How does this differ from the old Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain? I've had that for years, will it likely be worth my while to upgrade? -- KeithBraithwaite
I've only read the intro so far, where she says "The new" is the same book, but revised and expanded. An extra chapter on color is one of the things I remember. -- lb
Being able to draw seemed like a magical, God-given gift until I read this book. Are there other similar books for other skills/professions? I'd be interested in finding out the "trick" to thinking like a music composer, like a fiction writer, like a mechanic, or even like a programmer. -- KrisJohnson
AaronCopland, the American composer, wrote WhatToListenForInMusic, which is a book primarily devoted to explaining musical theory for the layman, but also discusses how composers compose music. He describes it as being a continual process much like that described by fiction writers. Just as writers constantly have ideas floating around in their heads for stories, characters, settings, etc., so musical composers are constantly thinking about bits of music. He also points out that this is a gradual process; just as writers start out having few of these thoughts and eventually building up to having many of them, so novice composers have little or no music running through their heads, but as they work, their minds become accustomed to the work. -- BrentNewhall
So would I. But I'd gathered that the point of this book is that there is no trick to thinking like an artist, and that thinking like an artist isn't the point. Rather that there are learnable skills that artists use to draw realistically (and that practicing those skills can have broader benefits). How could one possibly learn from a book how to think like Picasso?
It would be nice though, to have a similar highly focussed, single-volume experiential introduction to the learnable skills used by composers, writers, mechanics and programmers.
Something like Wiki:SmalltalkBestPracticePatterns comes to mind... -lb
There is now TheOdeLessTravelled, for poetry.
Many artists, writers and composers don't have patterns or rules -- or rather they come to learn of their existence by observing themselves. AlfredEdwardHousman? (full name since AEHousman doesn't wiki) said his poems came to him like a "morbid secretion". TerryPratchett in WyrdSisters? tells of the playwright, Hwel who is struck by ideas that hurtle through space like particles, until they hit a brain that is receptive to them. -- Tarquin
This strikes me as quite a misleading view to take of artisitc creation. Are we to imagine that, say, Wagner was struck by a wondering mote of inspiration then just sat down and wrote out several days worth of libretto and orchestration, without recourse to any patterns or rules that he didn't obtain from introspection? Or likewise Rembrandt and the Night Watch; Michaelangelo and David; Wren and 51 churches, several hospitals, and a couple of colleges and palaces; and so on and so forth?
Drawing on the right side of the brain collects the patterns and rules that artists use to draw realistically. Doubtless many talented artists have (re) discoverd these patterns and rules for themselves, but what of that? Not all visual artists draw, and not all of them draw realistically, but it's a commonplace that the better artists who don't have choosen not to. Picasso was an unequalled draughtsman, but he chose to develop his art in other directions.
It's another commonplace that many people decide that they'd like to express something or other in an artistic form, and they somehow get the idea that training will be unneccesary (all those rules and patterns just get in they way, right? ). Then they take hold of the materials, and it unaccountably turns out to be very hard to make them do what you want...best stick to abstract impressionism then!
Note that this is not an attack on abstract, non-representational or conceptual art. There are some great sculptures by Koons, who had almost nothing to do with preparing the objects themselves. What he had was the idea expressed by the object. And I'm pretty sure that a good deal of thinking whent into it. If it hadn't, people could tell. They really could, because some, abstract, non-representational or conceptual art truly doesn't have a lot of thought behind it, and that it doesn't screams out.
Here is the sad news: artistic creation is hard work, and it is folly to embark upon it in ignorance of what came before. And it's hard work, mark you, for those of us with talent and ability. What Betty Edwards has done is to show the rest of us a little of the work that it takes to develop whatever ability you might have into a skill, exercises, etudes, if you will, that develop those skills.
Exercises, work. There is as little of a royal road to art as there is to geometry. -- KeithBraithwaite
It's worse than that. There's not even a commoners' road to art. Many people can work at it all their lives, and still not find the spark of creativity. On the other hand, genis looks easy, and can feel easy too. Boris Vian said that it may have seemed like he sat at the piano and wrote a piece in a mere twenty minutes, but there were twenty years of work behind it. And as for Wagner, well, yes, we are. Mussorgski wrote that "Hartmann is bubbling up inside me". Lines of poetry came to Housman ready-made. Genius can't be acquired or learnt. There's hard work too, but it's just building channels for it to flow down. Just as you say, you need to know what has gone before, and you need the skill to make something of ideas and understand them. -- Tarquin
Reading what I just wrote, that seems horribly egotistical, so let me give you an example: there are teachers that teach you that the human figure is six heads tall (seven in Greek statues and eight in comic books and about eleven in fashion ads), that the inset in the skull for eyes appears exactly half-way between the tip of the skull and the bottom of the chin, that the top of the ear touches a line drawn through the eyes straight back through the back of the skull. When an artist looks at a real life figure and uses these stored facts to draw, he is interpreting the subject in a conceptual manner, he is recognizing and finding patterns; in effect, mirroring life to his or her ego. If you've ever seen a drawing by a child which is missing a torso and has the legs and arms sticking out of a head, you've seen an exaggerated example of what happens when we interpret in the process.
This is much like life; we get too caught up in our conceptualizations to see things the way they really are. In drawing (and perhaps in Zen, I'm not very studied) there are a few tricks to break these habits. When drawing from a photograph, you can turn the photograph and the paper upside-down. My favorite, however, is to not draw the subject, but draw the space around the subject. This really breaks it down for me.
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