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.

I went for a walk through the bush at my parent’s place in Tasmania this afternoon, looking for things to draw. I picked up blue-gum nuts, brown gumnuts with a cross on top like little hot cross buns and a tiny white animal skull nestled in the leaf litter.

I sat down to draw the skull, spending lots of time trying to get the intricacies just right. I finished the shading with my pen and sat back to look at it. It sucked. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t work, perhaps the relationships between the shapes weren’t quite right. It just looked wrong in a funny sort of way.

This often happens for me the first time I draw something, it seems to take me one go at drawing something new and complex before I can see it properly. I am going to have another try tomorrow, and see if it comes out any better. I don’t find I have this problem if the object is flattened out into 2D already. The picture below is a watercolour I did from a little business card-sized image of beetles, from the back of a Museum admission ticket.

Next here (I hope) will be a decent drawing of a skull. For now, I am enjoying the learning process.