The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [50]
“In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures or sensations.”
—George Orwell
“Politics and the English
Language,” 1968
If perhaps you did not attain a shift to R-mode in your first Pure Contour Drawing, please be patient with yourself. You may have a very determined verbal system. I suggest that you try again. You might try using a crumpled piece of paper, a flower, or any complex object that appeals to you. My students sometimes have to make two or even three tries in order to “win out” against their strong verbal modes.
Set a timer, perhaps for eight or even ten minutes. In the beginning, it takes time to cause a shift to R-mode. Later on, as American artist Robert Henri proposed in the sidebar quotation on page 5, the shift “to the higher state” will occur just by starting to draw.
These strange marks on the wall of a cave were made by Paleolithic humans. In their intensity, the marks seem to resemble Pure Contour Drawing.
— Shamans of Prehistory,
J. Clottes and D. Lewis-
Williams. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1996
Why Pure Contour Drawing is important
Whatever the actual reason may be, I can assure you that Pure Contour Drawing will permanently change your ability to perceive. From this point onward, you will start to see in the way an artist sees and your skills in seeing and drawing will progress rapidly.
Look at the Pure Contour Drawing of your hand one more time and appreciate the quality of the marks you made in R-mode. Again, these are not the quick, glib, stereotypic marks of symbolic L-mode. These marks are true records of perception.
The next exercise will pull together everything learned so far and you will be doing a wonderful “real” drawing.
Student showing: A record of an alternative state
Following is a Student Showing of some Pure Contour Drawings. What strange and marvelous markings are these! Never mind that the drawings don’t resemble greatly the overall configuration of a hand—that’s to be expected. We will attend to the overall configuration in the next exercise, “Modified Contour Drawing.”
In Pure Contour Drawing, it is the quality of the marks and their character that we care about. The marks, these living hieroglyphs, are records of perceptions. To be found nowhere in the drawings are the thin, glib, stereotypic marks of casual, rapid L-mode symbolic processing. Instead, we see rich, deep, intuitive marks made in response to the thing-as-it-is, the thing as it exists out there, marks that delineate the is-ness of the object. Blind swimmers have seen! And seeing, they have drawn.
Before moving on to the next step, Modified Contour Drawing, let’s review the important concept of edges in art.
The first component skill: The perception of edges
Pure Contour Drawing has introduced you to the first component skill of drawing: the perception of edges. In drawing, the term edge has a special meaning, different from its ordinary definition as a border or outline.
In drawing, an edge is where two things come together. In the Pure Contour Drawing you just finished, for example, the edge you drew was the place (the wrinkle) where two parts of the flesh of your palm came together to form a single boundary for both parts. That shared boundary, in drawing, is described by a line that is called a contour line. In drawing, therefore, a line (a contour line or, more simply,