Ideas |
"L'art est fait pour troubler, la science rassure."
– Georges Braque An archive of leading researchers and artists writing about vision, perception, drawing and learning |
Topics
On Perception
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
… our perception tends under natural circumstances to be ‘object- directed’ rather than ‘stimulus-directed.’ That is, we customarily seek to achieve an accurate perception not of the isolated stimulus attribute, but of the whole object. The functional value of this is obvious, inasmuch as it is with whole objects in our environment that we must cope. In order to see objects, we must necessarily take account of patterns of stimuli, not isolated stimulus attributes, and in so doing we can achieve perceptual constancy of objects.
David Krech, Richard S. Crutchfield, and Norman Livson, Elements of Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1969. Pg. 215.
The perception of pictures, whether as decorated objects or as represented scenes, consists of fitting schemas (a term loosely equivalent to images) to what is given by each momentary glance. The different modes by which pictures can be perceived probably depend (1) on the schemas that one elects to fit to the momentary glance; (2) on the peculiar characteristics of the fovea and periphery of the retina of the eye; (3) and on the way in which we deploy our eyes across successive glances.
Julian Hochberg. “Some of the Things That Paintings Are.” British Journal of Aesthetics 21:1, 1997. Pg. 93-95.
The eye, like the groping hand, scans the page, and the cues or messages it elicits are used by the questioning mind to narrow our uncertainties.
E. H. Gombrich, “Illusion and Visual Deadlock.” Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1963. Pg. 156.
It’s All About Choice – The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining – as well as to their experience of the pain of burns. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach – though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Pg. 8.
Close observation of a single subject, whether it is as tiny as Pasteur’s microbes or as great as Einstein’s universe, is the kind of work that happens less and less these days. Glued to computer and TV screens, we have forgotten how to look at the natural world, the original instructor on how to be curious about detail.
Jennifer New, Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Pg. 20.
In Piaget’s terms, perception is “centrated” rather than “decentrated”. In Arnheim’s terms, the solution is “local” rather than “contextual.” The viewer looks, but looks at parts rather than at the ways those parts interact with each other. Teaching in the arts is very much concerned with helping students learn how to see the interactions among the qualities constituting the whole.
Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pg. 76.
Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories (red, yellow, dark, thick, thin) remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one tends to forget that the visual is always the result of an unrepeatable, momentary encounter. Appearances, at any given moment, are a construction emerging from the debris of everything that has previously appeared. It is something like this that I understand in those words of Cezanne, which so often come back to me: “One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.”
John Berger, Drawn To That Moment. Cork: Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 41.
David Hockney on what turns a picture into a masterpiece: "The eye is always moving; if it isn’t moving you are dead."
David Hockney (in interview with Martin Gayford). The Guardian. 26 September 2016.
Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and froth over the walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of coloured light - an image the normal eye only captures by squinting.
Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. Vintage Books, Randomn House NY 1983 pp 12-13
“But, the longer I live, the more ground I see to hold in high honour a certain sort of childishness or innocent susceptibility. Generally speaking, I find that when we first look at a subject, we get a glimpse of some of the greatest truths about it: as we look longer, our vanity, and false reasoning, and half-knowledge, lead us into various wrong opinions; but as we look longer still, we gradually return to our first impressions, only with a full understanding of their mystical and innermost reasons; and of much beyond and beside them, not then known to us, now added (partly as a foundation, partly as a corollary) to what at first we felt we saw”.
Complete Works of John Ruskin series four Delphi Classics 2014 version 1 p 1293
Wallace Stevens
… our perception tends under natural circumstances to be ‘object- directed’ rather than ‘stimulus-directed.’ That is, we customarily seek to achieve an accurate perception not of the isolated stimulus attribute, but of the whole object. The functional value of this is obvious, inasmuch as it is with whole objects in our environment that we must cope. In order to see objects, we must necessarily take account of patterns of stimuli, not isolated stimulus attributes, and in so doing we can achieve perceptual constancy of objects.
David Krech, Richard S. Crutchfield, and Norman Livson, Elements of Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1969. Pg. 215.
The perception of pictures, whether as decorated objects or as represented scenes, consists of fitting schemas (a term loosely equivalent to images) to what is given by each momentary glance. The different modes by which pictures can be perceived probably depend (1) on the schemas that one elects to fit to the momentary glance; (2) on the peculiar characteristics of the fovea and periphery of the retina of the eye; (3) and on the way in which we deploy our eyes across successive glances.
