cognitivelydemanding tasks simultaneously.”—David Teater, National Safety Council, quoted in theNew York Times, February 27, 2011An interesting example of this slightly altered state, Ibelieve, is driving on the freeway. In freeway driving, wedeal with visual information, keeping track of relational,spatial changes, sensing complicated configurations oftraffic. These visual mental operations may activate some53of the same parts of the brain used in drawing. Manypeople find that they also do a lot of creative thinking whiledriving, often losing track of time. Of course, if drivingconditions are difficult, if we are late for an appointment,or if someone sharing the ride talks with us, the shift to analternative state doesn’t occur. And that nonverbalalternative state is the appropriate one for driving. Verbaldistractions, like cell phone conversation or texting whiledriving, are proving to be so distracting and dangerous thatthey are banned in some cities and states.“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shownfor a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not asthey appear to an animal obsessed with work and notions, but asthey are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind atLarge—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.”—Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954The shift to the drawing state, therefore, is not entirelyunfamiliar, but it is strikingly different in some ways from,say, daydreaming. The drawing state is one of highalertness, engagement, and acute, focused attention. It isalso a state without a sense of time passing or awareness ofone’s surroundings. Because the state is fragile and easilybroken, an important key to learning todraw is learning how to set up conditions that allow thismental shift that enables you to see and draw. In addition toteaching you what and how to see, the exercises andstrategies in this book are designed specifically for thatpurpose.The original 1979 edition of Drawing on the Right Side ofthe Brain was based on my teaching experiences in the artdepartments of Venice High School in West Los Angeles,54Los Angeles Trade Technical Community College, andCalifornia State University, Long Beach. Subsequenteditions benefitted from experiences teaching an intensivefive-day, eight-hour-a-day workshop, conducted in manylocations across the United States, as well as in countriesoverseas. Workshop students range widely in ages andoccupations. Most of the participants begin a workshopwith low-level drawing skills and with high anxiety abouttheir potential drawing ability.Almost without exception, workshop students achieve quitea high level of skill in drawing and gain confidence to goon developing their skills in further art courses or bypractice on their own. One of the most intriguing findingsof the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain five-dayworkshop is that people can actually achieve thosehigh-level drawing skills in that forty-hour time period. It ishard work, for both students and teachers, but it doesreinforce my belief that our teaching and our instructionhave more to do with releasing inborn skills than teachingnew skills.To put it another way, it seems probable that you have allthe brain power needed for drawing, but old habits ofseeing interfere with that ability and block it. The exercisesin this book are designed to remove that interference andunblock it.Realism as a means to an endThe drawing exercises focus on what is known in the artworld as realism, the art of realistically portraying actualthings seen “out there” in the world. Unexpectedly,55perhaps, the subjects I have chosen for the exercises areusually considered in drawing termsto be the most difficult: the human hand, a chair, alandscape or an interior of a building, a profile portrait, anda self-portrait.I have not selected these drawing tasks to torture ourstudents but rather to provide them with the satisfaction ofbeing able to draw the really “hard” subjects. Famedpsychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “The greatestsatisfaction comes from mastering something that is trulydifficult.” Another reason for my subject choices is that alldrawing is the same, broadly speaking, always involvingthe same ways of seeing and the same skills, the basiccomponents of drawing. You might use different mediums,different papers, large or small formats, but for drawingstill-life setups, the figure, random objects, portraitdrawings, and even imaginary subjects or drawing frommemory, it is all the same task, always requiring the samebasic component skills—just as it is in reading! Drawingrequires that you see what is out there (imaginary subjectsand images from memory are “seen” in the “mind’s eye”)and you draw what you see. Since it is all the same task, itseems to me that we might as well go for peakaccomplishment. One subject is not “harder” than another,once you understand the basics of drawing.“I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never reallyseen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realizehow extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.”—Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing, 1973Moreover, in the case of drawing a profile portrait or aself-portrait, students are highly motivated to see clearly56and to draw correctly what they see. This high motivationmight be lacking if the subject is a potted plant, where aviewer of the finished drawing might have a less criticaleye for verisimilitude. Beginning students often think thatportrait drawing must be the hardest of all kinds ofsubjects. Thus, when they see that they can successfullydraw a portrait that actually looks like the sitter, theirconfidence soars and progress is enhanced.A second important reason for using portraits as subjectmatter is that the right hemisphere of the human brain isspecialized for recognition of faces. Since the righthemisphere is the one we are trying to access, it makessense to choose a subject that fits the functions of the rightbrain. And third, faces are fascinating! In drawing aportrait, you see a face as you have never seen onebefore, in all its complexity and expressive individuality.As one of my students said, “I don’t think I ever actuallysaw anyone’s face before I started drawing. Now, theoddest thing, I find I am really seeing people instead of justmaking verbal tags, and the unusual faces are the ones Ifind the most interesting.”My approach: A path to creativityI recognize that you may have no interest whatsoever inbecoming a full-time working artist, but there are manyreasons for learning to draw. I see you as an individual withcreative potential for expressing yourself through drawing.My aim is to provide the means for releasing that potential,for gaining access at a conscious level to your inventive,intuitive powers that may have been largely untapped byour verbal, technological culture and education system.57Creative persons from fields other than art who want to gettheir working skills under better control and learn toovercome blocks to creativity will also benefit fromworking with the techniques presented here. Teachers andparents will find the theory and exercises useful in helpingchildren develop their creative abilities.The exercises will also provide insights into the way yourmind works—that is, your two minds—singly,cooperatively, or one against the other. A reasonable goalthat you might pursue in learning to drawis simply toenhance confidence in your critical thinking ability andyour decision making. With our new knowledge of brainplasticity, the possibilities seem almost limitless.Learning to draw may uncover potentialities that areunknown to you right now. The German artist AlbrechtDürer said, “From this, the treasure secretly gathered inyour heart will become evident through your creativework.”In a letter to his brother, Theo, who had suggested that Vincentbecome a painter, Vincent van Gogh wrote:“… at the time when you spoke of my becoming a painter, Ithought it very impractical and would not hear of it. What mademe stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective,Cassange’s Guide to the ABC of Drawing, and a week later Idrew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table andwindow—in their places and on their legs—whereas before ithad seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspectiveinto a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.”—Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Letter 184, p.33158Summing upDrawing is a teachable, learnable skill that can provide atwofold advantage. First, by gaining access to the part ofyour mind thatworks in a style conducive to creative, intuitive thought,you will learn a fundamental skill of the visual arts: how toput down on paper what you see in front of your eyes.Second, you will enhance your ability to think morecreatively in other areas of your life.How far you go with these skills will depend on your othertraits, such as energy, curiosity, and discipline. But firstthings first! The potential is there. Sometimes it isnecessary to remind ourselves that Shakespeare at somepoint learned to write a line of prose, Beethoven learnedthe musical scales, and, as you see in the margin quotation,Vincent van Gogh learned how to draw.Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Three Hands, TwoHolding Forks, Nuenen: March-April, 1885. Drawing,59black chalk on laid paper, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam(Vincent van Gogh Foundation), The Netherlands60CHAPTER 2FIRST STEPS IN DRAWING61Edgar Degas (1834–1917), M. Gouffé, theString Bass Player. Photography: GrahamHaber, 2010. The Thaw Collection, ThePierpont Morgan Library, New York. EVT279/Art Resource, NY.A sketch by Degas for his painting, TheOrchestra of the Opera. The artist masterfullyused the compositional device of placing thebass player in the extreme foreground of thepainting, giving depth to the scene. The viewerlooks past Gouffé to the footlit stage.62Drawing materialsArt supply stores can be rather baffling in their profusion ofproducts, but fortunately, the materials required fordrawing are simple and limited in number. Essentially, youneed paper and a pencil, but for purposes of effectiveinstruction, I have added a few more items.Paper: Some inexpensive plain bond paperA pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper, 80 lb.,11" × 14"Pencils: A #2 ordinary yellow writing pencil with aneraser at the topA #4 drawing pencil—Faber-Castell,Prismacolor Turquoise, or other brandMarkingpens:Sharpie (or other brand) fine pointnon-permanent blackA second marker, fine point permanent blackGraphitestick:#4 General’s is a good brand, or other brandPencilsharpener:A small handheld sharpener is fineErasers: A Pink Pearl eraserA Staedtler Mars white plastic eraser63A kneaded eraser—Lyra, Design, or otherbrandMaskingtape:3M Scotch Low Tack Artist TapeClips: Two 1-inch-wide black clipsDrawingboard:A firm surface large enough to hold your 11"× 14" drawing paper—about 15" × 18" is agood size. This can be improvised from akitchen cutting board, a piece of foam board, apiece of Masonite, or thick cardboard.Pictureplane:This too can be improvised using an 8" × 10"piece of glass (you will need to tape theedges), or an 8" × 10" piece of clear plastic,about 1/16" thick.Viewfinders:You will make these from blackpaper—“construction” paper is a goodthickness, or you could use thin blackcardboard. You will find instructions formaking the viewfinders on page 14A