Transcription
We are reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.
Betty Edwards' Introduction:
Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.
Michael Kimmelman:
For more than 30 years, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" has been a work in progress. Since the original publication in 1979, I've revised the book three times, with each revision about a decade apart: 1989, 1999, now a third in 2012. In each revision, my main purpose has been to incorporate instructional improvements that my group of teachers and I had gleaned from continuously teaching drawing over the intervening years, as well as bringing up-to-date ideas and information from education and neuroscience that relate to drawing.
As you will see in this new version, much of the original material remains, as it has passed the test of time, while I continue to refine the lessons and clarify instructions. In addition, I make some new points about emergent right-brain significance and the astonishing, relatively new science called neuroplasticity. I make a case for my life's goal: the possibility that public schools will once again teach drawing, not only as a civilized thing to do and a boon to happiness, but also as perceptual training for improving creative thinking.
The Power of Perception:
Many of my readers have intuitively understood that this book is not only about learning to draw, and it is certainly not about art with a capital A. The true subject is perception. Yes, the lessons have helped many people attain the basic ability to draw, and that is a main purpose of the book. The larger, underlying purpose was always to bring right-hemisphere functions into focus and to teach readers how to see in new ways, with hopes that they would discover how to transfer perceptual skills to thinking and problem-solving.
In education, this is called transfer of learning, which has always been regarded as difficult to teach. And often, teachers, myself included, hope that it will just happen. Transfer learning, however, is best accomplished by direct teaching. And therefore, in Chapter 11 of this revised edition, I encourage that transfer by including some direct instruction on how perceptual skills learned through drawing can be used for thinking and problem-solving in other fields.
The book's drawing exercises are truly, on a basic level, intended for a beginner in drawing. The course is designed for persons who cannot draw at all, who feel that they have no talent for drawing, and who believe that they probably can never learn to draw. Over the years, I've said many times that the lessons in this book are not on the level of art, but are rather more like learning how to read, more like the ABCs of reading: learning the alphabet, phonics, syllabification, vocabulary, and so on. And just as learning basic reading is a vitally important goal because the skills of reading transfer to every other kind of learning, from math and science to philosophy and astronomy, I believe that in time, learning to draw will emerge as an equally vital skill, one that provides equally transferable powers of perception to guide and promote insight into the meaning of visual and verbal information.
I will even go out on a limb and say that we mistakenly may have been putting all our educational eggs into one basket only, while shortchanging other truly valuable capabilities of the human brain, namely perception, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
The Hidden Content:
About six months after publication of the original book in 1979, I had the odd experience of suddenly realizing that the book I thought I had written contained another content, of which I was unaware. That hidden content was something I didn't know I knew. I had inadvertently defined the basic component skills of the global skill of drawing. I think part of the reason this content was hidden from me was the very nature of art education at the time, where beginning drawing classes focused on subject matter such as still life drawing, or landscape drawing, or figure drawing, or on drawing medium such as charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, ink wash, or mixtures of mediums.
But my aim was different. I needed to provide my readers with exercises that would cause a cognitive shift to the right hemisphere, a shift similar to that caused by upside-down drawing, or tricking the dominant left hemisphere into dropping out of the task. I settled on five subskills that seemed to have the same effect. But at the same time, I thought there must be other basic skills, maybe dozens of them.
Then, months after the book had been published, in the midst of teaching a class, it hit me as an "aha!" that for learning to draw realistic images of observed objects, the five subskills were it. There weren't more. I had inadvertently selected from the many aspects of drawing a few fundamental subskills that I thought might be closely aligned to the effect of upside-down drawing. And the five skills, I realized, were not drawing skills in the usual sense; they were rock-bottom, fundamental seeing skills: how to perceive edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadow, and the Gestalt. As with the ABCs of reading, these were the skills you had to have in order to draw any subject.
I was elated by this discovery. I discussed it at length with my colleagues and searched through old and new textbooks on drawing, but we did not find any additional fundamental basic components of the global skill of basic realistic drawing, drawing one's perceptions. With this discovery, it occurred to me that perhaps drawing could be quickly and easily taught and learned, not strung out over years and years as was the current practice in art schools. My aim suddenly became drawing for everyone, not just for artists and trainers.
Clearly, the basic ability to draw does not necessarily lead to the fine art found in museums and galleries, any more than the basic ability to read and write inevitably leads to literary greatness and published works of literature. But learning to draw was something I knew was valued by children and adults. Thus, my discovery led me in new directions, resulting in a 1989 revision of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," in which I focused on explaining my insight and proposing that individuals who had never been able to draw could learn to draw well very rapidly.
