The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (2 page)

Public-school teachers are also using my book. After twenty-five years of budget cuts in schools’ arts programs, I am happy to report that state departments of education and public school boards of education are starting to turn to the arts as one way to help repair our failing educational systems. Educational administrators, however, tend to be ambivalent about the purpose of including the arts, often still relegating arts education to “enrichment.” This term’s hidden meaning is “valuable but not essential.” My view, in contrast, is that the arts are essential for training specific, visual, perceptual ways of thinking, just as the “3R’s” are essential for training specific, verbal, numerical, analytical ways of thinking. I believe that both thinking modes—one to comprehend the details and the other to “see” the whole picture, for example, are vital for critical-thinking skills, extrapolation of meaning, and problem solving.

To help public-school administrators see the utility of arts education, I believe we must find new ways to teach students how to transfer skills learned through the arts to academic subjects and problem solving. Transfer of learning is traditionally regarded as a most difficult kind of instruction and, unfortunately, transfer is often left to chance. Teachers hope that students will “get” the connection, say, between learning to draw and “seeing” solutions to problems, or between learning English grammar and logical, sequential thinking.

My work with various corporations represents, I believe, one aspect of transfer of learning, in this instance, from drawing skills to a specific kind of problem solving sought by corporate executives. Depending on how much corporate time is available, a typical seminar takes three days: a day and a half focused on developing drawing skills and the remaining time devoted to using drawing for problem solving.

Groups vary in size but most often number about twenty-five. Problems can be very specific (“What is _?”—a specific chemical problem that had troubled a particular company for several years) or very general (“What is our relationship with our customers?”) or something in between specific and general (“How can members of our special unit work together more productively?”).

The first day and a half of drawing exercises includes the lessons in this book through the drawing of the hand. The twofold objective of the drawing lessons is to present the five perceptual strategies emphasized in the book and to demonstrate each participant’s potential artistic capabilities, given effective instruction.

The problem-solving segment begins with exercises in using drawing to think with. These exercises, called analog drawings, are described in my book
Drawing on the Artist Within.
Participants use the so-called “language of line,” first to draw out the problem and then to make visible possible solutions. These expressive drawings become the vehicle for group discussion and analysis, guided, but not led, by me. Participants use the concepts of edges (boundaries), negative spaces (often called “white spaces” in business parlance), relationships (parts of the problem viewed proportionally and “in perspective”), lights and shadows (extrapolation from the known to the as-yet unknown), and the gestalt of the problem (how the parts fit—or don’t fit—together).

The problem-solving segment concludes with an extended small drawing of an object, different for each participant, which has been chosen as somehow related to the problem at hand. This drawing, combining perceptual skills with problem solving, evokes an extended shift to an alternate mode of thinking which I have termed “R-mode,” during which the participant focuses on the problem under discussion while also concentrating on the drawing. The group then explores insights derived from this process.

The results of the seminars have been sometimes startling, sometimes almost amusing in terms of the obviousness of engendered solutions. An example of a startling result was a surprising revelation experienced by the group working on the chemical problem. It turned out that the group had so enjoyed their special status and favored position and they were so intrigued by the fascinating problem that they were in no hurry to solve it. Also, solving the problem would mean breaking up the group and returning to more humdrum work. All of this showed up clearly in their drawings. The curious thing was that the group leader exclaimed, “I thought that might be what was going on, but I just didn’t believe it!” The solution? The group realized that they needed—and welcomed—a serious deadline and assurance that other, equally interesting problems awaited them.

Another surprising result came in response to the question about customer relations. Participants’ drawings in that seminar were consistently complex and detailed. Nearly every drawing represented customers as small objects floating in large empty spaces. Areas of great complexity excluded these small objects. The ensuing discussion clarified the group’s (unconscious) indifference toward and inattention to customers. That raised other questions: What was in all of that empty negative space, and how could the complex areas (identified in discussion as aspects of the work that were more interesting to the group) make connection with customer concerns? This group planned to explore the problem further.