Julian Hochberg. “Some of the Things That Paintings Are.” British Journal of Aesthetics 21:1, 1997. Pg. 93-95.
The eye, like the groping hand, scans the page, and the cues or messages it elicits are used by the questioning mind to narrow our uncertainties.
E. H. Gombrich, “Illusion and Visual Deadlock.” Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1963. Pg. 156.
It’s All About Choice – The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining – as well as to their experience of the pain of burns. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach – though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Pg. 8.
Close observation of a single subject, whether it is as tiny as Pasteur’s microbes or as great as Einstein’s universe, is the kind of work that happens less and less these days. Glued to computer and TV screens, we have forgotten how to look at the natural world, the original instructor on how to be curious about detail.
Jennifer New, Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Pg. 20.
In Piaget’s terms, perception is “centrated” rather than “decentrated”. In Arnheim’s terms, the solution is “local” rather than “contextual.” The viewer looks, but looks at parts rather than at the ways those parts interact with each other. Teaching in the arts is very much concerned with helping students learn how to see the interactions among the qualities constituting the whole.
Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pg. 76.
Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories (red, yellow, dark, thick, thin) remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one tends to forget that the visual is always the result of an unrepeatable, momentary encounter. Appearances, at any given moment, are a construction emerging from the debris of everything that has previously appeared. It is something like this that I understand in those words of Cezanne, which so often come back to me: “One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.”
John Berger, Drawn To That Moment. Cork: Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 41.
David Hockney on what turns a picture into a masterpiece: "The eye is always moving; if it isn’t moving you are dead."
David Hockney (in interview with Martin Gayford). The Guardian. 26 September 2016.
Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and froth over the walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of coloured light - an image the normal eye only captures by squinting.
Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. Vintage Books, Randomn House NY 1983 pp 12-13
“But, the longer I live, the more ground I see to hold in high honour a certain sort of childishness or innocent susceptibility. Generally speaking, I find that when we first look at a subject, we get a glimpse of some of the greatest truths about it: as we look longer, our vanity, and false reasoning, and half-knowledge, lead us into various wrong opinions; but as we look longer still, we gradually return to our first impressions, only with a full understanding of their mystical and innermost reasons; and of much beyond and beside them, not then known to us, now added (partly as a foundation, partly as a corollary) to what at first we felt we saw”.
Complete Works of John Ruskin series four Delphi Classics 2014 version 1 p 1293
On the Visual Elements: Light & Shadow
Before Piero, painters generally depicted objects in cartoon fashion, without shadows. If shadows were included in a painting they were for the most part inconsistent and confusing because the painters did not understand the organizing benefits of perspectivist space. Piero’s shadows fell consistently on one side opposite the light source.
Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Pg. 54.
Constancy tells us that light sources are overhead… Though this is primarily attributable to our understanding of sunlight, most artificial light sources are also placed overhead. We prefer it that way. …We find light sources at eye level disturbing. Light from underneath an object may actually cause spatial inversion. The aspect of the brain’s mechanisms that we call perceptual constancy is so strong that the concave face is difficult to see. …This is why a person’s face looks so eerie and frightening when we hold a flashlight underneath the chin. It’s a ghastly sight to us – the face appears to be turned wrong-side out.
Jack Fredrick Myers, The Language of Visual Art: Perception as a Basis for Design. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1989. Pg. 117.
Light and shadow can be a very real help to you in seeing and understanding the form …Shadows can be a helpful element only when you make the integrity of the form your first consideration.
Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Pg. 140.
Without even realizing it, we make use of the information provided by shadows. Shadows make it possible to recognize the shape of three-dimensional objects that are all around us, define surfaces, and indicate the time of day. Lighting is one of the most important questions in drawing. Learning to draw requires learning how to see shadows and represent them with all their inherent logic.
Technical control in the distribution of light and shadow is a crucial, defining factor that must be learned if we wish to endow the depiction with greater realism.
Introduction of Light and Shadow in Drawing. New York: Barron’s Educational Series Inc., 2005. Pg. 1.
Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Pg. 54.
