Don't Tell Me You Can't Draw a Straight Line !

Kimon Nicolaides, a teacher at the Art Students League of New York for many years prior to after serving in the forces in WWI. He became 'second father" to hundreds of students who passed through his classes there. " He died in 1938 leaving only the manuscript for a book which sets out to teach everything a student would learn by taking a full year of his classes. This book 'The Natural Way to Draw' can open and transform the experience of drawing for anyone who is inclined.

If there were a Heaven just for Art Teachers, and I had a chance to thank just one art teacher (of the many I am grateful to) Kimon Niclaides would be the one.

"Just to see something is not enough. It is necessary to have fresh, vivid contact with what you draw through as many of the senses as possible."
Kimon Nicolaides

In his book Niclaides will instruct you to do a 'Contour drawing' WITHOUT looking at your paper. It is a radically different approach to what you would normally think of as drawing.

When you look at your first complete contour drawing, you will probably laugh!, Nicolaides advises.

Contour drawing brings you into contact with what you are drawing with the sense of touch. It is done searchingly and sensitively.

With eyes and attention focussed 100% on your model, feel that your pencil is tranversing across the surface of the model. Your pencil then responds to every hill, valley, roughness, smoothness that you encounter with your pencil. If your attention waivers, stop drawing until you are able to gather back your attention, and feel that you are almost touching your model.


The point of a contour drawing is NOT to produce a great work of art that will impress all your friends. The point is to have a pure experience of looking, with little or no concern for what the result is on your paper.

The end result is that you may find a nose as long as an arm, a leg running right off the paper. And this is just fine. A finished contour drawing becomes a record of how well you looked at something.

The result can be surprising and may reveal more about your subject than if you tried too hard to get it right.

"Gesture" is an expression of life. To capture "Gesture" is NOT to draw what a thing IS, but what it is DOING.

In gesture drawing, you feel the movement of the whole. You feel that YOU are doing whatever your model is doing.

But it is more than just observing movement, or capturing a specific position in space. Rather the artist seeks to feel the impulse that exists inside the model that is the cause of the pose. For example a feeling of sadness or hopelessness will show in many ways through a persons body language, as will a feeling of inspiration or joy.

Gesture drawing is done quickly, responding to the WHOLE subject all at ONCE.

Just LOOK . . . . FEEL . . . . and let the hand respond.



This gesture drawing was done as a quick response to a dancer I was watching at our local ballet studio.
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While contour drawing is to be done "painstakingly", gesture drawing is to be done "furiously".
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The analytical mind is best left OUT of gesture drawing.
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You can do a gesture drawing of anything - a chair, a snake, a plant. Think of its reason for being when you draw. A chair invites you to sit. A snake slithers through the grass. A plant with its roots in the earth grows upward reaching toward the sun.
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Should you decide to follow Nicolaides art course as outlined in "The Natural Way to Draw" - you will do HUNDREDS of gesture drawings. Use cheap paper and there is no need to keep all your drawings. The value is in the life that you learn to express.

From my experience, what you learn from gesture drawing will stay with you and be reflected in any future form your art may take.

As with Kimon Nicolaides, I would love to be able to thank Harold Speed in person for the wealth of artistic insight in his books. Harold Speed lived in the late 19th/early 20th century.

To the beginning art student, he recommended studying "line drawing" and "mass drawing". Each of these has its own type of expressive power are best studied separately at first. Otherwise, trying to master too many skills all at once - a beginner can tend to just "muddle through".

Once each approach has been practiced or mastered separately, the artist can incorparate both into a single drawing with much more effective results.

Learning to draw what we see accurately takes practice.
Think of it as a routine practice of scales by a trumpet player.
Although playing scales is the means to an end it is essential to the development of the musician.

And so with art study, the discipline of accurate line drawing will enhance your ability to express yourself artistically.



From the study of line drawing the eye is trained to observe and the hand is trained to make a definite statement. Harold Speed describes how to use horizontal and vertical lines for reference, block out key points, measure comparative distances, and portray light and shadow.

From this study you can learn learn the expressive value of line, the subtleties of contour and the construction of form.

Mass drawing is about tone and atmosphere. A study of mass drawing will introduce the student to the study of tone values and the expression of form by means of planes.


Without the study of mass drawing the art student will lack knowledge of the tone and atmosphere that always envelop form in nature.

One thing I find in drawing that makes it all worth it is that it changes the way I see things. It widens my experience of the world. Impressions come flooding in that I would otherwise have missed. This was certainly the case after spending two days drawing with Frederick Franc.


