48 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy
What We Illustrate When We Draw
doing when they make these clear, bounded, known
things because it makes for images that are so rec-
ognizable, so obvious, so processable to us that it is
hard to understand what they could possibly not be
doing—or perhaps even to see them because they
are digested so fast: They do everything normally
we need an image to do.
Our visual confidence
We feel our vision is continuous, consistent,
observant, reliable but the evidence for this is not
convincing. In general, we use visual information
in very economical, adaptable and abstract forms:
categorizing an oversized beanbag as a chair, see-
ing expressive faces in emoticons, people in stick
figures, the person we are talking to as unchanged
(even if they have been substituted as we are speak-
ing). An actual detail is held in focal attention so
incredibly briefly, before it’s triggered mental con-
text is called in, and seen in that place. We add in
our extrapolations, memories, knowlege and fore-
casts: seeing a dog behind a fence, a fight in a flicker
of a spouse’s eyebrow, a remembered barn if it’s
hinted at, or a perpetrator in a line-up, and we stick
with what we’ve assumed—rabbit or duck. “Eyewit-
ness” testimony, blindsight, phi illusions, identifica-
tion of skin color, among other things should open
big cracks in our confidence about our vision, but
we are not much bothered. We edit or fudge a lot
of the details: we aren’t aware of our two blindspots;
signals from the eyes seem to be inhibited during
rapid saccades or movement—our world does not
lurch or blur like a handheld camera would—doing
what we do; when I get a migraine blind-spot, my
mind fills it in with surroundings, and salt shak-
ers can disappear into it, and then pop back out
as I turn my head. Only seeing detail through the
fovea, the world should look as if viewed through
the circle of pointer and thumb at arm’s length,
the rest of the field functionally blind, and with-
out much color. But this is not at all how the world
looks to us: we are filling it in somehow really quite a
lot and all the time. With fast moving objects—say a
pitched baseball—we think we see that which is not
physically possible to consciously see. “A fastball
will travel about 9 feet before your retina transmits
and your brain processes the initial notification of
the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand”(Burton, 2008).
But we say “keep your eye on the ball,” and trust in
some kind of simplified, forecasting system to rec-
ognize objects. This “vision” seems half baggage,
half clarification, half imagination, and rather mini-
mal immediate local observation. In a world where
we have to quickly interpret massive amounts of
changing visual information this kind of clear
sighted object identification seen in the drawings
above is a very, very useful habit—probably a skill
on which our survival has depended, and most of
us, when we sit down to Basic Drawing, are using it.Detail-access vision
But to draw, we have to take that absolutely
essential way of processing information, and lay it
aside. If there is such a thing, we have to just see, as
we would feel air coming in from a window, or the
heat from a cup of tea—as something precious that
will alter in an instant, overflowing with richness
and information beyond our ability to comprehend.
To draw what lies in front of us, it is helpful to
see—almost really to feel—the vast ocean of detail
that is out there. Though it may not help us navi-
gate, or plan, or identify quickly, or do anything
obviously useful or essential to survival, seeing lots
of actual detail is very helpful in drawing. (It may
not be necessary for drawing –there are lots of strat-
egies and ways to draw—but I haven’t found my
way around it.) In the drawings of very experienced
artists—Rembrandt, Raphael, Giacometti, Basquiat,
Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Seraut, Van Dyck, Par-
migianino, Ingres, Degas, Durer, Schiele, Hokusai,
Kuo Hsi, Sun Long, Wu Chen, Li T’ang, etc.—the
edges are not the only nor the most important lines.
To describe seen changes, line per se, is not the
overwhelming strategy. Of course most everything
drawn on a page is line, but experienced drawers’
lines tangle up, drift off, become textures, shadows,
blobs, shapes, and patterns. Their lines do not stick
to edges nor bind linguistically defined “things”
—there is no necessary contour around head and
shoulders, no neat oval of mouth—where the edges
of a lip would be a shadow creeps down into a
beard. Lines are uneven, twist, modulate, flake into
divets and dots, and scratches and fields. The drawn
lines are very sensitive to minuscule changes, rather
than describing broadly. Experienced drawers also
use the emptiness of the page—look at Rembrandt’s
nose and neck. They organize the whole space of the
page: using inter-locking shapes, negative spaces,
overall composition, design, the balance or relation-
ships of texture, color, light and shadow. You can
also see emotion, atmosphere, and point of view.
These artists focus in on certain particulars that