California Natives
Betty Edwards is an 80-something-year-old Californian whose ideas about creativity and the brain have inspired millions of people to draw with confidence: faces, apples, hands. These days, the grandmother of two lives near San Diego and spends her retirement cooking, reading, gardening, drawing (of course) and, according to Wikipedia, appreciating “art in general.”
While teaching at California State University, Long Beach, Dr. Edwards explored the implications of brain function lateralization, or the specialization of cerebral hemispheres—left brain versus right. She wrote a book based on her research. Published in 1979, it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list within just two weeks, and in 1998 got my younger sister into a local art fair.
Actually, my sister got herself into an art fair (talent, drive) but in ways that elevated both her artistic confidence and drawing skills, Betty helped.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been translated into 13 languages and is the most widely used how-to-draw book in the world.
—
I’m thinking of another book, a biography of installation artist Robert Irwin. Also native to California, born in Long Beach; also in his eighties and now living in San Diego. Actually, I’m thinking of the title: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. I’ve yet to read the book.
Still, the title alone, in addition to being beautiful, says a lot. Among other things, it reminds me of Betty Edwards’ emphasis on facilitating visual/spatial discovery in a predominantly verbal/analytical education system.
“We deprive our children of their sense of wonder and discovery by labeling and categorizing things in the physical world,” she writes in a postscript to an updated version of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. “After discovering that every object is fascinating and complex, a child will begin to understand that the label is only a small part of the whole. Thus taught, a child’s sense of wonder will survive, even under our modern avalanche of words.”
Our modern avalanche of words is kind of beautiful, too (ironic, since it’s a critique of language), but maybe you’re wondering where this is going.…
I’m not about to make an argument that a popular art teacher/best-selling author at Cal State Long Beach and a pioneering light-and-space artist roaming in the desert are, or ever were, kindred spirits or visionary on a similar plane. The former has taught students to draw what’s right in front their noses, to be keenly perceptive of edges, space, light, relationships between objects, and the gestalt (whole) in order to capture the view exactly. The latter questioned everything about his studio practice to eventually embrace situational art and perceptual phenomena. Instead of capturing the environment in front of his nose, he has responded to it with subtle, exacting alterations. And yet both Californians espouse looking more closely as a catalyst for creativity: seeing until all words dissolve.
Another light-and-space artist, James Turrell (born in Pasadena) described this type of seeing as “akin to wordless thought.”
“This thought is not at all unthinking or without intelligence,” he said. “It’s just that it has a different return than words.”
Native to the Margins
“Do you wish you could draw?” asks writer/cartoonist Lynda Barry in her 2008 book What It Is, a book that her publisher describes as having pioneered a genre: the graphic-memoir how-to. On the next pages, amid collaged words, swirls of color, and paintings of birds, rabbits, and cephalopods, she inquires, “Do you wish you could sing? Do you wish you could write?”
Based on her popular writing workshops “Writing the Unthinkable,” What It Is is a vibrant manual demonstrating how to abandon rote methods of creation and instead focus on the image. Just as Edwards instructs us to draw precisely what we see, trying not to let the verbal/analytical side of the brain interfere, Barry teaches us to describe, in writing, a very specific image—e.g., an old car, a friend’s dog, something that went missing—and to stay inside that image rather than edit ourselves.
One day in a college fiction writing class, my instructor, who’d recently returned from a Lynda Barry workshop and who also had a flair for the dramatic, burst into the classroom and urged us, Dead Poets Society–style, to rip out all the pages of our writing textbooks.
“Forget everything I’ve taught you up ’til now!” she declared, with Robin Williams-y gusto. “I’m teaching you a new way to write!” I’m not sure if she actually intended for us to rip up our textbooks (and I think we just quietly stowed them away), but from that day on we followed a Barry-inspired course, delving deep into the heart of the image.
These intensive writing exercises, which Barry learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca in the late ’70s, involve describing an image—or specific slice of memory—as concretely as possible. This helps us avoid falling into the usual modes of storytelling, the rhythm of What We’ve Always Done. In my fiction class, the more we practiced, the more vivid our writing became. And yet we learned that preconceived approaches are difficult to shake. We crave syncopation, the ability to write or draw in a new way, and we want to excel at it, but as Barry points out we’re often stuck obsessing over two questions: Is this good? and Does this suck?
