Art teaches us how to see
Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash
The drawings on the wall at one of my students’ midterm critiques were as undeveloped as any I’d ever seen in a Basic Drawing class. I knew they were drawn from life because I had watched the student, call him Joe, draw them. I struggled each time I walked by his area in the drawing studio to direct his progress. Now that I was looking at half a semester’s work, I was at a total loss. The marks were sloppy, the shapes were crude, the space was flat, and I could hardly discern what he was attempting to draw at all. Fumbling around for questions to get a conversation started, I asked Joe what his biggest challenge was in the class.
He thought for a moment, and then answered very earnestly, “I think I just try too hard to make everything perfect.”
It wasn’t the answer I expected. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he said that he was having trouble caring about the class at all. But trying too hard to be perfect?
I’ve had students who try to make everything perfect. They might start a portrait by rendering an eye in exquisite detail, then inch over the the bridge of the nose and down to the nostrils, pausing to fill in the shadows on the cheek. When I walk by, they often think things are going along swimmingly—they’re excited because they just nailed down this detail or that. So they get a little grumpy when the art professor asks them to stop drawing for a moment and take a step back. Way back, as far away from the drawing as they can get. So far back that they can’t see the details they’ve been trying to perfect anymore.
It forces them to notice other aspects of the drawing. Often, they deflate a little. Something isn’t right, maybe they’re not sure what. We’ll start talking about the relative size of things, noticing that the eyes and nose are too big, the cheek is too small, the jaw needs to be extended this way, and the back of the head is much larger than they’ve accounted for.
Don’t worry, I’ll reassure them, everyone makes the same mistake: we make the things that are most important to us too big—things like eyes and noses and mouths—and we make the things that we don’t care about too small—things like the back of the head or the space between the bottom lip and the bottom of the chin. It’s totally human.
“We see all at once,” I might say in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear, “but we draw part by part. So you have to keep the whole in view: work around the whole drawing, look at how the parts relate to each other.”
You could make a distinction between what we see and what we notice. We see the whole thing, all at once, but we notice only a very small part of that whole. We hold onto a very little bit of what we see. But that’s what makes it onto the drawing paper: we can only draw what we’ve noticed. If you make a drawing and it doesn’t look like what you see, it’s because you haven’t noticed everything that you’ve seen. Learning to draw is mostly about learning to attend to what you see as you’re seeing it. It’s learning to notice more of what you see.
That’s a hard lesson to internalize, especially for the perfectionists—mostly because they perceive their fault, “trying to be too perfect,” as a heroic virtue in disguise. They think that by noticing the details, they’re seeing everything. A lot of them aced their high school art classes working from photographs, where their ability to render details won the admiration of their teachers. They didn’t realize just how much work the photograph, and by extension the camera, was doing for them.
Because we’ve designed cameras to be mechanical replicas of our eyes, and since they fix images “all at once,” it might seem like they’ve solved the drawing paradox, like they’re the perfect path to better drawings. But we draw part by part because that’s how we notice the world: it’s an essential characteristic of our vision. And what we value in the drawings of the masters is that they reconcile the parts to the whole in really compelling ways. It’s because they notice the whole as well as the parts, because they notice the spaces between things, because they notice so very much and they notice the way that it fits together.
A camera doesn’t notice. It puts all of the details together into an image through a mechanical process governed by the laws of optics, so the difficult task of reconciling the parts of what we see to the whole disappears into a mechanical process we take for granted. So students who work from photographs haven’t gotten practice noticing the whole, finding a way to hold the parts together. Confronted with a still life and a blank piece of paper, there’s no camera to do that work for them, and there’s a whole world that you’re seeing that you have to start noticing. And that’s overwhelming.
Photo by Nick Jones on Unsplash
It’s incredibly intimidating to realize that there’s a whole realm of their vision that they’ve never noticed before. That they don’t really know what they see. And just like Socrates didn’t always get the warmest reception by pointing out that people don’t really know what they think they know, I often get resistance from students when I point out that they don’t really know what they see.
Some of my favorite works of art from the twentieth century meet the same kind of resistance by people who feel quite certain that they know what they see (and who will assure you that they know beauty when they see it)—drawings by Mercedes Matter, paintings by Joan Mitchell, even and perhaps especially Piet Mondrian’s austere grids. These are works by artists who notice an astounding amount of what they see. But to communicate that, they create works that record only what is seen but not ordinarily noticed. So the works look strange, difficult—even sloppy, undeveloped, or dull. But they’re a lifeline for those of us trying to learn to see more deeply, because they report from the very innermost recesses of vision about the architecture of seeing riding below the details we normally notice. They reveal just how much there is to notice about what we see.
In my drawing classes, I play Socrates: I try to ask questions that help my students notice what they’re seeing, to help them understand that what they notice isn’t everything that they see. So wherever students are, I can usually meet them. It’s an iterative process: if I can initiate that first iteration of development, get them to realize that there is always more to notice about what they see, they can start looking for other things they haven’t noticed about what they see. Ultimately they’ll make drawings that speak more fully to their own personal vision (and aren’t just better imitations of photographs).
They’ll start to really know what they see—and they’ll find that there’s more to what they see than they could possibly have imagined. Maybe they’ll even get tired of thumbing through photographs and look out the window. Maybe they’ll wonder about what there is to see in the beatific vision.
But what about Joe? What was he noticing? It took me a while to see it, but after looking long enough at his drawing of a folding chair, I realized what was happening. He drew the seat of the chair square, which it was. He noticed its actual shape. But that’s not what he saw, standing across the room. That seat would look more like a squashed diamond, the sides slanting away from each other at irregular angles. He noticed something true of the chair, but didn’t notice the way it looked from where he was standing.
“I can see what you mean,” I was finally able to respond. “You look at the chair, and you see that the seat of the chair is square, and so you draw a square. And that’s right, you look at the seat and it’s a square, and that’s what you’re trying to get down perfectly.” Exactly. I was understanding him. So we could turn and look at another folding chair in the room and look at it, really look at it. And we could marvel, together, that even though the seat is a square, the shape we’re both seeing doesn’t have any right angles. And that it looks much wider than it is long. “Isn’t it incredible that the shape we see tells us that the seat of the chair is a square? How do you draw that so that you get all of that into your drawing, what you see and how you see it from where you’re standing?”
It turned out to be the start of a great conversation, and my trips to his drawing area grew much more productive. And by the end of the class, he was making drawings that had those things that we value in drawings—balance, depth, structure—drawings that looked a little bit more like what we see. He was beginning to notice more, and, just maybe, beginning to see more deeply.
