Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

The German artist Albrecht Dürer said, “From this, the treasure secretly gathered in your heart will become evident through your creative work.”

In order to gain access to the right hemisphere, it is necessary to present the left hemisphere with a task that it will turn down.

For the global skill of drawing, the basic component skills, as I have defined them, are:
The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts)
The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond)
The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion)
The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values)
The perception of the gestalt(seeing the wholeand its parts)

How does this help a person draw? It appears that the right brain perceives—processes visual information—in a mode suitable for drawing, and that the left-brain mode of functioning (L-mode) may be inappropriate for the task. Because of the strength and dominance of the L-mode, the problem we confront is how to “set aside” the L-mode in order to access the R-mode at the conscious level.

Julian Brooks defines style in drawing thusly: “Style: In drawing, the distinctive ‘handwriting’ or ‘artistic personality’ revealed by the myriad decisions made consciously and unconsciously by an artist (preference of media, viewpoint, moment depicted, method of drawing human features, etc.) while creating a work.”

Success is defined as the ability to effectively use all five of the basic perceptual skills of drawing: perceiving and drawing edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the gestalt (in a self-portrait, the likeness ).

We no longer attempt to teach our students without the help of viewfinders and the plastic picture plane, because these aids are so essential to your understanding of the basic nature of drawing. 1