Betty Edwards' famous book, Drawing
on the Right Side of the Brain, contains a wonderful series
of exercises for those who are convinced they can't draw. I only
picked it up after I'd read Edward de Bono's Serious
Creativity and discovered that creativity is a learned
skill, not something that you're 'born with' (or without). Edwards'
book taught me that drawing is also an acquired skill. Or, to be more
precise, it's an 'unlearning' skill, because it requires you to defeat
our natural inclination to view objects as series of icons (a
left-brain 'shorthand'), and instead view them as lines, shades and
spaces (a right-brain abstraction). The reason we think we can't draw, says Edwards,
is that when we try to draw, our left brain gets in the way, telling us
that what we're drawing when we draw a face is two eyes, a nose, a
mouth etc., which our brain symbolizes in certain iconographic ways, so
that our drawing turns out to be a drawing of these symbolic icons,
rather than what we really see.
The most powerful exercise in the book, in my opinion, is the
upside-down drawing exercise. Here's what you do:
- Find a line drawing that you like. It can be the work of a
master, a cartoon, anything.
- Turn it upside down.
- Now, without turning the page right-side up, draw what you
see, trying to ignore the subject and focusing strictly on the lines,
shades, spaces and proportions of the original. You're disabling your
left-brain, which can't see or handle such abstractions, and allowing
your right-brain to do all the work.
Most people are pleasantly surprised with the result. When I did this
exercise I was blown away -- I had been convinced I couldn't draw, and
immediately did five more upside-down drawings, some of which I still
have, and treasure.
This exercise alone won't make you an artist, but it's a powerful first
step. Now when I draw, I ignore the substance of what I'm drawing and
focus strictly on lines, shades, spaces and proportions. Sometimes I
use software to help defeat my left-brain: I take a photo of something
I like, use graphic software (which has an 'outlining' feature) to make
it into a black-and-white pseudo-line drawing, turn it upside down, and
draw what I see. The results are amazing.
The book provides some other exercises to improve the strength of your
right-brain and apply it to the art of drawing. What's more important
to me, however, is the realization of how the analytic left-brain,
which our culture tends to favour and over-exercise, diminishes our
awareness of the world around us. I remember in high school a poster
with the caption Stand still and
look until you really see. When I am trying to get in the frame
of mind to draw, or photograph, or write poetry or fiction, I try to do
just that. Here are some exercises that I've found can help
left-brainers to 'really see':
- Move in close, so you divert attention from individual
objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow,
reflection, pattern
- Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down
on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a
microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things
differently from usual
- Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at
night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
- Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up
close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or
music, walk in your bare feet
- Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination,
direction or time limit
- Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of
a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving
or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle
looks different when viewed from different angles
In the book Easy Travel to Other
Planets, Ted Mooney describes a future world where people are so
bombarded with meaningless information, abstract facts that don't
really matter, that they become psychologically paralyzed, unable to
focus on anything, and succumb to what Mooney calls 'information
sickness'. In some ways we are already there. The trappings of our
society and culture have already separated us from, and deadened us to,
most of what is real in this
world, and surrounded us instead with artifice -- bland, manipulative,
numbing 'entertainment', office and home lighting (and air
conditioning, and jobs) that are artificial, news
that shows wars as light-shows instead of people dead and dying, cars
that insulate us from any exposure to real people or real weather.
Looking until we really see is important, and not only to artists. In a
way it's shock therapy, a test to prove to ourselves we're still human, still
real, still really alive.
Drawing above is by
Canadian artist Pierre
Surtes, from a print in my personal collection.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
