pencils and perception

exploring your feelings toward objects, nature, and people

INTRODUCTION

the adventure of seeing

Every day in every city on the planet people in drawing classes gather around arrangements of flowers, drapery, or a live person — and draw! They spend hours exploring the adventure of seeing and drawing.

Drawing accelerates and quickens a kind of seeing that allows you access to a part of your mind that is different from the part you are accustomed to using. It involves a different kind of thinking. Any time that you exercise your mind in this way, you see something new. And this experience is very refreshing, even liberating. It can also be very challenging to the way you have come to think of things.

Perceiving accomplishes at the sensory level what in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding. Eyesight is insight.

• • • Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception

No machine or technological wizardry can get inside your head, look out at the world through your eyes, and describe what you see. This seeing business is very personal, which is why I say that drawing is an individual adventure of seeing. Only you stand inside your thoughts, behind your eyes, aware of what you are seeing, feeling, and thinking. Only you can go where no one has gone before — on an inner journey to explore and see the world as it is — as energy, as consciousness.

When you first begin drawing, you are challenged by the limits and distortions of your ordinary left-brain way of seeing. This is the scary and irritating side of drawing. I've seen many people hit the wall, so to speak, when they come up against the fact that their ordinary way of seeing just does not facilitate drawing. Even artists who have been drawing for years have to shift their thinking to draw what they see.

People should learn to see and so avoid all danger.

• • • Buddha

It is good to know that other ways of seeing are available to you. There are parts of your brain that easily embrace visual information. When you know what to look for, you can draw what you see.

Lawrence Wechsler wrote a book called Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees about the life of Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin. In it he quotes Irwin as saying, "Physicalness is experienced perceptually." In other words, forget the names of the things you are looking at when you want to draw or paint them. Instead, look for perceptual relationships. This concept is the basis of my drawing classes.

In this part of the book you will learn how to see. By practicing the basic directions in the warm-ups and by doing the drawing exercises, you will find yourself very naturally drawing a felt sense of what you are looking at. Your drawings will express your natural style, which, fortunately, is already within you. You do not have to invent it or create it out of thin air. It can be drawn out of you with practice, patience, willingness, and lots of love.

This kind of perceptual drawing may initially stretch your mind, but once you get into the flow of it, it will become much easier, and it will also become therapeutic. You will have to open your heart to yourself while you are learning. You will have to let love be your goal rather than academic standards, your mother's approval, gallery sales, or just plain old self-imposed notions of perfection. Your heart sees things as a child does — very simply. This kind of looking and drawing opens your heart so that you can see the world as it is. It is far more beautiful than you can imagine.

Remember, no matter how old you are or how young, no matter how knowledgeable you are about art and drawing or how ignorant you are about such things — your point of view is very important. Your point of view is all you are working with — no matter what you are looking at.

trusting your eyes

Although trusting your eyes is simple, it can be challenging at first. Even after years of drawing, I still have to consciously remind myself to relax and simply look for vertical, horizontal, and diagonal directions, intersections, and relationships.

Just the other day I had a few minutes after church to sit in the outdoor patio and draw. A chair caught my eye, and I began to draw it. Pretty quickly I realized how rigid my drawing was and how limited and serious I felt trying to get this chair on my paper. When you find yourself drawing this way, stop! It's too confining, limiting, difficult, and serious to draw just the chair. Back up and look for lines that intersect it — the table in front of it, the plants and the tree behind it.

It is only through a sense of the right relation of things that freedom can be obtained.

• • • Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

In other words, look for relationships. Ah. I began to let the drawing unfold through me. I relaxed and fell into the part of me that is interested in seeing lines, directions, and relationships.

Instead of drawing things, draw the field in which the things exist. The field includes both the object that attracts your eye and the objects that surround and interact with it. Draw a direction of the arm and a direction that intersects it. Believe it or not, this makes drawing far easier and much more exciting. You are just using a different way of seeing.

Drawing the field instead of just the object helps you to focus in a soft and lighthearted way. Chairs, trees, lamps, even people can be thought of as hard, substantial, and serious objects, yet when you approach them in this new way — as a field of relationships — they soften. And you soften. Lift yourself out of your ordinary judgmental way of seeing things and focus on what is before your eyes. Be playful. You will see how powerful and simple it can be when you trust your eyes and your heart.

Frederick Franck says in his book The Zen of Seeing, "Don't 'think' about what you are drawing, just let the hand follow what the eye sees."

The real study of an art student is more a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life.

• • • Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

In other words, the rules for drawing begin with trust. Trust your eyes. Trust your hands. Trust your heart. And lighten up! Perfection is not the goal. Academic standards, gallery standards, parental standards, and university standards are not important here. Meaningful connection is the goal.

In mathematics there is one right answer. But in drawing...