—
If I were writing this essay by hand, I’d probably be stopping occasionally to doodle in the margins: mindless blooms, not easily classifiable. For years they’ve crowded the corners of pages in notebooks I’ve owned, also blossoming on the backs of bank statements, Jewel-Osco receipts.
Kindgom: Plantae. Genus, species: Unknown.
In elementary school I wished I knew how to draw realistic horses, and dogs that looked like dogs and not cats, but flowers came more easily. Since then, my habit of sketching them on every piece of scrap paper within reach has seemed relatively innocuous. That is, until lately, when I’ve been stopping mid-sketch to think about how I’m not drawing actual flowers, just weird amalgamations and approximations of flowers I drew when I was nine. Sure, they’ve advanced a little over the years, showing slight structural variations (iris-ish or cherry blossom-y or daisy-like) and a bit of shading. And sometimes I know I’m only doodling—an activity that frees the mind to go elsewhere. Other times, though, I long for a fresh approach, and the sameness of the flower chain seems indicative of some larger creative malaise.
My 13-year-old sister’s drawing—the one that appeared in the art fair after her skills bloomed wildly and almost overnight—was a realistic rendering of a male model’s face. The model was from a cologne ad, Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani, and she perfectly captured his piercing gaze.
The art fair-goers were impressed. When asked how she captured the cologne guy so well, my sister replied that she’d read a book called Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain.
Coming Into Bloom
Dr. Betty Edwards has made it her life’s work to facilitate “aha” moments for people who think creative abilities cannot be learned.
“To many people, the process of drawing seems mysterious and somehow beyond human understanding,” she writes in the intro to The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1989). “You will soon discover that drawing is a skill that can be learned by every normal person with average eyesight and average eye-hand coordination with sufficient ability, for example, to thread a needle or catch a baseball.”
The official DOTRSOTB website features a gallery of before-and-after portraits: drawings made by students of various professions and backgrounds at the beginning and end of a five-day intensive drawing class. Predictably, the “before” drawings are simple, crude, and more than a little lopsided in comparison to the meticulously shaded and proportionate “afters.” The latter drawings show shadow, texture, and more nuanced hairstyles and facial expressions. They demonstrate students’ newfound skills at processing visual information. Yet there’s something especially endearing about the lopsided “befores.”
Maybe the difference between Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Lynda Barry’s “Writing the Unthinkable” method is the intended result. Edwards wants students to activate their right brains, looking closely until they forget the name of the thing they’re seeing and then express themselves in the language of forms. But as drawright.com indicates—with its proud portrait gallery and offers for $1500 five-day intensive drawing classes and corporate workshops (taught by Edwards’ son)—the other goal is to sell a ton of books. Tapping into one’s creative potential can’t be the only objective, therefore. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Inc. also relies on the customer producing nice-looking, recognizable portraits.
“Writing the Unthinkable,” meanwhile, is all about process. Lynda Barry doesn’t tell you what to do with your image-based exercises, and in fact she advises “DO NOT READ OVER!” I have notebooks full of exercises from that college fiction-writing class—countless attempts at making alive the memories of old cars and friends’ dogs—and now I see that, free from the pressure of having to edit, analyze, or turn in my work for a grade, these exercises really did get me seeing and writing differently. When I cheated and did read over my work, the voice I discovered was fresh and unfamiliar. I wouldn’t call it miracle growth, but certainly progress: the activation of another brain hemisphere or maybe just new habits.
Unfortunately, when the semester ended, I didn’t keep at it. The eyes wander, and the image falls out of focus.
—
The grounds of the Getty Center, located on a hill above Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, afford stunning views of the Santa Monica Mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, and the Pacific Ocean. In the middle of the grounds is a garden, appropriately named The Central Garden: a tree- and shrub-lined walkway spiraling around a pool featuring a floating maze of azaleas. Home to more than 500 varieties of plant materials, the garden is ever-evolving.
Robert Irwin was commissioned to plan this public garden in 1992. In the plaza beside the pool, visitors can find shade beneath canopies of bougainvillea and read his inscription, carved into stone—the statement of an artist who recognizes that perceptions shift as we do: “Always changing, never twice the same.”
—
A note I’d written to myself fell out of a book and grew into this essay. It said:
I found the solution to creative malaise!
KEEP LOOKING.
Originally published in Monsters + Dust, issue No. 3: Flowers