THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 45

As a drawing teacher
If you ask a room of a hundred people to draw 3
pears, you get 300 different pears. The first, say, 10
years I taught art I was overwhelmed by the unique-
ness of all those drawings. After 20 years of teach-
ing drawing, I started seeing patterns. It was the
commonality of particular stumbling points that I
noticed first.

How beginners draw
Drawings are illustrations of what someone’s
brain has done with their world—the path from
object to brain to hand. When people first come to
a drawing class, without having spent time drawing,
they tend to draw according to a reliable agenda, a
set of heuristics.

These illustrations of tables come from the first

day of my Basic Drawing class at Columbia Uni-

versity last Spring. Before any teaching happened I

asked them to draw a table. About half will draw the

tables in the room like the top two, and half draw a

table from their mind, like the bottom two. These

initial drawings are notable in that they tend to rely

predominantly on edgelines, specifically the outside

defining contour of the object. Even if that student

feels insecure about where exactly those are—as

on the top right—they are still using edge lines to

define their table. Usually the identity or category of

the drawn object is very clear—anyone could look

at it and say immediately what it was. Decorations,

details or elaborations tend to be secondary. (You

can see the individualistic details here—the zig-zag

and dot decoration on the round table, the slanted

line, the little nails—are confined to the thinnest

surface edges. In an art class, new students will

vary elements as far as possible while still retain-

ing recognizablity, continuous edges and boundary

clarity.) People just starting in tend to draw a con-

tinuous and closed bounded edge. The line itself is

very even. Even if the internal space of that thing is

not so clear—it looks flat, or awkward—their edges

are quite clear. The drawings look like illustrations

of Gestalt closure and good continuity: each object

closed with an outline; proximate information not

relevant to categorical definition is left out.

Drawing multiple objects

In first attempting your average still-life—each

object still tends to be considered separately, and

What we Illustrate when we Draw:

Normative Visual Processing in Beginner Drawings,

and the Capacity to Observe Detail

Tara Geer

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. — Henry David Thoreau

Figure 1.