smallmirror:About 5" × 7" that can be taped to a wall, orany available wall mirror.64“I love the quality of pencil. It helps me get to the core of athing.”65—Andrew Wyeth, in The Art of Andrew Wyeth,exhibition catalog, The Fine Arts Museum of SanFrancisco, 1973Gathering these materials requires a bit of effort, but theywill truly help you learn rapidly. We no longer attempt toteach our students without the help of viewfinders and theplastic picture plane, because these aids are so essential toyour understanding of the basic nature of drawing.4 Onceyou have learned the basic components of drawing,however, you will no longer need these teaching aids.Pre-instruction drawings—a valuable record for latervalidation of your progressNow, let’s get started. First, you need to make a record ofyour present level of drawing skills. This is important! Youdon’t want to miss the pleasure of having a real mementoof your starting point to compare with your later drawings.I am fully aware of how anxiety-causing this is, but just doit. As the great Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh wrote in aletter to his brother Theo:“You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring ofa blank canvas which says to a painter, ‘You don’tknow anything.’”How to construct two viewfindersViewfinders are perceptual aids that will help you “frame” yourview and compose your drawings. Note that the outside edge ofyour picture plane, the outside and inside edges of yourviewfinders, and the format you draw on your drawing paper areall the same proportion in width to length, differing only in size.This enables you to draw what you see through the viewfinder/66picture plane onto the format drawn on your paper—they are allproportionately the same shape, though they differ in size.Construct two viewfinders as follows:1. Use black construction paper or thin black cardboard.2. Cut two 8" × 10" pieces (this is the same size as your pictureplane).3. On both pieces, using pencil, draw diagonal lines fromcorner to corner, crossing in the middle.4. On one piece, draw vertical and horizontal lines 2" from theedge, again connecting the lines at points on the diagonals.Cut out the inner rectangle. This is your “small viewfinder.”5. On the second piece, draw vertical and horizontal lines 1"from the edge, connecting the lines at points on thediagonals, forming a new inner rectangle. Using scissors, cutout the inner rectangle. This is your “large viewfinder.”Constructed this way, the inner rectangles have the sameproportion width to length as the outer edges of the viewfinders.You will use your viewfinders by clipping one or the other ontoyour Picture Plane. Don’t forget to draw vertical and horizontalcrosshairs on your Picture Plane, using your permanent markingpen.Soon you will “know something,” I promise. Just gearyourself up and do the drawings. Later you will be veryhappy that you did. The pre-instruction drawings haveproved invaluable in helping students see and recognizetheir own progress, because a kind of amnesia seems to setin as drawing skills improve. Students forget what theirdrawing was like before instruction. Moreover, the degreeof criticism keeps pace with progress. Even afterconsiderable improvement, students are sometimes criticalof their drawings because “It’s not as good as da Vinci67could do,” as one person put it. The pre-instructiondrawings provide a realistic gauge of progress.After you have finished the drawings, put them carefullyaway, to be looked at later on in light of your newlyacquired skills.Three pre-instruction drawingsIt usually takes students about an hour to do the threepre-instruction drawings, but take as long or as short a timeas you wish. I first list the drawing titles, then a list ofmaterials needed for these drawings, followed byinstructions for each drawing.68What you will draw:“A Person, Drawn from Memory”“Self-Portrait”“My Hand”Materials you will use for the three drawings:Paper to draw on—plain bond is fineYour #2 writing pencilYour pencil sharpenerYour masking tapeA small 5" × 7" mirror, or any available wall mirrorYour drawing boardAbout an hour of uninterrupted timeFor each drawing in turn, tape a stack of three or foursheets of bond paper to your drawing board. Stacking thesheets provides a “padded” surface to draw on—muchbetter than the rather hard surface of the drawing board.Pre-instruction drawing #1: “A Person, Drawn from Memory”1. Call up in your mind’s eye an image of aperson—perhaps someone from the past, or someoneyou know now. Or you may recall a drawing you did inthe past or a photograph of a person well known to you.2. To the best of your ability, do a drawing of the person.You may draw just the head, a half-figure, or afull-length figure.693. When you have finished, title, sign, and date yourdrawing in the lower right-hand corner.Pre-instruction drawing #2: Your “Self-Portrait”1. Tape your small mirror to a wall and sit at arm’s length(about 2 to 2½ feet) from the wall. Adjust the mirror sothat you see your whole head within its edges. Leanyour drawing board up against the wall, resting thebottom of the board on your lap. Have a three-sheetstack of paper taped to your board.2. Look at the reflection of your head in the mirror anddraw your “Self-Portrait.”3. When you have finished, title, sign, and date yourdrawing.Pre-instruction drawing #3: “My Hand”1. Seat yourself at a table to draw.2. If you are right-handed, draw your left hand in whateverposition you choose. If you are left-handed, of course,draw your right hand.3. Title, sign, and date your drawing.When you have finished the pre-instruction drawings:Spread the three drawings out on a table and look at themclosely. If I were there with you, I would be looking forsmall areas of the drawings that show that you