The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [44]
Say that a ten-year-old wants to draw a picture of a cube, perhaps a three-dimensional block of wood. Wanting the drawing to look “real,” the child tries to draw the cube from an angle that shows two or three planes—not just a straight-on side view that would show only a single plane, and thus would not reveal the true shape of the cube.
To do this, the child must draw the oddly angled shapes just as they appear—that is, just like the image that falls on the retina of the perceiving eye. Those shapes are not square. In fact, the child must suppress knowing that the cube is square and draw shapes that are “funny.” The drawn cube will look like a cube only if it is comprised of oddly angled shapes. Put another way, the child must draw unsquare shapes to draw a square cube. The child must accept this paradox, this illogical process, which conflicts with verbal, conceptual knowledge. (Perhaps this is one meaning of Picasso’s statement that “Painting is a lie that tells the truth.”)
Fig. 5-17. Children’s unsuccessful attempts to draw a cube that “looks real.”
Fig. 5-18. Realistic depiction of a cube requires drawing uncubelike shapes.
“The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception. He must ignore or override the very mechanisms in his mind that create objects out of images. . . . The artist, like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies.”
—Colin Blakemore
Mechanics of the Mind, 1977
From childhood onward, we have learned to see things in terms of words: We name things, and we know facts about them. The dominant left verbal system doesn’t want too much information about things it perceives—just enough to recognize and to categorize. It seems that one of its functions is to screen out a large proportion of contextual perceptions. This is a necessary process and one that works very well for us most of the time, enabling us to focus our attention. The left brain, in this sense, learns to take a quick look and says, “Right, that’s a chair (or an umbrella, bird, tree, dog, etc.).” But drawing requires that you look at something for a long time, perceiving lots of details and how they fit together, registering as much information as possible—ideally, everything, as Albrecht Dürer apparently tried to do in Figure 5-19.
If verbal knowledge of the cube’s real shape overwhelms the student’s purely visual perception, “incorrect” drawing results—drawing with the kinds of problems that make adolescents despair (see Figure 5-17). Knowing that cubes have square corners, students usually start a drawing of a cube with a square corner. Knowing that a cube rests on a flat surface, students draw straight lines across the bottom. Their errors compound themselves as the drawing proceeds, and the students become more and more confused.
Though a sophisticated viewer, familiar with the art of cubism and abstraction, might find the “incorrect” drawings in Figure 5-17 more interesting than the “correct” drawings in Figure 5-18, young students find praise of their wrong forms incomprehensible. In this case, the child’s intent was to make the cube look “real.” Therefore, to the child, the drawing is a failure. To say otherwise seems as absurd to students as telling them that “two plus two equals five” is a creative and praiseworthy solution.
On the basis of “incorrect” drawings such as the cube drawings, students may decide that they “can’t draw.” But they can draw; that is, the forms indicate that manually they are perfectly able to draw. The dilemma is that previously stored knowledge—which is useful in other contexts—prevents their seeing the thing-as-it-is, right there in front of their eyes.
Sometimes