THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

(Jeff_L) #1

50 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy


What We Illustrate When We Draw


to observed detail. When asked to draw objects
from memory, they can come up with odd, skeletal,
maybe schematically reminiscent shapes. The fact
that access to visual detail increases when the ability
to name is lost, suggests that our ability to catego-
rize may actually inhibit our ability to observe.


Normative vision, and a functional inferotempo-
ral cortex (IT), somehow seem to get in the way of
drawing the specifics of what is there is front of you.
In most of my classes I spend my time nudging my
students from their normative vision to their detail-
access vision—trying to spark them to do the kind
of observation we assume we are doing all the time.
I tell them to draw less what they think and more
what they see—less with their IT and more with
their—I don’t know—“array of light that hits the
retina”? Right hemisphere? Sense of touch? Oddly,
I don’t think drawing teaches people to observe so
much as it gives them practice in what observation
actually is. I don’t have the feeling I am teaching
something they do not know how to do exactly, but
something they are not used to accessing—perhaps
a capacity inhibited by our normative processing
needs. Often when the students finally “see” what
I’m talking about there is a sudden, dramatic jump
in the drawings. Their performance isn’t a gradual
shift in tendency but jumps back and forth between
ways of seeing until they are comfortable enough
slipping into their own ability to access detail. (I
don’t think it was not that they could see it, but did
not have the technical ability to draw what they
saw—the most common explanation for a “bad”
drawing—because technical ability doesn’t make
those kinds of jumps back and forth.) Most of my
job is moving them through the discomfort of those
transitions, and believing that there is something to
be gained from a world of details.


As a drawer
I believe drawing is about seeing. The more I
look around me, as I am drawing, the more the
world opens up as if under an old magnifying lens.
The world is strange and beautiful. For me, drawing
is about piecing apart all the named, known objects
around me; not window, table, hand, but fat oily
lines, shivering, hairline cracks, darkness... As soon
as I begin to recognize what is on my drawing, as
soon as it raises up a known world, I change tactics.


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