The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [37]
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.”
—William James
The Varieties of Religious
Experience, 1902
L-mode is the “right-handed,” left-hemisphere mode. The L is foursquare, upright, sensible, direct, true, hard-edged, unfanciful, forceful.
R-mode is the “left-handed,” right-hemisphere mode. The R is curvy, flexible, more playful in its unexpected twists and turns, more complex, diagonal, fanciful.
“I have supposed a Human Being to be capable of various physical states, and varying degrees of consciousness, as follows:
“(a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies;
“(b) the ‘eerie’ state, in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence of Fairies;
“(c) a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surrounding, and apparently asleep, he (i.e., his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes, in the actual world, or in Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies.”
—Lewis Carroll
Preface to Sylvie and
Bruno
The second insight gained from the exercise is your awareness that shifting to the R-mode enables you to see in the way a trained artist sees, and therefore to draw what you perceive.
Now, it’s obvious that we can’t always be turning things upside down. Your models are not going to stand on their heads for you, nor is the landscape going to turn itself upside down or inside out. Our goal, then, is to teach you how to make the cognitive shift when perceiving things in their normal right-side-up positions. You will learn the artist’s “gambit”: to direct your attention toward visual information that L-mode cannot or will not process. In other words, you will always try to present your brain with a task the language system will refuse, thus allowing R-mode to use its capability for drawing. Exercises in the coming chapters will show you some ways to do this.
A review of R-mode
It might be helpful to review what R-mode feels like. Think back. You have made the shift several times now—slightly, perhaps, while doing the Vase/Faces drawings and more intensely just now while drawing the “Stravinsky.”
In the R-mode state, did you notice that you were somewhat unaware of the passage of time—that the time you spent drawing may have been long or short, but you couldn’t have known until you checked it afterward? If there were people near, did you notice that you couldn’t listen to what they said—in fact, that you didn’t want to hear? You may have heard sounds, but you probably didn’t care about figuring out the meaning of what was being said. And were you aware of feeling alert, but relaxed—confident, interested, absorbed in the drawing and clear in your mind?
Most of my students have characterized the R-mode state of consciousness in these terms, and the terms coincide with my own experience and accounts related to me of artists’ experiences. One artist told me, “When I’m really working well, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. I feel at one with the work: the painter, the painting, it’s all one. I feel excited, but calm