Constancy tells us that light sources are overhead… Though this is primarily attributable to our understanding of sunlight, most artificial light sources are also placed overhead. We prefer it that way. …We find light sources at eye level disturbing. Light from underneath an object may actually cause spatial inversion. The aspect of the brain’s mechanisms that we call perceptual constancy is so strong that the concave face is difficult to see. …This is why a person’s face looks so eerie and frightening when we hold a flashlight underneath the chin. It’s a ghastly sight to us – the face appears to be turned wrong-side out.
Jack Fredrick Myers, The Language of Visual Art: Perception as a Basis for Design. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1989. Pg. 117.
Light and shadow can be a very real help to you in seeing and understanding the form …Shadows can be a helpful element only when you make the integrity of the form your first consideration.
Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Pg. 140.
Without even realizing it, we make use of the information provided by shadows. Shadows make it possible to recognize the shape of three-dimensional objects that are all around us, define surfaces, and indicate the time of day. Lighting is one of the most important questions in drawing. Learning to draw requires learning how to see shadows and represent them with all their inherent logic.
Technical control in the distribution of light and shadow is a crucial, defining factor that must be learned if we wish to endow the depiction with greater realism.
Introduction of Light and Shadow in Drawing. New York: Barron’s Educational Series Inc., 2005. Pg. 1.
On the Visual Elements: Value
Like line and shape, value is a versatile compositional tool. Value can increase attention to a form’s direction, weight, or importance; it creates visual diversity but also serves a strong unifying agent.
Nathan Goldstein, The Art of Responsive Drawing. 5th ed. Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999. Pg. 80.
Nathan Goldstein, The Art of Responsive Drawing. 5th ed. Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999. Pg. 80.
On the Act and Process of Drawing
*The Project Gutenberg Etext of James Nasmyth's Autobiography*
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/476/pg476-images.html
Drawing is a carefully choreographed dance between the brain, eyes, and hands. It requires the cooperation and coordination of the three to translate what’s seen in the mind to what’s drawn on paper. It doesn’t always quite work out. Things—namely, your hands—can get in the way of artistic vision. But what if they didn’t have to? In the recent exhibition Drawing With My Eyes, artist Graham Fink drew portraits using only his eyes, some software and enviable amounts of concentration.
(Video: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/artist-draws-detailed-portraits-eyes/)
Liz Stinson, “Artist Draws Detailed Portraits With Only His Eyes,” WIRED.com, 24 March 2015.
Drawing from life involves deciding what line to draw as well as knowing how to draw it. During the drawing process which proceeds detail by detail, these two aspects, or subtasks, overlap completely. While the hand draws a line, the eye already perceives the next detail to draw; and while the eye captures the selected visual information, the hand already moves to draw the corresponding line.
John Tchalenko, “Eye movements in drawing simple lines.” Perception 36, 2007. Pg. 1152-1157.
Drawings are episodes characterized by intention, a beginning, a structure, and an end, yet what happens within that structure and between that beginning and end is driven by an open sense of possibility and intuition, one where tactile body and visual imagination coalesce. The drawing event is an occasion; an occasion to remember, to re(con)figure, to imagine, to react, to to react, to become possessed, to render. It is also an occasion to fail, to aspire and fall short.
Sara Schneckloth, “Marking Time, Figuring Space: Gesture and the Embodied Moment.” Journal of Visual Culture 7:277, 2008. Pg. 281.
Working from life is working from memory: the artist can only put down what remains in his head after looking. And the time between the instant when he looks at the model and the instant later when he looks at the paper or canvas or clay to copy what he has just seen might as well be an eternity. The model can go on standing forever, but the work will nonetheless be the product of an accumulation of memories none of which is quite the same as any other, because each of them is affected by what has gone before, by the continually changing relation between all that has already been put down and the next glance at the model. And it is not merely because of the necessity to look away from the model to look at the paper, canvas, clay that, as soon as we try to copy what is seen, it was seen: it is also because our mind has to get outside the sensation before we can copy it, our very awareness of having a sensation pushes it into the past, for we cannot think about our present thought, it slips away as we try and grasp it, because we try and grasp it. … Giacometti’s work lays naked the despair known to every artist who has tried to copy what he sees. At the same time it is an affirmation that there is a hard core which remains from all that has been seen and that this can be stabilised, this can be saved, this can be rendered as indestrucible
David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti. Pimlico, 1995. Pg. 47.
