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My editor at Tarcher/Putnam, Wendy Hubbert.

My team of teachers, Brian Bomeisler, Marka Hitt-Burns, Arlene Cartozian, Dana Crowe, Lizbeth Firmin, Lynda Green-berg, Elyse Klaidman, Suzanne Merritt, Kristin Newton, Linda Jo Russell, and Rachael Theile, who have worked with me at various sites around the nation, for their unfaltering devotion to our efforts. These fine instructors have added greatly to the scope of the work by reaching out to new groups.

I am grateful to The Bingham Trust and to the Austin Foundation for their staunch support of my work.

And finally, my warmest thanks to the hundreds of students—actually, thousands by now—I have been privileged to know over the years, for making my work so rewarding, both personally and professionally. I hope you go on drawing forever.

Preface

Twenty years have passed since the first publication of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in July 1979. Ten years ago, in 1989, I revised the book and published a second edition, bringing it up to date with what I had learned during that decade. Now, in 1999, I am revising the book one more time. This latest revision represents a culmination of my lifelong engrossment in drawing as a quintessentially human activity.

How I came to write this book

Over the years, many people have asked me how I came to write this book. As often happens, it was the result of numerous chance events and seemingly random choices. First, my training and background were in fine arts—drawing and painting, not in art education. This point is important, I think, because I came to teaching with a different set of expectations.

After a modest try at living the artist’s life, I began giving private lessons in painting and drawing in my studio to help pay the bills. Then, needing a steadier source of income, I returned to UCLA to earn a teaching credential. On completion, I began teaching at Venice High School in Los Angeles. It was a marvelous job. We had a small art department of five teachers and lively, bright, challenging, and difficult students. Art was their favorite subject, it seemed, and our students often swept up many awards in the then-popular citywide art contests.

At Venice High, we tried to reach students in their first year, quickly teach them to draw well, and then train them up, almost like athletes, for the art competitions during their junior and senior years. (I now have serious reservations about student contests, but at the time they provided great motivation and, perhaps because there were so many winners, apparently caused little harm.)

Those five years at Venice High started my puzzlement about drawing. As the newest teacher of the group, I was assigned the job of bringing the students up to speed in drawing. Unlike many art educators who believe that ability to draw well is dependent on inborn talent, I expected that all of the students would learn to draw. I was astonished by how difficult they found drawing, no matter how hard I tried to teach them and they tried to learn.

I would often ask myself, “Why is it that these students, who I know are learning other skills, have so much trouble learning to draw something that is right in front of their eyes?” I would sometimes quiz them, asking a student who was having difficulty drawing a still-life setup, “Can you see in the still-life here on the table that the orange is in front of the vase?” “Yes,” replied the student, “I see that.” “Well,” I said, “in your drawing, you have the orange and the vase occupying the same space.” The student answered, “Yes, I know. I didn’t know how to draw that.” “Well,” I would say carefully, “you look at the still-life and you draw it as you see it.” “I was looking at it,” the student replied. “I just didn’t know how to draw that.” “Well,” I would say, voice rising, “you just look at it...” The response would come, “I am looking at it,” and so on.

Another puzzlement was that students often seemed to “get” how to draw suddenly