Inspiration Fridays! Seeing With New Eyes
Seeing With New Eyes
Seeing is believing. Unless you don’t happen to believe that. A lot of us seem to get that one backward. We see what we already believe to be there.
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
A good portion of how I see comes from my beliefs about how the world works. This can be helpful, like when I decided that becoming an artist was a legit career move, but it can also be a major handicap, like when I think I know what my wife Naomi is going to say before she says it. When I can’t see past my beliefs it affects what I get to see.
One exercise that helps me to break this vicious cycle of assumption is to take a little time away from knowing everything. Naomi loves when I stumble across these days. I step away from the podium and… break out the sketchbook. When drawing shapes from the world around me, I have to shift from assumption to observation. The whole world just becomes a series of positive and negative shapes. Any preconceived notions about what those shapes are will hopefully fall away when I begin to draw. I have drawn friends that I’ve known for years and felt like I was seeing them for the first time. It’s so great to sit down and really look.
Still Life’s are great because we don’t care about getting a perfect likeness.
The act of drawing something is the act of falling in love with it. Slowing down, taking the time to observe the minutiae and sort out the shapes. It’s a different way of seeing. Instead of judging, it’s almost like we’re guests in a new world, seeing everything fresh and for the first time.
The next time you’re drawing something, try drawing all of the shapes that surround your subject. Instead of trying to draw the eye and then the nose, what shape does the space between the eye and the nose make? If you’re drawing from a photo, turn it upside down and see if the shapes are just a little bit more obvious when you don’t know what you’re looking at. This is a great way to let go of what we think we know and to take some little steps closer to seeing the truth of what’s really there in front of us.