The Drawing Studio

a) Drawing is the practice of how to shift from casual noticing to disciplined looking. This is a shift that fundamentally changes our visual relationship with the world around us from a passive to an active state and our general relationship with the world from reactive to creative. It is our active commitment to the practice of observation makes... everything new, both the world without and the world within. b) Once one is a 'drawer,' it also becomes obvious that we of the urban tribes live in a techno, left-brained, linear culture that looks upon images as magic, i.e. 'outside' the parameters of ordinary knowing.** ("I can't draw a straight line" say our friends to us.) As we learn to draw, we realize we are reclaiming a whole right-brain way of knowing, the source of much that we call creative. c) Thus, a new opportunity for visual learning opens before us. But western education is built upon and dominated by the oral/written language systems of the linear 'left-brain' model, and there is almost no recognition historically of visual language learning as either present or essential to general education. Instead visual learning is relegated to arts 'specialists'. Given this almost alien environment for visual learning that we live in, we are left to ourselves to literally invent the curriculum for learning to see.Read More