The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (21 page)

Looking at your drawing, a tangled mass of pencil marks, perhaps you will say, “What a mess!” But look more closely and you will see that these marks are strangely beautiful. Of course, they do not represent the hand, only its details, and details within details. You have drawn complex edges from actual perceptions. These are not quick, abstract, symbolic representations of the wrinkles in your palm. They are painstakingly accurate, excruciatingly intricate, entangled, descriptive, and specific marks—just what we want at this point. I believe that these drawings are visual records of the R-mode state of consciousness. As a witty friend of mine, writer Judi Marks, remarked on viewing a Pure Contour Drawing for the first time, “No one in their left mind would do a drawing like that!”

The most important reason for this exercise is that Pure Contour Drawing apparently causes L-mode to “reject the task,” enabling you to shift to R-mode. Perhaps the lengthy, minute observation of severely limited, “non-useful,” and “boring” information—information that defies verbal description—is incompatible with L-mode’s thinking style.

Note that:

For reasons that are still unclear, Pure Contour Drawing is one of the key exercises in learning to draw. But it’s a paradox: Pure Contour Drawing, which doesn’t produce a “good” drawing (in students’ estimations), is the best exercise for effectively and efficiently causing students later to achieve good drawing. Even more important, though, this is the exercise that revives our childhood wonder and the sense of beauty found in ordinary things.

Apparently, in our habitual use of brain modes, L-mode seeks quickly to recognize (and name and categorize) by picking out details, while R-mode wordlessly perceives whole configurations and seeks how the parts fit together—or perhaps whether the parts fit together.

In regarding a hand, for example, the nails, the wrinkles and creases are details and the hand itself is the whole configuration. This “division of labor” works fine in ordinary life. In drawing a hand, however, one must give equal attention—visual attention—to both the configuration and the details and how they fit together into the whole. Pure Contour Drawing may function as a sort of “shock treatment” for the brain, forcing it to do things differently.

Pure Contour Drawing, I believe, causes L-mode to “drop out,” perhaps, as I mentioned before, through simple boredom. (“I’ve already named it—it’s a wrinkle, I tell you. They’re all alike. Why bother with all this looking.”) Once L-mode has “dropped out,” it seems possible that R-mode then perceives each wrinkle—normally regarded as a detail—as a whole configuration, made up of even smaller details. Then each detail of each wrinkle becomes a further whole, made up of ever-smaller parts, and so on, going deeper and deeper into ever expanding complexity. There is some similarity, I believe, to the phenomenon of fractals, in which whole patterns are constructed of smaller detailed whole patterns, which are constructed of ever smaller, detailed whole patterns.

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.

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.

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, a contour) is always the border of two things simultaneously—that is, a shared edge. The Vase/Faces exercise illustrates this concept. The line you drew was simultaneously the edge of the profile and the edge of the vase.

To sum up this concept: In drawing, an edge is always a shared boundary.

The child’s jigsaw puzzle, Figure 6-2, illustrates this important point. The edge of the boat is shared with the water. The edge of the sail is shared with the sky and the water. Put another way, the water stop where the boat begins—a shared edge. The water and the sky stop where the sail begins—shared edges.

Note also that the outer edge of the puzzle—its frame or
format,
meaning the bounding edge of the composition—is also the outer edge of the sky-shape, the land-shapes, and the water-shape.