Seeing (part 1)

“Learning To Draw:  Seeing and the Three Kinds of Memory”.  It has become apparent to me during my years of teaching, that by naming and examining each element that goes into improving drawing skill, I could make the undertaking less mysterious and more logically accessible.   

In my view (no pun intended), accurate Seeing must be understood before the various memory elements the student needs to acquire can be absorbed most effectively.   We must describe each of the three areas of memory briefly, because, one of the three, in particular, directly affect Seeing (artistic seeing).

The Three Kinds of Memory

1.      Memory knowledge of what things look like.  I refer to this type of memory as a Mental construct.

2.      Technique.  This is acquired knowledge and memorized processes which enable the artist to enhance the believability and reality of a drawn object or scene 

   

Both of these types of memories reside in the Left-brain memory storage bank.

 

3.       Muscle memory.  This is the kind of physical memory you acquire by repeating a physical process over and over.  Think doing a one and a half flip off the high board, tying your shoe or simply dashing off your signature. 

4.       

Seeing (artistically) goes way beyond the optical component of looking at things.  Of even greater importance is how the brain processes that visual input.  And, it is the functioning of our memories (Mental Constructs), that is so crucial to the Seeing process

 

Often, even drawing something again (and again) doesn’t achieve the desired result.  This is because something happens when, as untrained artists, we try to draw something accurately.  It is at this stage that many people, who want to learn to draw, become discouraged, assuming that they do not possess the requisite “talent”.  But the problem is not with drawing ability; it is with “seeing” ability. If you separate out the act of “seeing correctly,” and learn and understand its several basic precepts, then your development of drawing skills and abilities proceeds at a much faster pace.  A corollary is that those who try to bypass the seeing step or don’t fully integrate it into their approach improve at a much slower rate.  I have encountered many people who, having not absorbed this fairly simple concept, have wasted years, changed the course of careers even, to hide or compensate for that fact.  Proportional and angular measuring ability, for example, is one of the major processes that form the basis for artistic seeing yet I have had students who felt measuring (see Chapter 2) wasn’t “artistic.” that it seemed too mechanical or slowed them down.; but nothing is further from the truth.  After a very short learning period, measuring becomes a natural even instinctive aid to seeing which expands your artistic capabilities. We’ll cover measuring, in more detail, later.

Seeing an object, the way an accomplished artist would see it is a skill that most of us must learn, and it is not so much an extended learning process as just changing your notion of how to look at things.  This can take as little as five minutes (for the student who is already aware of the seeing problem or 6 months for the student who can’t seem to pry himself loose from old habits.  Some students figure it out on their own -- these are the advanced students in every class.  Yet, for most of us, artistic seeing ability is annoyingly elusive.  To understand it we must first talk about human brain function and how perfectly legitimate habits we develop for one kind of activity can thwart or hinder or ability to undertake a different sort of activity.

 

 Psychological research into brain function has created a whole new understanding of our thought process.  Art educators and in particular, Artist/writer Betty Edwards, in her book Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, have made it common parlance to talk about the human brain and thought process in terms of right-brain and left-brain.   Memory, stepwise logic, math and language skills, and digging an existing hole deeper (getting a PhD for example) are all predominantly left-brain functions, while perceiving relationships and spatiality, proportional measuring, and digging several other holes in different locations (that is, exploring seemingly unrelated options) are predominantly controlled by the right hemisphere.

  How can we tell that there are distinctly different thought processes which act in different but harmonious and integrated ways to help us navigate through our days?

  Two examples come to mind:

n When you are driving, have you ever been so lost in thought (left brain function) that you have driven for two or three miles before realizing that you weren’t paying attention to what you were doing?  If you have had that experience, and survived, what was it that prevented you from crashing into a tree or rear-ending the car in front of you?  Answer: the right side of your brain, which deals primarily with spatial relationships.  While you were on autopilot, daydreaming, your right brain was doing the steering, adjusting your foot on the gas, and so on.

 

n Another example is the venerable vase face optical illusion.  Most people who have taken an art course have run across this example; however, what’s really happening in the drawing of the vase face isn’t always fully explained beyond the gee-whiz effect of its visual ambiguity. But, it is an excellent tool for explaining the separation of brain function. 