Drawing demands active and purposeful participation like that which is alluded to in the timeless Roman admonition carpe diem (seize the day). This phrase is a concise exhortation to actively explore, experience, and embrace each unfolding moment. Such focused concentration on immediate experience lies at the very heart of the drawing process.
Brian Curtis, Drawing from Observation: An Introduction to Perceptual Drawing. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002. Pg. 1-2.
The main reason for drawing, unless you have professional pretensions, is , I suppose, interest. People have made drawings from the earliest times. For art and design students, drawing is an essential tool and is the basic component of visual research from which most of their visual ideas must ultimately stem. Paradoxically, to learn to draw you don’t primarily have to learn special techniques and develop manual dexterity. You have to learn to see.
Ian Simpson, Drawing: Seeing and Observation. London: A&C Black, 1987. Pg. 9.
Drawing is a way of seeing. One test of whether you really understand something is whether you can put it into words in such a way as to teach it to someone else. Another test is whether you can draw it. A drawing is a picture of your understanding. Matisse declared that “to draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.” As most understandings are flawed, most drawings are flawed. One draws chiefly to advance one’s understanding.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 23.
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Life Drawing. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 3.
Perhaps these three stories suggest the three distinct ways in which drawings can function. There are those which study and question the visible, those which put down and communicate ideas, and those done from memory. Even in front of drawings by the old masters, the distinction between the three is important, for each type survives in a different way. Each type of drawing speaks in a different tense. To each we respond with a different capacity of imagination.
In the first kind of drawing (at one time such drawings were appropriately called studies) the lines on the paper are traces left behind by the artist’s gaze, which is ceaselessly leaving, going out, interrogating the strangeness, the enigma, of what is before they eys, however ordnary and everyday this may be. The sum total of the lines on the paper narrate a sort of optical emigration by which the artist, following his own gaze, settles on the person or tree or animal or mountain being drawn. And if the drawing succeeds, he stays there forever.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Drawing on Paper. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 47.
To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Drawn to that Moment. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 71.
… drawings have the advantage over photography that they can remove the desired information effortlessly from its irrelevant context and concentrate the attention on the subject being examined.
Susan Lambert, Reading Drawings: An Introduction to Looking at Drawings. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Pg. 133.
Everything has to come through the drawing. After that, the colors will be inevitable. In two days I’ll know whether there is any possibility of going on.
Alberto Giacometti (speaking with James Lord) in A Giacometti Portrait. James Lord. New York: 1965 Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1965. Pg. 60.
Not once, as I described the form of that mass, did I take my eyes off the model. Why? Because I wanted to be certain that nothing escaped me. Not for an instant did I think about the technical problem of its depiction on paper, which might have hindered the impulse of my intuition from my eye to my hand. As soon as my eye rests on the paper, this impulse comes to a stop… My aim is to test the extent to which my hands already feel what my eyes see.
Auguste Rodin in Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin. Anthony Luovici. London: John Murray, 1926. Pg. 138-9.
Drawing has had a bit of a renaissance recently: a plethora of books and apps have appeared, promoting drawing for mindfulness. And this time I think it’s more than just a bit of quackery and faddishness; for me at least, drawing directs attention in a way that seems to creates focus and a feeling of deep serenity at the same time. But the process of drawing does more than unlocking this state of mind; it can inspire creativity. It complements rational investigation. It helps us create and remember and build on our mental models of the world around and within us.
Dr. Alice Roberts in forward to Drawing for science, invention & discovery by Paul Carney 2018
We draw so that we can capture and preserve a memory. We have been doing it for thousands of years…
That thing I mentioned earlier about a drawing’s power to transport you back to the moment when you created it – there is a strange thing about that – because to a lesser degree you can also transport someone who was never there. Years from now, or days from now, people squinting at your sketch – good or bad – will be connecting with that time on a very personal, human level. Seeing and feeling the world through you.
This is why we draw.
Richard Johnson on drawing his son who recovered from heart surgery. Dec 31 2014. Washington Post
It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do. The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one’s naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort ‘to clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground.
Bridget Riley At the End of My Pencil London Review of Books Vol 31 No 19 October 2009
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n19/bridget-riley/at-the-end-of-my-pencil?utm_campaign=20200410%20DT18&utm_content=usca_nonsubs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=LRB%20themed%20email
Drawing is the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words. It is graphic language.
