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Drawing

Photography is instant action, drawing is meditation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

For most of us, drawing is an activity which we engage in enthusiastically during our earlier school years, but which gradually gets squeezed out as our education progressively focuses us on more academic subjects. However, I have observed with what delight many older students return to using felt-tipped coloured pens when invited to try their hand at drawing a mind map!

The brain's visual powers are truly remarkable, and therefore it is unfortunate that students are not encouraged to develop and explore these powers more fully during their formal education. Nevertheless for those who do, the experience can be extremely rewarding. Working with graphical representations and colour, as in mind maps, can enrich the whole learning process, engaging different areas of the brain and making the entire activity more stimulating and enjoyable.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the right side of the brain and Drawing on the artist within, claims that we are all capable of being excellent artists, and that the secret lies in learning how to draw with the right hemisphere of the brain. (See Left Brain-Right Brain.) In the first of these books she describes her sudden realisation:

"that an individual's ability to draw was perhaps mainly controlled by the ability to shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual information - to shift from verbal, analytical processing (in this book called "left-mode" or "L-mode") to spatial, global processing (which I have called "right-mode" or "R-mode")."

It appears that the main challenge in bringing about this shift is to close down the normally dominant left brain to stop it interfering, and so Edwards has devised some intriguing exercises to achieve this. In one of these she introduces her students to 'upside-down drawing', in which they attempt to copy a drawing which has been deliberately placed the wrong way up. Since the left brain is unable to make much sense of the seemingly arbitrary array of lines and shapes, it quickly switches off and leaves everything to the right brain.

The shift in consciousness to R-mode, as described by Edwards, appears to have much in common with the shift into 'awareness mode' achieved in Inner Game thinking and the related concept of 'getting in the zone'.

Further Information

For further information about drawing and the brain see:

Brain Based Visual Education (Iowa State University)
Drawing with Dr Betty Edwards
Right Brain is Key to Making Art by Lisa Beth Goldstein

	Page last modified: 7 February 2007