Subsequently, my colleagues and I developed a five-day workshop of 40 hours of teaching and learning (eight hours a day for five days), which proved to be surprisingly effective. Students acquired quite high-level basic drawing skills in that brief time and gained all the information they needed to go on making progress in drawing. Since drawing perceives subjects, it is always the same task; it always requires the five basic component skills. They could just proceed to any subject matter, learn to use any or all drawing mediums, and take the skill as far as they wished. They could also apply their new visual skills to thinking. The parallels to learning to read were becoming obvious.
Over the next decade, from 1989 to 1999, the connection of perceptual skills to general thinking, problem-solving, and creativity became a more central focus for me, especially after publication of my '86 book, "Drawing on the Artist Within." In this book, I proposed a written language for the right hemisphere: a language of line, the expressive language of art itself. This idea of using drawing to aid thinking proved to be quite useful in a class on creativity that I developed for university students and in small corporate seminars on problem-solving.
Then, in 1999, I again revised "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," again incorporating what we had learned over the years of teaching the five basic skills and refining the lessons. I especially focused on the skill of sighting, which is proportion and perspective, which is perhaps the most difficult component skill to teach in words because of its complexity and its reliance on students' acceptance of paradox, always a theme to the logical, concept-bound left brain. In addition, I urged using perceptual skills to see problems.
Now, with this third revision in 2012, I want to clarify, to the best of my abilities, the global nature of drawing and to link drawing's basic component skills to thinking in general and to creativity in particular. Throughout many cultures, both in the United States and worldwide, there is much talk of creativity and our need for innovation and invention. There are many suggestions to try this or try that, but the nitty-gritty of precisely how to become more creative is seriously lacking.
Our education system seems bent on eliminating every last bit of creative, perceptual training of the right side of the brain, while overemphasizing the skills best accomplished by the left side of the brain: memorizing dates, data, theorems, and events with the goal of passing standardized tests. Today, we are not only testing and grading our children into the ground, but we are not teaching them how to see and understand the deep meaning of what they learn, or to perceive the connectedness of information about the world.
It is indeed time to try something different. Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning. According to a recent news report, a small group of cognitive scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles is recommending something they call perceptual learning as a remedy to our failing educational practices. They express hope that such training will transfer to other contexts, and they have had some success with achieving transfer. Discouragingly, however, the news report ended in an educational wash. With computerized learning tools and pilot programs of all kinds, the future of such perceptual learning efforts is far from certain. Scientists still don't know the best way to train perceptual intuition or which specific principles it's best suited for. And such tools, if they are incorporated into curriculums in any real way, will be subject to the judgment of teachers.
I would like to suggest that we already have the best way to train perceptual skills. It has been staring us in the face for decades, and we haven't, or wouldn't, or couldn't accept it. I think it's not a coincidence that as drawing and creative arts in general have steadily diminished in school curricula since the mid-20th century, the educational achievement of students in the United States has likewise diminished to the point that we now rank behind Singapore, Taiwan, and seven other countries.
In 1969, perceptual psychologist Rudolph Arnheim, one of the most widely read and respected scientists of the 20th century, wrote: "The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in every field of academic study. What is most needed is not more aesthetics or more esoteric manuals of art education, but a convincing case made for visual thinking quite in general. Once we understand in theory, we might try to heal in practice the unwholesome split which cripples the training of reasoning power."
Drawing does indeed involve thought, and it is an effective and efficient method for perceptual training. And perceptual knowledge can impact learning in all disciplines. We now know how to rapidly teach drawing. We know that learning to draw, like learning to read, is not dependent on something called talent, and that given proper instruction, every person is able to learn the skill. Furthermore, given proper instruction, people can learn to transfer the basic perceptual components of drawing to other learning and to general thinking. And as Michael Kimmelman said, learning to draw is a boon to happiness, a panacea for the soul-toying and uncreative drudgery of standardized testing that our schools have embraced.
Our Two Minds in Modern Multitasking:
Today, as research expands in the information processing styles and proclivities of the hemispheres, the ever-clearer respected scientists are recognizing functional differences as evident and real, despite the fact that both hemispheres appear to be involved to a greater or lesser extent in every human activity. And there remains much uncertainty about the reason for the profound asymmetry of the human brain, which we seem to be aware of at the level of language expression. "I am of two minds about that," clearly states our human situation.
Our two minds, however, have not had an equal playing field until recently. Language has dominated worldwide, especially in modern technological cultures like our own. Visual perception has been more or less taken for granted, with little requirement for special concern or education. Now, however, computer scientists who are trying to replicate human visual perception find it extremely complicated and slow-going. After decades of effort, scientists have finally achieved facial recognition by computers, but reading the meaning of changes in facial expression, accomplished instantly and effortlessly by the right hemisphere, will take much more time and work.