The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit. Who that possesses this language can fail to look back with pleasure on the course of a journey illustrated by pencil drawings? They bring back to you the landscapes you have seen, the old streets, the pointed gables, the entrances to the old churches, even the bits of tracery, with a vividness of association such as mere words could never convey.
James Nasmyth: Engineer, An Autobiography. Edited by Samuel Smiles March, 1996 [Etext #476]
The Project Gutenberg Etext of James Nasmyth's Autobiography
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/476/pg476-images.html
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/476/pg476-images.html
Drawing is a carefully choreographed dance between the brain, eyes, and hands. It requires the cooperation and coordination of the three to translate what’s seen in the mind to what’s drawn on paper. It doesn’t always quite work out. Things—namely, your hands—can get in the way of artistic vision. But what if they didn’t have to? In the recent exhibition Drawing With My Eyes, artist Graham Fink drew portraits using only his eyes, some software and enviable amounts of concentration.
(Video: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/artist-draws-detailed-portraits-eyes/)
Liz Stinson, “Artist Draws Detailed Portraits With Only His Eyes,” WIRED.com, 24 March 2015.
Drawing from life involves deciding what line to draw as well as knowing how to draw it. During the drawing process which proceeds detail by detail, these two aspects, or subtasks, overlap completely. While the hand draws a line, the eye already perceives the next detail to draw; and while the eye captures the selected visual information, the hand already moves to draw the corresponding line.
John Tchalenko, “Eye movements in drawing simple lines.” Perception 36, 2007. Pg. 1152-1157.
Drawings are episodes characterized by intention, a beginning, a structure, and an end, yet what happens within that structure and between that beginning and end is driven by an open sense of possibility and intuition, one where tactile body and visual imagination coalesce. The drawing event is an occasion; an occasion to remember, to re(con)figure, to imagine, to react, to to react, to become possessed, to render. It is also an occasion to fail, to aspire and fall short.
Sara Schneckloth, “Marking Time, Figuring Space: Gesture and the Embodied Moment.” Journal of Visual Culture 7:277, 2008. Pg. 281.
Working from life is working from memory: the artist can only put down what remains in his head after looking. And the time between the instant when he looks at the model and the instant later when he looks at the paper or canvas or clay to copy what he has just seen might as well be an eternity. The model can go on standing forever, but the work will nonetheless be the product of an accumulation of memories none of which is quite the same as any other, because each of them is affected by what has gone before, by the continually changing relation between all that has already been put down and the next glance at the model. And it is not merely because of the necessity to look away from the model to look at the paper, canvas, clay that, as soon as we try to copy what is seen, it was seen: it is also because our mind has to get outside the sensation before we can copy it, our very awareness of having a sensation pushes it into the past, for we cannot think about our present thought, it slips away as we try and grasp it, because we try and grasp it. … Giacometti’s work lays naked the despair known to every artist who has tried to copy what he sees. At the same time it is an affirmation that there is a hard core which remains from all that has been seen and that this can be stabilised, this can be saved, this can be rendered as indestrucible
David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti. Pimlico, 1995. Pg. 47.
Drawing demands active and purposeful participation like that which is alluded to in the timeless Roman admonition carpe diem (seize the day). This phrase is a concise exhortation to actively explore, experience, and embrace each unfolding moment. Such focused concentration on immediate experience lies at the very heart of the drawing process.
Brian Curtis, Drawing from Observation: An Introduction to Perceptual Drawing. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002. Pg. 1-2.
The main reason for drawing, unless you have professional pretensions, is , I suppose, interest. People have made drawings from the earliest times. For art and design students, drawing is an essential tool and is the basic component of visual research from which most of their visual ideas must ultimately stem. Paradoxically, to learn to draw you don’t primarily have to learn special techniques and develop manual dexterity. You have to learn to see.
Ian Simpson, Drawing: Seeing and Observation. London: A&C Black, 1987. Pg. 9.
Drawing is a way of seeing. One test of whether you really understand something is whether you can put it into words in such a way as to teach it to someone else. Another test is whether you can draw it. A drawing is a picture of your understanding. Matisse declared that “to draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.” As most understandings are flawed, most drawings are flawed. One draws chiefly to advance one’s understanding.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 23.
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Life Drawing. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 3.
