The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (20 page)

Our job now is to bring this state into clearer focus and under greater conscious control, in order to take advantage of the right hemisphere’s superior ability to process visual information and to increase your ability to make the cognitive shift to R-mode at will.

6

Getting Around Your Symbol System: Meeting Edges and Contours

WE HAVE REVIEWED YOUR CHILDHOOD ART and the development of the set of symbols that formed your childhood language of drawing. This process paralleled the development of other symbol systems: speech, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Whereas these other symbol systems formed useful foundations for later development of verbal and computational skills, childhood drawing symbols seem to interfere with later stages of art.

Thus, the central problem of teaching realistic drawing to individuals from age ten or so onward is the persistence of memorized, stored drawing symbols when they are no longer appropriate to the task. In a sense, L-mode unfortunately continues to “think” it can draw long after the ability to process spatial, relational information has been lateralized to the right brain. When confronted with a drawing task, the language mode comes rushing in with its verbally linked symbols. Then afterward, ironically, the left brain is all too ready to supply derogatory words of judgment if the drawing looks childlike or naive.

In the last chapter I said that an effective way to “set aside” the dominant left verbal hemisphere and to “bring forward” your nondominant right brain, with its visual, spatial, relational style, is to present your brain with a task that the left brain either can’t or won’t work at. We have used the Vase/Faces drawings and upside-down drawings to illustrate this process. Now we’ll try another, more drastic strategy that will force a stronger cognitive shift and set aside your L-mode more completely.

I’ve called the method of the next exercise “Pure Contour Drawing,” and your left hemisphere is probably not going to enjoy it. Introduced by a revered art teacher, Kimon Nicolaides, in his 1941 book,
The Natural Way to Draw,
the method has been widely used by art teachers. I believe that our new knowledge about how the brain divides its workload provides a conceptual basis for understanding why Pure Contour Drawing is effective as a teaching method. At the time of writing his book, Nicolaides apparently felt that the reason the contour method improved students’ drawing was that it caused students to use both senses of sight and touch. Nicolaides recommended that students imagine that they were touching the form as they drew. I suggest an alternate possibility: L-mode rejects the meticulous, complex perceptions of spatial, relational information, thus allowing access to R-mode processing. In short, Pure Contour Drawing doesn’t suit the left brain’s style. It suits the style of the right brain—again, just what we want.

In my classes, I demonstrate Pure Contour Drawing, describing how to use the method as I draw—if I can manage to keep talking (an L-mode function) while I’m drawing. Usually, I start out all right but begin trailing off in mid-sentence after a minute or so. By that time, however, my students have the idea.

Following the demonstration, I show examples of previous students’ Pure Contour Drawings. See examples of students’ drawings on page 95.

Please read through the following instructions before you begin your drawing.

The temptation to turn and look at the drawing will be very strong. Resist the impulse! Don’t do it! Keep your eyes focussed on your hand.

Match the movement of the pencil exactly with your eye movement. One or the other may begin to speed up, but don’t let that happen. You must record everything at the very instant that you see each point on the contour. Do not pause in the drawing, but continue at a slow, even pace. At first you may feel uneasy or uncomfortable: Some students even report sudden headaches or a sense of panic.

Think back now on how you felt at the beginning of the Pure Contour Drawing compared to how you felt later, when you were deeply into the drawing. What did that later state feel like? Did you lose awareness of time passing? Like Max Ernst, did you become enamored of what you saw? When you return to the alternative state you were in, will you recognize it?