I like to post essays of mine from time to time. This latest one is not yer usual predigested blog soundbite - “8 Ways to Make Better Pots!” (ugh). I’ll begin posting my essays related to pots, art, seeing and the senses on the potter’s side of my website as well.
SYMBOLIC THINKING
From time to time I make myself draw. Not that I’m any good at it. I’ve known people who could draw anything that came to mind: a derelict Rocky the Flying Squirrel with a cigarette teetering on his lip, a Kentucky tobacco barn nestled in hills, a striking likeness of Kurt Cobain. These people have an unusual gift akin to singing well and on key with little apparent effort.
For the rest of us, there’s a lot that can be attained through practice. I sit down to draw a realistic image of a bone, a nude, a landscape, a crow. First comes an uneasy period of transition, often a half hour or more, where I am slowly quieting down the voice in my head telling me what it thinks I’m seeing – the voice of my symbolic brain – until I can simply see what is in front of me. What I draw moment by moment when I’m successful is: subtle shift from grey to darker grey here, curve gets slightly sharper there, shape of the eye from this angle is not what I expected…Dozens of very small, unimportant observations will hopefully add up to a persuasive whole.
I have never seen a brown tree. Betty Edwards, in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, notes that we steadily develop the ability to draw from the moment we begin as toddlers right up to the age of twelve or so. At that point, the few who make the leap to seeing what is in front of them continue to blossom as draughtsmen. The rest of us stagnate, resting on our sixth grade laurels.
Can you draw a car – without looking at one – from the perspective of standing right in front of the driver’s side headlight? Can you draw what it would look like if in the split second you looked up someone was leaping over your head like they were doing a high jump?
(I pick these examples because they incorporate a strong knowledge of everyday 3D forms, and that element of visual art that heartlessly sorts out the would-be representationalists: perspective.)*
Most of us – with myself absolutely included – can only draw perspective convincingly with earnest practice. Without that practice, we stay stunted. We become the 12 year old in Betty Edwards’ book, and our ways of drawing a tree, a house, a car freeze in time even as our bones grow, our endocrine systems kick in, and our grasp of the world matures. Don’t believe me? Sketch a car from memory right now. Alright, when did you learn to draw a car like that? If you haven’t studied art since grade school, chances are good it was a long time ago.
And where did we get the idea trees are brown? I hike all the time, I gaze at the Bradford pear out my window over morning coffee, and I see mostly grey bark with some surprising splashes of colors, brown amongst them. But I have yet to see a Crayola brown tree with bark the color of a racehorse or an acorn.
Of course I remember being encouraged to think trees are brown at a young age, along with every other child in my class. Gazing into our boxes of eight Crayolas, it was clear trees weren’t blue violet or green. If we decided to double-check what color trees are with our parents – who, odds are, had not revisited the issue since their childhood –they drew on their ossified visual training and agreed: trees are brown.
What I’m belaboring here is the idea of symbolic thinking. We have one part of our brains groomed to make snap judgments, to file away shorthand captions to serve in the place of more complex readings of what we experience day to day. This symbolic brain keeps us from being blithering idiots drowning in the onslaught of incoming stimuli.
It also consistently steers us away from far richer engagements with the world, and from deeper and more productive associations within as we subconsciously mull our experiences.
I almost imagine that part of the brain as a busy workroom where constant questions appear as empty buckets, and if the symbolic brain can quickly pop a definitive little snippet in the bucket and send it back out, it prevents the question from moving on to other parts of the brain. For there are many other areas in the brain ready to spend precious resources - focus, energy, time - devoting more thought to all questions. What is this? Why is this? What does it mean? What could it mean down the road? The symbolic brain keeps us efficient, aiding in our survival. The deeper parts of the brain keep us human, aiding our will to live.
The symbolic brain is fairly easy to manipulate. Here’s an example: think about the crowning achievement of democracy in America, the liberty and pursuit of happiness brought forth by our forefathers as a beacon of hope to all mankind.
What does that make you think of? Most likely a mix of original and symbolic thoughts. Chances are good if you grew up in the U.S. that you felt some grade school-era twinges of patriotism, a sense of forces larger than you at play looking out for your better interests, and a hunch that you don’t really need to worry about the rest of the world because we are an exceptional nation playing by our own rules.
These thoughts spring up because they are the symbolic thinking we’ve had drummed into us since kindergarten and they are reinforced constantly. Touchstone phrases like “forefathers” and “crowning achievement” lock in access to preconceived notions. We don’t have to think about it, we get a whiff of reassurance, and we’re freed up to focus on the immediate details of our personal lives.
Of course, you thought of other things too, possibly some negative symbolic thoughts: Congress is a bunch of bums, America is going to the dogs, etc.
Having a realistic grasp on how each of us relates to our communities and our nation, and in turn how our nation relates to the world, is devilishly hard. If we start actively thinking about what defines America, we realize these shorthand thoughts don’t come close. Two hundred and thirty-odd years of history, three hundred and thirty million souls, the complexities of the Constitution, the clash between the founding principles and the realities on the ground…it’s unwieldy. It’s far easier to have a flag decal or a “W” in a circle with a slash through it. That’s what makes symbolic thinking so effective and insidious – it’s just so much easier than the alternative.
Which means that when we adopt symbolic thinking, unexamined and untested, we begin to make any number of choices based on faulty information, or we make assumptions that actually go against our interests. We take stands based on symbolic thinking that, if we’d thought it through, run counter to our beliefs. And we miss much of what is richest about the world around us by not seeing what is just beyond our noses.
*Perspective
I don’t mean to give the impression that perspective is a requisite technique for artists. For centuries it was a peculiarly western conceit to try to render on a flat surface – drawings, paintings, prints – the three-dimensional world as it appears to the artist and by extension the viewer.
Annie Dillard mentions, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the phenomenon of some Inuit people pinning snapshots to their walls at every imaginable angle precisely because, when they looked at these squares of paper, they saw colors and shapes, not a horizon line or a captured record of a specific moment in the world.
I had the pleasure of taking a beginning drawing class with a student from Ghana. The teacher was inaugurating us into the tradition of perspective. We were to draw a grouping of plaster blocks, spheres and cones in correct proportion, using shading to accurately indicate the source of light shining down, giving the forms a sense of volume. With every attempt the Ghanaian student drew vibrant geometric shapes in yellows and fuchsias without the least hint of spatial depth. His drawings were flat as a pancake and gorgeous.
The teacher, unaware of the cultural hurdle she’d run smack up against, was able to see only that he wasn’t completing the assignment. She had paroxysms.
A quick look at the riches of world art outside of western art circa 1450-1900 reveals that the accurate use of perspective is wholly unnecessary for creating profound work. You don’t even need it to capture and convey your perception of reality. It’s just one arrow in the artist’s quiver which can easily be reduced to a parlor trick if it’s not used in service of some larger idea.