Perhaps these three stories suggest the three distinct ways in which drawings can function. There are those which study and question the visible, those which put down and communicate ideas, and those done from memory. Even in front of drawings by the old masters, the distinction between the three is important, for each type survives in a different way. Each type of drawing speaks in a different tense. To each we respond with a different capacity of imagination.
In the first kind of drawing (at one time such drawings were appropriately called studies) the lines on the paper are traces left behind by the artist’s gaze, which is ceaselessly leaving, going out, interrogating the strangeness, the enigma, of what is before they eys, however ordnary and everyday this may be. The sum total of the lines on the paper narrate a sort of optical emigration by which the artist, following his own gaze, settles on the person or tree or animal or mountain being drawn. And if the drawing succeeds, he stays there forever.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Drawing on Paper. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 47.
To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.
John Berger, Berger on Drawing: Drawn to that Moment. Occasional Press, 2005. Pg. 71.
… drawings have the advantage over photography that they can remove the desired information effortlessly from its irrelevant context and concentrate the attention on the subject being examined.
Susan Lambert, Reading Drawings: An Introduction to Looking at Drawings. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Pg. 133.
Everything has to come through the drawing. After that, the colors will be inevitable. In two days I’ll know whether there is any possibility of going on.
Alberto Giacometti (speaking with James Lord) in A Giacometti Portrait. James Lord. New York: 1965 Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1965. Pg. 60.
Not once, as I described the form of that mass, did I take my eyes off the model. Why? Because I wanted to be certain that nothing escaped me. Not for an instant did I think about the technical problem of its depiction on paper, which might have hindered the impulse of my intuition from my eye to my hand. As soon as my eye rests on the paper, this impulse comes to a stop… My aim is to test the extent to which my hands already feel what my eyes see.
Auguste Rodin in Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin. Anthony Luovici. London: John Murray, 1926. Pg. 138-9.
Drawing has had a bit of a renaissance recently: a plethora of books and apps have appeared, promoting drawing for mindfulness. And this time I think it’s more than just a bit of quackery and faddishness; for me at least, drawing directs attention in a way that seems to creates focus and a feeling of deep serenity at the same time. But the process of drawing does more than unlocking this state of mind; it can inspire creativity. It complements rational investigation. It helps us create and remember and build on our mental models of the world around and within us.
Dr. Alice Roberts in forward to Drawing for science, invention & discovery by Paul Carney 2018
We draw so that we can capture and preserve a memory. We have been doing it for thousands of years…
That thing I mentioned earlier about a drawing’s power to transport you back to the moment when you created it – there is a strange thing about that – because to a lesser degree you can also transport someone who was never there. Years from now, or days from now, people squinting at your sketch – good or bad – will be connecting with that time on a very personal, human level. Seeing and feeling the world through you.
This is why we draw.
Richard Johnson on drawing his son who recovered from heart surgery. Dec 31 2014. Washington Post
It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do. The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one’s naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort ‘to clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground.
Bridget Riley At the End of My Pencil London Review of Books Vol 31 No 19 October 2009
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n19/bridget-riley/at-the-end-of-my-pencil?utm_campaign=20200410%20DT18&utm_content=usca_nonsubs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=LRB%20themed%20email
Drawing is the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words. It is graphic language.
The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit. Who that possesses this language can fail to look back with pleasure on the course of a journey illustrated by pencil drawings? They bring back to you the landscapes you have seen, the old streets, the pointed gables, the entrances to the old churches, even the bits of tracery, with a vividness of association such as mere words could never convey.
James Nasmyth: Engineer, An Autobiography. Edited by Samuel Smiles March, 1996 [Etext #476]
The Project Gutenberg Etext of James Nasmyth's Autobiography
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/476/pg476-images.html
On Learning to Draw
The correlation between the act of drawing and training the eye is a significant aspect of drawing which has dominated much subsequent art school teaching, in the West and globally, and which remains one of the few notions about drawing generally regarded today as ‘irrefutable’. This popular truism is undermined by the fact that few students in the twenty-first century develop sophisticated hand-eye skills, and most drawing tends to be slight, spontaneous, expressive, gestural and often deliberately de-skilled.
Deanna Petherbridge, Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing. Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research. Series ed. John Steers. NSEAD, 2008. Pg. 27-41.
