My previous experiences of life drawing were mainly about skill acquisition. Drawing from the model was really about trying to get the image that I was making to look the best it possibly could. And by “best”, I mean most skilful. Although I was concentrating on the model and trying to see the nuances that needed to be translated into marks on the paper, my main focus was the image I was creating, not the model in the room.
Fifteen years on, and with a few other life experiences now behind me, I have discovered that my perception has changed. Of course I am interested in making images that convey something essential about the model I am drawing, but there’s more going on now.
For a start, I understand that my brain constantly play tricks on me. It encourages me to only see the things that I think I already know. This trickery means that I can sometimes slip into a kind of “knowing gaze” where the eyes are open, but the brain is in the way acting as a translator turning a difficult collection of shapes into convenient shorthand descriptions such as “foot”, “side of face”, and so on. The result of this filtration process is a drawing that may (or may not) look good, but captures nothing of the essence of the model sitting before me.
The difference today is that I am more aware that my brain is acting as this not-so-helpful translator of experience into pre-packaged shapes. And as a result, I trust my brain a lot less. My challenge today is to recognise the difference between looking and seeing, and to use this understanding to develop a more authentic connection to the thing I am drawing.
Looking is something we do everyday. Looking is a continuous act of recognition and labeling. It is the mechanism we use to get around the world and make sense of the information and symbols that bombard us from every angle. In a life overloaded with ideas and information, we have developed a very sophisticated sense of looking. We spot, recognise, label, prioritise, and dismiss thousands of times a second. Without this overdeveloped sense of looking we would be stopped in our tracks the same way a three-year-old is mesmerised by every stick, stone or insect between home and the local shop.
Seeing is different. Seeing is an unfiltered regard for the objects that appear before you. It is a pure response to the shapes that enter the eyes. My aim in life drawing now is to do less looking, and more seeing.
But it’s hard. We are trained to look. We don’t spend much time really seeing the world as it truly is. And I wonder if many problems in life might be better solved if we could learn to see instead of just look. If we could engage things as they really are, and not filter or apply our pre-packaged definitions of what is going on, we might stand a chance of actually finding the right answer.
Interestingly, in my work helping teams within large organisations navigate the difficult waters of change and transformation it is clear that there is a lot of looking, but not a lot of seeing going on. When presented with the difficult situations that every business leader comes up against in their work (things like resolving a dispute, dealing with de-motivated staff, sorting out internal turf wars, etc) people tend to look at the problem. But they rarely take the time to really see what is going on and get intimately familiar with the problem on its own terms. It is easier to look at it, label it, address it, and move on. But the consequence is that many hours are wasted in organisations for the simple lack of seeing.
So, maybe more people should go to life drawing classes and learn to see. What if life drawing were a requirement for all students in business schools? Would we find a new breed of business leader coming through with a heightened observational capacity to see the situation as it really is?
In a world built on an ability to perpetually increase our velocity, perhaps drawing is the way to re-acquaint us with the benefits of seeing what's really going on around us.