Meanwhile, visual images are everywhere. The visual and verbal information compete for attention. Constant multitasking linked to information overload challenges the brain's ability to rapidly shift modes or to simultaneously deal with both modes of input. The recent banning of texting while driving illustrates the problem of the brain's difficulty in simultaneously processing two modes of information. This recognition that we need to find productive ways to use both modes, perhaps explains why replicating right-hemisphere processes is only now emerging as important, and even perhaps critical.
A Complication: The Brain That Studies Itself:
As a number of scientists have noted, research on the human brain is complicated by the fact that the brain is struggling to understand itself. This three-pound organ is perhaps the only bit of matter in our universe, at least as far as we know, that observes and studies itself, wonders about itself, tries to analyze how it does what it does, and tries to maximize its capabilities. This paradoxical situation no doubt contributes to the deep mysteries that still remain, despite rapidly expanding scientific knowledge.
One of the most encouraging new discoveries that the human brain is made about itself is that it can physically change itself by changing its accustomed ways of thinking, by deliberately exposing itself to new ideas and routines, and by learning new skills. This discovery has led to a new category of neuroscientists, neuroplastician, who use micro-electrodes and brain scans to track complex brain maps of neuronal communication and who have observed the brain revising its neuronal maps.
Brain Plasticity: A New Way to Think About Talent:
This conception of a plastic brain, a brain that constantly changes with experience, that can reorganize and transmute, and even develop new cells and new cell connections, is in direct contrast to previous judgments of the human brain as being more akin to a hardwired machine with its parts genetically determined and unchangeable, except for development in early childhood and deterioration in old age.
For teachers like myself, the science of brain plasticity is both exciting and real. Exciting because it opens vast new possibilities, and reaffirming because the idea that learning can change the way people live and think has always been a goal of education. Now, at last, we can move beyond the idea of fixed intelligence limits and special gifts for the lucky few, and look for new ways to enhance potential brain power.
One of the exciting new horizons that brain plasticity opens is the possibility of questioning the concept of talent, especially the concepts of artistic talent and creative talent. Nowhere has the idea of a hardwired brain with its notion of "given or not given" talent been as widespread as in the field of art, and especially in drawing. Because drawing is the entry-level skill for all the visual arts, the common remark, "Drawing? Not on your life! I can't even draw a straight line. I can barely draw a bath," is still routinely announced with full conviction by many adults, and even more distressingly, by many children as young as eight or nine, who have tried and sadly judged as failures their attempts to draw.
With perceptions, the reason given for this situation is often a flat-out statement: "I have no artistic talent." And yet, we know now from knowledge of brain plasticity and from decades of work by me and many others in the field that drawing is simply a skill that can be taught and learned by anyone of sound mind who has learned other skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Drawing, however, is not regarded as an essential skill in the way the three Rs are viewed as necessary life skills. It is seen as perhaps a peripheral skill, nice to have as a pastime or hobby, but certainly not indispensable. And yet, somehow, at some level, we sense that something important is being ignored. Surprisingly, people often equate their lack of drawing skills with the lack of creativity, even though they may be highly creative in other areas of their lives. And the importance of perception often shows up in the words we speak, phrases that we speak of "seeing" and "receiving." When we finally understand something, we exclaim, "Now I see it!" Or when someone fails to understand, we say, "The person can't see the forest for the trees," or "doesn't get the picture." This implies that perception is important to understanding, and we hope that we somehow learn to perceive, but it is a skill without a classroom and without a curriculum. I propose that drawing can be that curriculum.
Public Education and the Arts:
Drawing, of course, is not the only art that trains perceptual thinking. Music, dance, drama, painting, design, sculpture, and ceramics are all vitally important and should all be restored to public schools. But I'll be blunt: even if there were the will, there is no way that will happen because it would cost too much. In this era of ever-diminishing resources for public education, music requires costly instruments; dance and drama require staging, costume; sculpture and ceramics require equipment and supplies. Although I wish it were otherwise, high-cost visual and performing arts programs that were terminated long ago will not be reinstated.
And cost is not the only deterrent. Over the last 40 years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let's face it, frivolous, especially the visual arts with their connotation of the "starving artist" and the mistaken concept of necessary talent. The one art subject that we could easily afford is drawing: the skill that is basic to training the visual perception and is therefore the entry-level subject, the ABCs of perceptual skill building.
Among people who oppose art education, drawing doesn't escape the frivolity label, but it is affordable to teach. Drawing requires the simplest of materials: paper and pencils. It requires a minimum of simple equipment and no special rooms or buildings. The most significant requirement is a teacher who knows how to draw, knows how to teach the basic perceptual skills of drawing, and knows how to transfer those skills to other domains. Of all the arts, drawing is the one that can fit into today's rapidly shrinking school budgets. And most parents are very supportive if their children acquire real, substantive drawing skills, as opposed to the more usual "expressive manipulation of materials" in vogue in recent decades.