 

In the exercise, the student is asked to draw the silhouette of a face (Example - 1), and then to draw an opposing silhouette facing the original.  Horizontal lines are added to the top and bottom to complete the vase illusion (Example 2).  The crux of the exercise is that the first silhouette is drawn from memory (left-brain), while the facing silhouette requires the student to measure distances and try to match the shapes in reverse while at the same time positioning it in opposition to the first (right-brain).  Try drawing a couple of these and attempt to get a feel for the two different brain functions at work.  The two parts of the vase-face drawing exercise rely on totally different brain processes; one memory, the other spatial organization. Keep in mind how much easier it was to draw the one from memory (utilizing your pre-existing mental construct for the silhouette of a face).   If you are still not totally convinced, I have another example coming up that should help.  

                 

 

Having established that there are two interdependent brain functions that, work in concert to govern our day-to-day activities, let’s see what effect that knowledge has on our ability to draw. 

 

For the most part, our bifurcated, or split brain works exceedingly well; after all, it has evolved over countless centuries to allow us to cope with an increasingly complex world.  In recent times, due to the emphasis placed on left-brain functions by our modern educational system, the left side of our brains gets much more attention than the right.  In our Western culture, as we get beyond second or third grade, right side brain activities often take a backseat to left side ones in the public education system.  Thus, instead of emphasizing subjects like drawing, music, and art we require math, foreign language, writing, sciences and other subjects that rely heavily upon logic and memorization.  Because of this, most people, as they enter adolescence lose or begin to ignore right-brain functions that seem irrelevant to us when we contemplate the likelihood of a career tied to our skill at using our left brain.

 

So, if we assume the Left side of the brain tends to be dominant, why is this a problem?

A.  Memory takeover

As a child you probably did a lot of drawing. Then, at about age 10 or 11, art (that is, drawing), took a back seat as you began to concentrate on learning math, English, history and other left-brain dominant subjects.  If you even  had an art teacher at that age, it would have been unusual if he or she were into teaching fundamental drawing skills.  Art classes you had would probably have been of the more general all-purpose variety, with exercises in color, craft projects, or perhaps computer graphics. Eventually, you either quit drawing all together or if you wanted to persist, you started your own program of self-study that, perhaps, involved copying comics, or some other pop culture imagery. 

You may possess only the technical skills and knowledge of a ten-year-old or you may have been memorizing Anime imagery or copying Lord of the Rings fantasy drawings, but it is important to understand, that whatever skill level you have attained, the left side of your brain, specifically, the part that keeps track of visual memory, will be part of the mix when you attempt to draw a 3D subject from life.  We rely on memory; it is, in fact, a large part of why we improve in our ability to depict something.  Each time we carefully draw a subject we accumulate more visual data which then informs our next rendition of that subject or other similar subjects

The difficulty arises when we or any individual, at any skill level, relies too heavily on current memory to deal with a new subject.  Someone who has not drawn since the age of ten, trying to draw a real 3D house, will dredge up their “ten-year old’s mental image” of a house (because it is easier!) with predictable results.  A more advanced student, who learned to draw by copying fantasy characters, will have a better idea for drawing the house (they’re stored memory will be better) but they will still embellish with the stylistic conventions of the memorized imagery. 

The single biggest impediment to being able to draw what you see accurately is the tendency of your left-brain (the dominant half) to interfere with or take over the drawing function.

 

Left-brain takeover is what happens when a drawing you’ve started, suddenly begins to go wrong.  Remember the vase face and how much easier it was to draw the profile from memory than it was to draw the second, opposing profile?  Your brain’s dominant half wants to take over the function of drawing for the same reason: because it is easier.  Whenever you draw something, your left brain will try to impose its memory of that object, no matter how imperfect that memory is.   So, right in the middle of your drawing, without realizing it, you allow your remembered concept of the object to take over and distort the actual rendition you are attempting. 

Object memories can be child-like symbol memories that you developed early in life, (like a football with a circle in the middle for an eye) but did not flesh-out because you weren’t “into” art. Or they can be the more elaborate memories of the stylized work you copied from during a later stage of your development.   The result is that rather than drawing an accurate rendition of what you are seeing, you draw an approximation of what you see because you lack a tactic to help you draw it accurately, and it’s easier just to revert to stored memory

You need an “approach” to drawing from life that doesn’t rely on currently held memories.  

 

Next we’ll look at strategies you can learn that will allow you to resolve perception issues that create distortions and that will help you build better memories (more accurate mental Constructs).