Perhaps the most fundamental discipline involved in drawing is learning to record what one sees. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this is not primarily a matter of manual skills. The physical requisites for drawing are minimal: average sight and average manual dexterity. Drawing is a matter of seeing, rather than of 20/20 vision and deft fingers. cannot see the difference.
Daniel M. Mendelowitz & Duane A. Wakeham, A Guide to Drawing. 4th ed. Holt Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1988. Pg. 32.
One has to train a new relationship between eye and memory. You can depict things from memory, but the more you rely on what you recall, the more inaccuracy you’ll have.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 51.
Connecting with things is part of the training of an artist. The first lesson is to slow down and look, to lend yourself to time and the world around you. “It is harder to see than it is to express,” Robert Henri, the painter and celebrated teacher, used to tell his students at the New York City’s Art Students League. Seeing takes time; it requires patience.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 66.
What’s essential is to work without any preconceptions whatever, without knowing in advance what the picture is going to look like. Van Gogh, for instance, worked with a preconception. He used to write to Theo, describing pictures he hadn’t yet painted. Picasso always has a preconception. But not Corot. His figure paintings are absolutely superb. And the Belfry of Douai, in the Louvre, it’s like a dream. It is very, very important to avoid all preconception, to try to see only what exists. Cezanne discovered that it’s impossible to copy nature. You can’t do it. But one must try all the same, try – like Cezanne – to translate one’s sensation.
Alberto Giacometti (speaking with James Lord) in A Giacometti Portrait. James Lord. New York: 1965 Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1965. Pg. 79.
Deanna Petherbridge, Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing. Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research. Series ed. John Steers. NSEAD, 2008. Pg. 27-41.
Perhaps the most fundamental discipline involved in drawing is learning to record what one sees. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this is not primarily a matter of manual skills. The physical requisites for drawing are minimal: average sight and average manual dexterity. Drawing is a matter of seeing, rather than of 20/20 vision and deft fingers. cannot see the difference.
Daniel M. Mendelowitz & Duane A. Wakeham, A Guide to Drawing. 4th ed. Holt Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1988. Pg. 32.
One has to train a new relationship between eye and memory. You can depict things from memory, but the more you rely on what you recall, the more inaccuracy you’ll have.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 51.
Connecting with things is part of the training of an artist. The first lesson is to slow down and look, to lend yourself to time and the world around you. “It is harder to see than it is to express,” Robert Henri, the painter and celebrated teacher, used to tell his students at the New York City’s Art Students League. Seeing takes time; it requires patience.
Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Pg. 66.
What’s essential is to work without any preconceptions whatever, without knowing in advance what the picture is going to look like. Van Gogh, for instance, worked with a preconception. He used to write to Theo, describing pictures he hadn’t yet painted. Picasso always has a preconception. But not Corot. His figure paintings are absolutely superb. And the Belfry of Douai, in the Louvre, it’s like a dream. It is very, very important to avoid all preconception, to try to see only what exists. Cezanne discovered that it’s impossible to copy nature. You can’t do it. But one must try all the same, try – like Cezanne – to translate one’s sensation.
Alberto Giacometti (speaking with James Lord) in A Giacometti Portrait. James Lord. New York: 1965 Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1965. Pg. 79.
On Drawing Research
The principles governing drawing … are sometimes mechanical and sometimes cognitive’. It is the mechanical that we are able to observe in the laboratory and it is the opportunity to analyze the record that permits speculation about the cognitive.
Peter van Sommers, Drawing and Cognition: Descriptive and Experimental Studies of Graphic Production Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
The relationship between drawing and thinking offers a potentially important topic for a drawing research agenda. Just how drawing supports cognitive processes, particularly creativity and the emergence of ideas, has been much discussed but little evidence has been used to construct a foundation of knowledge on which we might all build.
Steve Garner, Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research. Pg. 23.
Peter van Sommers, Drawing and Cognition: Descriptive and Experimental Studies of Graphic Production Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
The relationship between drawing and thinking offers a potentially important topic for a drawing research agenda. Just how drawing supports cognitive processes, particularly creativity and the emergence of ideas, has been much discussed but little evidence has been used to construct a foundation of knowledge on which we might all build.
Steve Garner, Towards a Critical Discourse in Drawing Research. Pg. 23.
On Creativity
Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles vol 1 2004 Simon & Schuster pg.121
Bob Dylan, Chronicles vol 1 2004 Simon & Schuster pg.121
