Catfacehorse

Reading A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense this morning, a section on the construction of perception jumped out at me. Our brains have an amazing capacity to construct our perceptions  so that our world appears full of stable phenomena. I learned this way back in high school psychology, but it just struck me this afternoon that here might lie part of the joy of drawing for me.

Our brains perceive an object as having constant qualities, even though changes in light or position can change the object’s appearance. For example, I will see my familiar red bedspread out of the corner of my eye as red, even though peripheral vision doesn’t register colour. Mastering drawing depends on you tricking your brain into seeing things the way they really appear, before some of that interpretation. I need to actually see that the box isn’t perfectly square, it’s skewed towards me; that the arm pointed at me isn’t long, it’s foreshortened. For me, that flip into the seeing that you do for drawing is like magic, like seeing both sides of the visual illusion or seeing the 3D image in a magic eye picture. It also takes a fair bit of concentration for me, which is part of the fun.

Below is a picture I drew nearly three years ago that broke a long drawing drought and was followed by another long drawing drought. It took me ages, nearly two hours, as I needed to concentrate really hard to see the form of the objects, rather than perceive a lemon, capsicum and garlic.