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—Max Ernst, 1948

Pure Contour Drawing is so effective at producing this strong shift that many artists routinely begin drawing with at least a short session of the method, in order to start the process of shifting to R-mode.

Looking at your drawing, a tangled mass of pencil marks, perhaps you will say, “What a mess!” But look more closely and you will see that these marks are strangely beautiful. Of course, they do not represent the hand, only its details, and details within details. You have drawn complex edges from actual perceptions. These are not quick, abstract, symbolic representations of the wrinkles in your palm. They are painstakingly accurate, excruciatingly intricate, entangled, descriptive, and specific marks—just what we want at this point. I believe that these drawings are visual records of the R-mode state of consciousness. As a witty friend of mine, writer Judi Marks, remarked on viewing a Pure Contour Drawing for the first time, “No one in their left mind would do a drawing like that!”

Why you did this exercise

The most important reason for this exercise is that Pure Contour Drawing apparently causes L-mode to “reject the task,” enabling you to shift to R-mode. Perhaps the lengthy, minute observation of severely limited, “non-useful,” and “boring” information—information that defies verbal description—is incompatible with L-mode’s thinking style.

Note that:

• Your verbal mode may object and object, but eventually will “bow out,” leaving you “free” to draw. This is why I asked you to continue drawing until the timer sounds.

• The marks you make in R-mode are different from and often more beautiful than marks made in your more usual L-mode state of consciousness.

• Anything can be a subject for a Pure Contour drawing: a feather, a piece of shredded bark, a lock of hair. Once you have shifted to R-mode, the most ordinary things become inordinately beautiful and interesting. Can you remember the sense of wonder you had as a child, poring over some tiny insect or a dandelion?

The paradox of the Pure Contour Drawing exercise

For reasons that are still unclear, Pure Contour Drawing is one of the key exercises in learning to draw. But it’s a paradox: Pure Contour Drawing, which doesn’t produce a “good” drawing (in students’ estimations), is the best exercise for effectively and efficiently causing students later to achieve good drawing. Even more important, though, this is the exercise that revives our childhood wonder and the sense of beauty found in ordinary things.

A possible explanation

Apparently, in our habitual use of brain modes, L-mode seeks quickly to recognize (and name and categorize) by picking out details, while R-mode wordlessly perceives whole configurations and seeks how the parts fit together—or perhaps whether the parts fit together.

In regarding a hand, for example, the nails, the wrinkles and creases are details and the hand itself is the whole configuration. This “division of labor” works fine in ordinary life. In drawing a hand, however, one must give equal attention—visual attention—to both the configuration and the details and how they fit together into the whole. Pure Contour Drawing may function as a sort of “shock treatment” for the brain, forcing it to do things differently.

Pure Contour Drawing, I believe, causes L-mode to “drop out,” perhaps, as I mentioned before, through simple boredom. (“I’ve already named it—it’s a wrinkle, I tell you. They’re all alike. Why bother with all this looking.”) Once L-mode has “dropped out,” it seems possible that R-mode then perceives each wrinkle—normally regarded as a detail—as a whole configuration, made up of even smaller details. Then each detail of each wrinkle becomes a further whole, made up of ever-smaller parts, and so on, going deeper and deeper into ever expanding complexity. There is some similarity, I believe, to the phenomenon of fractals, in which whole patterns are constructed of smaller detailed