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By Root 816 0

one way to help repair our failing educational systems. Educational administrators, however, tend to be ambivalent about the purpose of including the arts, often still relegating arts education to “enrichment.” This term’s hidden meaning is “valuable but not essential.” My view, in contrast, is that the arts are essential for training specific, visual, perceptual ways of thinking, just as the “3R’s” are essential for training specific, verbal, numerical, analytical ways of thinking. I believe that both thinking modes—one to comprehend the details and the other to “see” the whole picture, for example, are vital for critical-thinking skills, extrapolation of meaning, and problem solving.

To help public-school administrators see the utility of arts education, I believe we must find new ways to teach students how to transfer skills learned through the arts to academic subjects and problem solving. Transfer of learning is traditionally regarded as a most difficult kind of instruction and, unfortunately, transfer is often left to chance. Teachers hope that students will “get” the connection, say, between learning to draw and “seeing” solutions to problems, or between learning English grammar and logical, sequential thinking.

In the history of inventions, many creative ideas began with small sketches. The examples above are by Galileo, Jefferson, Faraday, and Edison.

Henning Nelms, Thinking With a Pencil, New York: Ten Speed Press, 1981, p. xiv.

Corporate training seminars

My work with various corporations represents, I believe, one aspect of transfer of learning, in this instance, from drawing skills to a specific kind of problem solving sought by corporate executives. Depending on how much corporate time is available, a typical seminar takes three days: a day and a half focused on developing drawing skills and the remaining time devoted to using drawing for problem solving.

Groups vary in size but most often number about twenty-five. Problems can be very specific (“What is _?”—a specific chemical problem that had troubled a particular company for several years) or very general (“What is our relationship with our customers?”) or something in between specific and general (“How can members of our special unit work together more productively?”).

“Analog” drawings are purely expressive drawings, with no namable objects depicted, using only the expressive quality of line—or lines. Unexpectedly, persons untrained in art are able to use this language—that is, produce expressive drawings—and are also able to read the drawings for meaning. The drawing lessons of the seminar’s first segment are used mainly to increase artistic self-confidence and confidence in the efficacy of analog drawing.

The first day and a half of drawing exercises includes the lessons in this book through the drawing of the hand. The twofold objective of the drawing lessons is to present the five perceptual strategies emphasized in the book and to demonstrate each participant’s potential artistic capabilities, given effective instruction.

The problem-solving segment begins with exercises in using drawing to think with. These exercises, called analog drawings, are described in my book Drawing on the Artist Within. Participants use the so-called “language of line,” first to draw out the problem and then to make visible possible solutions. These expressive drawings become the vehicle for group discussion and analysis, guided, but not led, by me. Participants use the concepts of edges (boundaries), negative spaces (often called “white spaces” in business parlance), relationships (parts of the problem viewed proportionally and “in perspective”), lights and shadows (extrapolation from the known to the as-yet unknown), and the gestalt of the problem (how the parts fit—or don’t fit—together).

The problem-solving segment concludes with an extended small drawing of an object, different for each participant, which has been chosen as somehow related to the problem at hand. This drawing, combining perceptual skills with problem solving, evokes an extended shift