The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [46]
Fig. 5-19. Albrecht Dürer, Study for the Saint Jerome (1521).One of the L-mode functions is to screen out a large proportion of incoming perceptions. This is a necessary process to enable us to focus our thinking and one that works very well for us most of the time. But drawing requires that you look at something for a long time, perceiving lots of details, registering as much information as possible—ideally, everything, as Albrecht Dürer tried to do here.
Given proper instruction, young children can easliy learn to draw. These examples are by third-grade children, age eight.
“Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness . . . meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object. . . . The picture must all come out of the artist’s inside. . . . It is the image that lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.”
—D. H. Lawrence, the
English writer, speaking
about his paintings
Again, the key question is how to accomplish that cognitive L→R shift. As I said in Chapter Four, the most efficient way seems to be to present the brain with a task the left brain either can’t or won’t handle. You have already experienced a few of those tasks: the Vase/Faces drawings and the upside-down drawing. And to some extent, you have already begun to experience and recognize the alternate state of right-hemisphere mode. You are beginning to know that while you are in that slightly different subjective state of mind, you slow down so that you can see more clearly.
As you think back over experiences with drawing since you started this book and over experiences of alternative states of consciousness you may have had in connection with other activities (freeway driving, reading, etc., mentioned in Chapter One), think again about the characteristics of that slightly altered state. It is important that you continue to develop your awareness and recognition of R-mode state.
Lewis Carroll described an analogous shift in Alice’s adventures in Through the Looking Glass:
“Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking Glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning to a mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through....”
Let’s review the characteristics of the R-mode one more time. First, there is a seeming suspension of time. You are not aware of time in the sense of marking time. Second, you pay no attention to spoken words. You may hear the sounds of speech, but you do not decode the sounds into meaningful words. If someone speaks to you, it seems as though it would take a great effort to cross back, think again in words, and answer. Furthermore, whatever you are doing seems immensely interesting. You are attentive and concentrated and feel “at one” with the thing you are concentrating on. You feel energized but calm, active without anxiety. You feel self-confident and capable of doing the task at hand. Your thinking is not in words but in images and, particularly while drawing, your thinking is “locked on” to the object you are perceiving. On leaving R-mode state, you do not feel tired, but refreshed.
Our job now is to bring this state into clearer focus and under greater conscious control, in order to take advantage of the right hemisphere’s superior ability to process visual information and to increase your ability to make the cognitive shift to R-mode at will.
“The development of an Observer can allow a person considerable access to observing different identity states, and an outside observer may often clearly infer different identity states, but a person himself who has not developed the Observer function very well may never notice the many transitions from one identity state to another.”
—Charles T. Tart
Alternate States of
Consciousness, 1977
6
Getting Around Your Symbol System: Meeting