The group seeking more productive ways of working together came to a conclusion that was so obvious the group actually laughed about it. Their conclusion was that they needed to improve communication within the group. Members were nearly all scientists holding advanced degrees in chemistry and physics. Apparently, each person had a specific assignment for one part of the whole task, but they worked in different buildings with different groups of associates and on individual time schedules. For more than twenty-five years they had never met together as a group until we held our three-day seminar.

I hope these examples give at least some flavor of the corporate seminars. Participants, of course, are highly educated, successful professionals. Working as I do with a different way of thinking, the seminars seem to enable these highly trained people to see things differently. Because the participants themselves generate the drawings, they provide real evidence to refer to. Thus, insights are hard to dismiss and the discussions stay very focused.

I can only speculate why this process works effectively to get at information that is often hidden or ignored or “explained away” by the language mode of thinking. I think it’s possible that the language system (L-mode, in my terminology) regards drawing—especially analog drawing—as unimportant, even as just a form of doodling. Perhaps, L-mode drops out of the task, putting its censoring function on hold. Apparently, what the person knows but doesn’t know at a verbal, conscious level therefore comes pouring out in the drawings. Traditional executives, of course, may regard this information as “soft,” but I suspect that these unspoken reactions do have some effect on the ultimate success and failure of corporations. Broadly speaking, a glimpse of underlying affective dynamics probably helps more than it hinders.

Introduction

The subject of how people learn to draw has never lost its charm and fascination for me. Just when I begin to think I have a grasp on the subject, a whole new vista or puzzlement opens up. This book, therefore, is a work in progress, documenting my understanding at this time.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,
I believe, was one of the first practical educational applications of Roger Sperry’s pioneering insight into the dual nature of human thinking—verbal, analytic thinking mainly located in the left hemisphere, and visual, perceptual thinking mainly located in the right hemisphere. Since 1979, many writers in other fields have proposed applications of the research, each in turn suggesting new ways to enhance both thinking modes, thereby increasing potential for personal growth.

During the past ten years, my colleagues and I have polished and expanded the techniques described in the original book. We have changed some procedures, added some, and deleted some. My main purpose in revising the book and presenting this third edition is to bring the work up-to-date again for my readers.

As you will see, much of the original work is retained, having withstood the test of time. But one important organizing principle was missing in the original text, for the curious reason that I couldn’t see it until after the book was published. I want to reemphasize it here, because it forms the overall structure within which the reader can see how the parts of the book fit together to form a whole. This key principle is: Drawing is a global or “whole” skill requiring only a limited set of basic components.

This insight came to me about six months after the book was published, right in the middle of a sentence while teaching a group of students. It was the classic Ah-ha! experience, with the strange physical sensations of rapid heartbeat, caught breath, and a sense of joyful excitement at seeing everything fall into place. I had been reviewing with the students the set of skills described in my book when it hit me that this was it, there were no more, and that the book had a hidden content of which I had been unaware. I checked the insight with my colleagues and drawing experts. They agreed.

Like other global skills—for example, reading, driving, skiing, and walking—drawing is made up of component skills that become integrated into a whole skill. Once you have learned the components and have integrated them, you can draw—just as once you have learned to read, you know how to read for life; once you have learned to walk, you know how to walk for life. You don’t have to go on forever adding additional basic skills. Progress takes the form of practice, refinement of technique, and learning what to use the skills for.

This was an exciting discovery because it meant that a person can learn to draw within a reasonably short time. And, in fact, my colleagues and I now teach a five-day seminar, fondly known as our “Killer Class,” which enables students to acquire the basic component skills of realistic drawing in five days of intense learning.

The global skill of drawing a perceived object, person, landscape (something that you see “out there”) requires only five basic component skills, no more. These skills are not drawing skills. They are perceptual skills, listed as follows:

I am aware, of course, that additional basic skills are required for imaginative, expressive drawing leading to “Art with a capital A.” Of these, I have found two and only two additional skills: drawing from memory and drawing from imagination. And there remain, naturally, many techniques of drawing—many ways of manipulating drawing mediums and endless subject matter, for example. But, to repeat, for skillful realistic drawing of one’s perceptions, using pencil on paper, the five skills I will teach you in this book provide the required perceptual training.