A Word from the Faculty — Stuart Ross

Visually Speaking

     Have you ever recognized a friend from a considerable distance?  A unique combination of shape, proportion and movement provides enough visual clues for an identification.  After talking to that person face to face for a few minutes, however, most of us could not say what color coat she wore.  Registering only the visual clues essential to our needs is something we do instinctively.  Drawing and painting require a different kind of observational skill, an intense and indiscriminate information-gathering facility.  You must look at things as if you are seeing them for the first time, without any assumptions or prior knowledge.  You must be clear-eyed, analytical, and unsentimental.  A part of the brain resists.  “Spout, handle, roundish shape, that’s a teapot,” it says.  “Cup of tea would be nice.”  Learning to turn off this innate voice is not easy, but it is necessary.  What color?  Exactly what shape?  Where is the light?  The shadow?  How do the reflections look?

     Students in beginning art classes, after a few weeks of exposure to this new language of seeing, often say that it has changed their way of looking at the world.  It doesn’t matter whether the medium is watercolor, oils, or drawing; students discover that they have been afflicted with a kind of visual illiteracy and are becoming conversant in this new language.  The world of familiar objects becomes something quite different when seen in this way.  To draw something lovingly and accurately is to know it in a way that is unlike any other, as anyone knows who takes a sketchbook on a trip instead of a camera.  As with learning any new language, it gets more difficult as we get older; a lifetime of habit is not easy to overcome.  But the rewards of learning to “speak” the visual language will more than repay the effort.