THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 47

Tara Geer

viewer-independent viewpoints etc. is still at work,
turning the specific visible into an internal template
example. If our drawings are true, most of us can-
not entirely see what is viewer specific, and one
surprise to me is not that we are capable of perceiv-
ing constancy among such variable things, but that
sometimes we cannot consciously see the particular
details in front of us even as we are looking at them.
As neural impulses move upstream through the
visual processing network, cell responses become
increasingly specific with respect to stimulus (ori-
entation, edge, discontinuity, specific spectral com-
position, etc.) and more general with respect to
viewing conditions. As Martha Farah describes it in
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision, “in the broad-
est terms the goal of vision is to take the array of
light that hits the retina and derive a representation
of the things that give rise to it.” (Farah, 2000, p. 27)
We think of vision as observation—and accurate
observation at that, but in these drawings our vision
appears to privilege shortcuts to categorization over
the absorption of the specifics of what lies out there.
Our eyes seem to be observing—preferring—the
categories in our minds, the internal models, “the
things” more closely than the outside world, or
visible variable specifics. The details of the outside
world serve rather like triggers to an internal visual
identification than parts of external and possibly
unknown wholes. These drawings seem to illus-
trate Semir Zeki’s point, “it is not as if perception
leads to abstractions and concepts but the other
way round: we form our percepts from abstrac-
tions” (Zeki, 2009, p.21). We make our drawings
of abstractions as well. Selective observation, object
distinction and clarification, the over- dependence
on line are default forms of describing the world
that I think of as a kind of documentation of higher
lever visual processing. Because so much of what is
seen by novice drawers is not exactly visually spe-
cific, it is tempting to imagine we start out drawing
relying on something more like our inferotemporal
cortex, and less like how we popularly imagine the
eye. It looks like novices are illustrating images lit-
erally corralled and defined and edited by concepts,
or abstractions—linguistic or visual or procedural I
don’t know—and we all are looking down at them
as if they were merely untrained drawings. I would
argue that they are highly trained drawings, just not
trained in the observation of external visual detail.

NORMATIVE VISUAL CLARIFICATION

•    Even,  consistent, usually complete    bounded 

edge lines

•    Reliance   on  line    as  a   descriptive strategy

•    Presents   objects that    are known   and recog-

nizable—that can be identified and catego-

rized—unclearly meaningful information is

s e c on d ar y.

Lines

I should step back a moment to say that draw-

ing is a completely outlandish activity. There are

lines out there in the world but not nearly as many

as we are capable of seeing, and not nearly as many

as needed to make a drawing. Most “lines“ are the

meeting of two differently lit areas, or the meeting of

areas with different textures or differing Gibsonian

gradients, (Gibson, 1974) or the known edges of

an object as opposed to the visible edges. It should

be completely odd that we are so adept at seeing all

the myriad visual changes around us as lines. Out

there visible, I would say there is mostly lumps and

texture. Turning the world into lines seems per-

fectly normal to us, but why? Why are we able to

almost instantaneously see in lines whole worlds?

In The Dioptrics, one of the first modern scientific

analyses of human vision, written almost 400 years

ago, Reneé Descartes points out this odd mismatch

between what we see in illustrations and what they

are composed of. “Engravings which consist merely

of a little ink spread over paper, represent to us

forests, towns, men and even battles and tempests.

And yet, out of an unlimited number of different

qualities that they [use to] lead us to conceive the

objects, there is not one in respect of which they

actually resemble [the objects] except shape. Even

this is a very imperfect resemblance” (Decartes,

1637/1954, p. 245). It may be that the center-

surround organization of receptive fields, and the

widening spread of these fields, biasing V1 and up

towards edges, makes lines particularly legible to us.

Before an image has left the eye it is laundered of

absolute illumination, and replaced by an initially

retinotopic map of differences, passed on to higher

levels and amplified in various ways but it may be

that those (electrically described) differences are

best translated by or from line. Often I find it dif-

ficult to convey the oddity of what it is people are