werelooking carefully—perhaps the way a collar turns or abeautifully observed curve of an eyebrow or ear. Once I70encounter such signs of careful seeing, I know the personwill learn to draw well.You, on the other hand, may find nothing admirable andperhaps may dismiss the drawings as “childish” or“amateurish.” Please remind yourself that these aredrawings made before instruction. On the other hand, youmay be surprised and pleased with your drawings, or partsof them, perhaps especially the drawing of your hand. The“Drawing from Memory” often elicits the most dismay.The reason for doing the memory drawingI’m sure that drawing a person from memory was verydifficult for you, and rightfully so. Even a trained artistwould find it difficult, because visual memory is never asrich, complicated, and clear as is actual seeing. Visualmemory is necessarily simplified, generalized, andabbreviated—frustratingly so for most artists, who oftenhave a fairly limited repertoire of memorized images thatthey can call up in the mind’s eye and draw.“Then why do it?” you may well ask. The reason is simplythis: for a beginning student, drawing a person frommemory brings forth a memorized set of symbols, practicedover and over during childhood. While doing the drawingfrom memory, can you recall that your hand seemed tohave a mind of its own? You knew that you weren’tmaking the image you wanted to, but you couldn’t keepyour hand from making those simplified shapes—perhapsthe nose shape, for example. This is caused by the socalledsymbol system of early childhood drawing, memorized bycountless repetitions.71Now, compare your “Self-Portrait” with your memorydrawing. Do you see symbols repeated in bothdrawings—that is, are the eyes (or the nose or mouth)similar in shape, or even identical? If so, this indicates thatyour symbol system was controlling your hand even whenyou were observing the actual shapes in your face in themirror. You may also find a simplified, repeated symbolfor fingernails in your hand drawing.The “tyranny” of the childhood symbol systemThis tyranny of the symbol system explains in large partwhy people untrained in drawing continue to produce“childish” drawings right into adulthood and even old age.What you will learn is how to set your symbol system asideand accurately draw what you see. This training inperceptual skills—how to see and draw what is actually“out there”—is the rock bottom “ABC” of drawing. It isnecessarily (or at least ideally) learned before progressingto imaginative drawing, painting, or sculpture.With this information in mind, you may want to make afew notes on the backs of your drawings, indicating anyrepeated symbols, which parts were the most difficult, andwhich were successful.Then, put the drawings away for safekeeping. Do not lookat them again until you have completed my course andhave learned to see and draw.Drawings before and after instructionThese examples show some of my students’ pre-instructionand post-instruction self-portraits. All had attended one ofour five-day, eight-hour-a-day workshops. Students drew72their images, seen in a mirror, as you have just done withyour pre-instruction drawing. Regard the drawings fromthis standpoint: as a visible record of improvement inperception. The drawings show typical changes in drawingability from the pre-instruction “Self-Portrait” to the“Self-Portrait” drawn on the fifth day. As you see, thechange between each student’s two drawings is significantenough that it almost seems as though two differentpersons have done the drawings.Learning to perceive is the basic skill that the studentsacquired, not drawing skill. In our workshops, we actuallyteach very few skills that could be called “drawing skills,”such as setting a toned ground, using an eraser as a drawingtool, crosshatching, shading from light to dark, and so on.The really important teaching/learning is how to seedifferently. Our goal is that every student will makesignificant progress regardless of their initial skill level.If you look at the pre-instruction drawings on pages 19 and20, you will see that people came to the workshop withdifferent levels of existing skills, as is the case with yourpre-instruction drawings. These pre-existing skills havenothing to do with potential to draw well. What thepre-instructions drawings represent is the age at which theperson last drew, often coinciding with the age at whichthe person gave up on trying to draw.73Andres Santiago Beforeinstruction April 5, 2011After instruction April 9, 201174Merilyn Umboh Beforeinstruction August 16, 201175After instruction August 20, 2011Douglas Hansen Beforeinstruction February 8, 201176After instruction February 12,2011David Caswell Beforeinstruction August 16, 201177After instruction August 20, 201178Jennifer Boivin Beforeinstruction September 9,2011After instruction September 13,201179James Han Beforeinstruction June 6, 2011After instruction June 10, 201180Robin Ruzan Beforeinstruction May 16, 2011After instruction May 20, 201181Frank Zvovu Beforeinstruction November 29,201082After instruction December 3,2010Terry Woodward Beforeinstruction January 8, 200783After instruction January 12, 2007Peter Lawrence Beforeinstruction February 8, 201184After instruction February 12,2011Maria Catalina OchoaBefore instruction May 30,201085After instruction June 3, 201086Derrick Cameron Beforeinstruction April 5, 3011After instruction April 9, 2011“Don’t worry about your originality. You couldn’t get rid of iteven if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up forbetter or for worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.”—Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, 1923Considered this way, the pre-instruction drawings on pages19 and 20 represent drawing-age ranges from about seven