THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 41

seymour simmons, III

comic caricatures to realistic figure drawing, begins

as simple shapes or forms, advancing from the gen-

eral to the specific in a logical, step-wise fashion.

The same approach is used for teaching elementary-

age children, for example, in Mona Brooks’ Drawing

with Children (1986). At a much more sophisticated

level, the academic method is taught in art acad-

emies and design schools around the world, includ-

ing in China where, under the Communist regime

and its promotion of socialist-realism, artists are

trained much as they were in the west several hun-

dred years earlier.

Politics aside, the approach is particularly useful

for training future architects, designers, and illus-

trators because it allows them to draw convincingly

from observation and imagination. A comprehen-

sive contemporary version of this approach taught

at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland is doc-

umented in Manfred Maier’s The Basic Principles of

Design (1977).

Although the academic method does facilitate

drawing from observation, its compulsion to ideal-

ize what is seen, combined with its singular stan-

dard of right and wrong, good and bad, stands in

stark opposition to more contemporary concerns

for both realism and expressive/creative art. React-

ing to these constraints, art instructional methods

have since been developed to support drawing from

observation in more direct and more individualized

manners. Though rarely explicated, these methods,

too, echo prominent philosophical attitudes from

the era in which they first emerged.

The most direct challenge to both rationalist

philosophy and the academic approach to teach-

ing came from Empiricism. Whereas rationalism

assumed we enter the world intellectually equipped

with ideal forms to be accessed by unaided reason,

empiricists like John Locke viewed the infant mind

as a “blank slate” to be written upon by sensory

impressions. This theory was initially applied to

drawing by the renowned art and social critic, John

Ruskin, as described in his 1857 book, The Elements

of Drawing (1904). Like Edwards, Ruskin used

drawing as a means to train visual perception freed

from the imposition of pre-determined schema.

He called this approach “seeing with the innocent

eye,” which meant learning how to observe and

draw with absolute accuracy, coordinating hand to

eye. Toward that end, one of Ruskin’s basic exer-

cises had students draw the interstices between the

branches of a tree (Figure 2). Whereas the branches

themselves could easily be schematized based

on a generic idea, rather than rendered based on

observation, the “negative spaces” or background

between them must be viewed objectively, as shapes

with particular configurations.

Beyond facilitating representational drawing,

Ruskin ascribed to seeing general educational impor-

tance, including moral and even spiritual value. On

the moral plane, truly seeing another person enabled

the perceiver to enter into a profound sympathetic

relationship with his or her subject. On the spiritual

plane, Ruskin felt that “truthful observation allows

the pleasure of the eye to lead to the truth of God.”

He went on to say that (1904), “The greatest thing a

human soul ever does in this world is to see some-

thing, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hun-

dreds of people can talk for one who can think, but

thousands think for one who can see. To see clearly is

poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”

Like the analytic approach favored by the aca-

demics, drawing from direct and unaided obser-

vation continues to be widely taught, especially as

formulated in the book by Betty Edwards men-

tioned earlier. Like Ruskin, Edwards ascribes sig-

nificance to observational drawing beyond its role

in representational art. In this case, drawing acti-

vates hitherto under-valued functions of the brain’s

right hemisphere, including visual/spatial functions

necessary to draw what is seen, as well as non-linear

thinking and intuition associated with creativity.

These are contrasted to supposedly left-brained

Figure 2. John Ruskin, Elements of Drawing. Inter-
stices,