At around age seven to nine, children long to learn how to make things look real in their drawings, and they are well able to learn to draw, given appropriate teaching. If educators would find the will, there would be a way. Try something new. We could at least give it a try.
Our American public schools are failing fast. The more we double down on teaching facts and figures, the more we focus on standardized testing, the more left-brained our schools become, the more our children are failing, even our standardized tests, while the dropout rates rise ominously. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He also said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
In light of the United States' appalling worldwide standing in reading, math, and science, surely it is time to try something different, namely to begin purposefully educating the other half of the brain in order to maximize the powers of both hemispheres. I believe the goal of education should be not only to pass necessary standardized tests but also to enable our students to acquire and apply understanding to what they have learned. Ideally, of course, students should develop rational, orderly thinking processes (left-hemisphere skills) that are compatible with investigation, dissection, reduction, examination, summary, and abstraction. If we also teach students right-hemisphere perceptual skills, they will help students see things in context, see the whole picture, see things in proportion and in perspective, and observe and apprehend. In short, to understand and bring meaning to the fragmented world of the left hemisphere.
Teaching for Transfer of Learning to Promote Understanding:
We could teach our children perceptual skills through drawing in elementary school, starting around the fourth and fifth grade, not with the intention of training future artists, but with the intention of teaching students how to transfer perceptual skills learned through drawing to general thinking skills and problem-solving skills. After all, we do not teach children to read and write with the goal of training future poets and authors. With careful teaching for transfer, drawing and reading together can educate both halves of the brain.
A further argument for perceptual training is the ameliorative effect that a partial focus on right-hemisphere learning might have on our public school's curriculum. To have even a small part of the school day free from continuous left-brain verbal discourse might provide some welcome quiet time and relief from incessant competitive verbal pressure. In days long past, when I attended ordinary working-class public schools, art classes, cooking classes, sewing classes, ceramics, woodworking, metalworking, and gardening provided welcome breaks in the academic day with time for solitary thought. Silence is a rare commodity in modern classrooms, and drawing is an individual, silent, timeless task.
Two Vital Global Skills: Reading and Drawing:
What are the skills you will learn through drawing, and how do they transfer to general thinking? Drawing, like reading, is a global skill made up of component subskills that are learned step by step. Then, with practice, the components meld seamlessly into smoothly functioning global activities of reading and drawing.
For the global skill of drawing, the basic component skills, as I have defined them, are:
1. The perception of edges: seeing where one thing ends and another starts.
2. The perception of space: seeing what lies beside and beyond.
3. The perception of relationships: seeing in perspective and in proportion.
4. The perception of lights and shadows: seeing things in degrees of values.
5. The perception of the Gestalt: seeing the whole and its parts.
The first four skills require direct teaching. The fifth occurs as an outcome or insight, a visual and mental comprehension of the perceived subject, resulting from the focused attention of the first four. Most students experience these skills as new learning, seeing in ways they haven't seen previously. As one student put it after drawing her own hand: "I never really looked at my hand before. Now I see it differently." Often, students say, "Before I learned to draw, I think I was just naming things I saw. Now it's different." And many students remark that seeing negative spaces, for example, is an entirely new experience.
Turning to reading specialists and teaching reading, the basic component skills of reading, mainly taught in elementary schools, are: phonetic awareness (which is knowing that alphabet letters represent sounds), phonics (recognizing letter sounds in words), vocabulary (knowing the meaning of words), fluency (being able to read quickly and smoothly), and comprehension (grasping the meaning of what is read). As in drawing, the last skill of comprehension ideally occurs as an outcome or result of the preceding skills.
I'm aware, of course, that many additional skills are required for drawing that leads to art with a capital A, the world of artists, galleries, and museums. There remain countless materials and mediums, along with endless practice to achieve mastery, as well as that unknown spark of originality and genius that marks a truly great artist of any time. Once you have learned basic drawing skills, you can move on, if you wish, to drawing from memory, drawing from imagined images, and creating abstract or non-objective images. But for skillful, realistic drawing of one's perceptions using pencil on paper, the five skills I will teach you in this book will provide adequate basic perceptual training to enable you to draw what you see.
The same is true of basic reading, of course. There are many refinements of reading abilities depending on subject matter and formats other than print on paper. But for both skills, the basic components are the foundation. Once you can read, your plastic brain has been forever changed. You can read anything, at least in your native language, and you can read for life. Likewise, once you have learned to draw, your brain has again been changed. You can draw anything that you see with your own eyes, and the skill stays with you for life.
All right, I think we are going to call it there because we're about a thousand bars on GarageBand. So, uh, yeah, we are reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," and we're, I think we're getting some progress here. We're about halfway through the introduction. See you next episode. Later.