The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [2]
In frustration, I began to observe myself: What was I doing when I was drawing? Some things quickly showed up—that I couldn’t talk and draw at the same time, for example, and that I lost track of time while drawing. My puzzlement continued.
One day, on impulse, I asked the students to copy a Picasso drawing upside down. That small experiment, more than anything else I had tried, showed that something very different is going on during the act of drawing. To my surprise, and to the students’ surprise, the finished drawings were so extremely well done that I asked the class, “How come you can draw upside down when you can’t draw right-side up?” The students responded, “Upside down, we didn’t know what we were drawing.” This was the greatest puzzlement of all and left me simply baffled.
During the following year, 1968, first reports of psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry’s research on human brain-hemisphere functions, for which he later received a Nobel Prize, appeared in the press. Reading Sperry’s work caused in me something of an Ah-ha! experience. His stunning finding, that the human brain uses two fundamentally different modes of thinking, one verbal, analytic, and sequential and one visual, perceptual, and simultaneous, seemed to cast light on my questions about drawing. The idea that one is shifting to a different-from-usual way of thinking /seeing fitted my own experience of drawing and illuminated my observation of my students.
Avidly, I read everything I could find about Sperry’s work and did my best to explain to my students its possible relationship to drawing. They too became interested in the problems of drawing and soon they were achieving great advances in their drawing skills.
I was working on my master’s degree in Art at the time and realized that if I wanted to seriously search for an educational application of Sperry’s work in the field of drawing, I would need further study. Even though by that time I was teaching full time at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, I decided to return yet again to UCLA for a doctoral degree. For the following three years, I attended evening classes that combined the fields of art, psychology, and education. The subject of my doctoral dissertation was “Perceptual Skills in Drawing,” using upside-down drawing as an experimental variable. After receiving my doctoral degree in 1976, I began teaching drawing in the art department of California State University, Long Beach. I needed a drawing textbook that included Sperry’s research. During the next three years I wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Since the book was first published in 1979, the ideas I expressed about learning to draw have become surprisingly widespread, much to my amazement and delight. I feel honored by the many foreign language translations of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Even more surprising, individuals and groups working in fields not remotely connected with drawing have found ways to use the ideas in my book. A few examples will indicate the diversity: nursing schools, drama workshops, corporate training seminars, sports-coaching schools, real-estate marketing associations, psychologists, counselors of delinquent youths, writers, hair stylists, even a school for training private investigators. College and university art teachers across the nation also have incorporated many of the techniques into their teaching repertoires.
Public-school teachers are also using my book. After twenty-five years of budget cuts in schools’ arts programs, I am happy to report that state departments of education and public school boards of education are starting to turn to the arts as