The Art of Seeing

Painting has taught me that most people don't see what's in front of them. They see the label. Tree. Leader. Brand. Success. Failure. Self. Then they move on.

Painting and drawing interrupt that. They make you stay longer than your brain wants to stay. Long enough for the thing to stop being the category you placed it in. Long enough to realize how much more there is to explore when you remain present.

Creating art has never felt like control. It feels more like a willingness to converse and dance with the unknowingness of what is right in front of you: a landscape, a still life, an inner narrative, an emotion. You may begin with an intention, but then the work starts talking back. The discipline is staying awake enough to notice what it is becoming, and allowing yourself to follow as much as lead throughout the process.

A workshop in seeing

Last month, I sat on the ground with a group of people at the Second Harvest Summit, held at the deCordova Museum outside of Boston.

Brand new blank sketchbooks open, markers in hand, I told them we weren't there to learn how to draw. We were there to learn how to see.

Second Harvest Retreats, including the Summit, are run by Richard Banfield and Devon Warwick McDonald for people in some kind of transition. They've lost a job. They've exited a company they spent years building. They've lost a spouse. The kids have left for college. They've gotten divorced. Something that used to define them no longer does, and the next version of their life hasn't shown up yet.

Richard and Devon created Second Harvest for those gaps. The part where you don't know which pieces of yourself to bring forward and which to leave behind.

That gap is terrifying. We grab for the old identity even after it stops fitting, because the alternative feels too uncomfortable. Or we rush towards the next easily categorizable and expected situation so we can feel safe again. Most of us are not changing from one clear self into another clear self.

I was there as a facilitator and a breakout session lead. The blind contour drawing workshop at the end of the day was mine.

We began with breathing. Eyes closed. Sitting on our blankets. Getting ourselves settled.

I told everyone in the group, "We've spent all day in language, words, stories, labels, structure. As we transition into this time together where we won't be using much language, I'd like you to consider the words that seem to have stuck with you as the day has progressed. When you open your eyes, write those words down on the very last page of your sketchbook."

Once we did that, I asked everyone to turn to the first page and destroy it.

Make a mess. Scribble. Feel how the different tips on the markers make different lines. Notice how the ink bleeds. Notice what fast lines and slow lines feel like. Notice what they look like.

This let us get over the preciousness of a blank sketchbook and the pressure of the first page. It warmed us up to begin.

I asked everyone to find something to focus on. It could be a tree, their own feet, a nearby sculpture, a structural object, whatever called their attention. Then I encouraged them to let go of the labeling. The preconceptions of what a “good” drawing should look like. The imagined picture they thought they should be creating to convey it properly to a complete stranger.

In blind contour drawing, you look at the thing you're drawing, and you let your line follow your eye. You don't look down at the page to make adjustments. Your job is to feel how your eye moves and capture it with your pen.

I asked everyone to pay attention to where their eye entered the scene. Just like you don't hear music all at once, you don't see everything all at once. Your eye enters somewhere first.

Maybe it is pulled toward the contrast between light and dark. Maybe it lands on an internal detail, like the texture of bark on a tree. Maybe it follows the shape of an external line where an object intersects with its surroundings in a striking way.

Whatever it is, that becomes the rhythm you let your eye follow. You pay attention to how fast or slow your eye moves. Where it jumps. Where it returns. Where it overlaps itself. Where it shifts into a different rhythm. And throughout it all, you keep following with your pen.

These start as fast drawings, about two or three minutes each. No time to fuss or get hung up. No time to second-guess the next subject of your attention.

Toward the second half of the workshop, I had everyone partner up and draw each other. Seeing another person and being seen at the same time.

At some point in every one of these workshops, I end up saying this: Nobody needs to see how perfectly or photorealistically you can draw a tree. They'd much rather sense how you were feeling the day you did the blind contour drawing of the tree.

Trust me on this. When you look back at drawings that came out of your own unique way of being in the world and seeing it, you will remember the way that day smelled. The people around you. The stories going on in your mind that you finally allowed to fall away so you could do nothing but be, and see.

Before you have it figured out

The second they pick up a pen, people start trying to make something that meets someone else's expectations. Drawing a “good” tree. Making the right marks. Labeling everything so the picture matches what they think they're supposed to make.

You can't think your way out of a perception problem. If you're still looking at the same familiar symbol, more thinking can keep you circling it. The drawing exercise gives you a way to notice what you've been overlooking.

I see the same trap in creative work. Whether it's a brand that has been described the same way for ten years or an identity that no longer fits but keeps getting worn anyway, it can be hard to move forward into something that feels undefined or unexpected.

The strategy does not always arrive fully formed before the creating begins. Sometimes the making is what exposes the strategy. The sketch, the conversation, the prototype, the wrong turn, the uncomfortable question. These are how clarity emerges, how it is created.

You do not always get to think your way into the next chapter from a safe distance. Sometimes you have to start looking, moving, making, and listening before you know what it means.