I have had the pleasure of taking two weekend courses with this artist. Both times at the beginning of the weekend I felt the class to be too easy for me. We were instructed to find a leaf, branch or rock and sit and draw it for 30 minutes. I would wonder why it was necessary to spend so much time drawing one simple thing. Yet after persisting, my perception of the object would change. But beyond that my ability to see everyone and everything around me was enhanced.

At the end of one of these courses, I drew a quick profile of Frederick Franc.

One would never suspect the healing power of drawing. Just a few minutes of simply looking can be a form of meditation. I found Frederik Franc's book when I was going through some emotional turbulence, and felt his approach to be a healing balm. Frederik Franc taught his students to slow down and look.



"When all the antennae are out, as they are in seeing/drawing the eye perceives and a reflex goes from the retina via the mind or heart to the hand."
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As to how a person progresses in drawing, Frederic Franc offers no recipe. Only to make the eye-heart-hand reflex more sensitive so that the hand becomes an ever more willing tool of the eye.

Let your pencil become an extension of your hand - a sensitive feeler.

If you are drawing a feather, let your pencil strokes BE as soft as a feather.



If you are drawing a holly bush , let your pencil strokes BE as spikey as the holly.

As human beings we all come equipped to put down on paper what we see. According to Betty Edwards if you have average eyesight and average eye-hand coordination, you can learn this skill. It is primarilly a matter of learning to "see" in a different way than we ordinarily see.
Inside each of our skulls is a two sided brain with two ways of comprehending the world around us. Most of us reside in a left-brain mode. To draw what you see, requires the ability to let the left-brain take a back seat and allow the right-brain to emerge.

Here is a summary of qualities of each side of the brain:

LEFT BRAIN MODE

RIGHT BRAIN MODE

Verbal

Non verbal

Analytic

Synthetic

Symbolic

Concrete

Abstract

Analogic

Temporal

Nontemporal

Rational

Nonrational

Digital

Spatial

Logical

Intuitive

Linear

Holistic

The abilities of the left-brain are highly valued in this culture and our educational system has been designed to cultivate the ability to speak, label measure, reason and keep to a schedule. The right half of the brain is virtually neglected in many educational settings.

Drawing a form that you see is largely a right-brain function. As the left-brain is dominant in most people and tends to interfere - it is necessary to present the brain with tasks that encourage the right-brain to take over and the left brain to recede.

One way to do this is to look at an image you want to draw upside down. Familiar things do not look the same when they are upside down. The visual clues don't match, and the left-brain becomes confused.

This creates an opening for the right-brain to simply perceive the shapes just as they appear. If the perception of the shapes is clear, the hand with the pencil in it can more easilly reproduce those shapes on paper.

~~~~~reference photograph~~~~~

In working on a portrait of a dancer show below, I used this photograph at the left as a reference. Although most of the time I looked at the photo right side up, if I was having trouble with a particular area of the portrait I would turn the photograph upside down. This allowed me to view the shape of the eye or the mouth for example exactly as is was. We have so many symbolic associations with the features of the face that it is difficult for us to view them simply as shapes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~completed pastel portrait ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

According to Julia Cameron, our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we actualize these yearnings, we come closer to our own divinity.

Do you feel that you are fully actualizing your creative potential? Julia Cameron specializes in creative recovery, and had designed a twelve week course that guides you through this process. This is a spiritual path to higher creativity.

When I was a child in elementary school, I loved to draw. Horses were my favorite subject and I had sketchbooks full of horse drawings. When I reached middle school this love of drawing went into a cold hybernation. I somehow got the idea that I had no talent, and it became embarassing to even try.


My story is not unusual. For many people the natural joy experienced in drawing and painting, withers away as they grow older.

The young creator of this painting had no artistic inhibitions.

The grown up in us can be skeptical, even judgemental of our efforts to be in touch with our creative sides. According to this author, judging your early artistic efforts is artistic abuse.

"The Artist's Way" pinpoints many core negative beliefs which can hold us back.

Michael Chaitow was my teacher in London for a number of years. He taught objective drawing skills as a foundation, and also guided his students in drawing as a form of meditation and inner development. His students experienced the use of the left and right hands as linked to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. We began to paint using Chinese ink, brush, reed pens and quill pens.

The dominant hand in us is usually capable of precision and some degree of control. To be instructed to draw a figure with the non-dominant hand (the left hand in my case) is unsettling at first. I couldn't quite tell what my left hand was going to do.



Using the Chinese ink and brush was a new adventure too. So just what is this supposed to be anyway? With a dominant left brain orientation a person can be skeptical, or even critical of what splashes out onto the page.



I felt so out of control at first. Who knows where the ink will run? Yet in persisting with these exercises, I found that a channel had opened to express a more intuitive perception.



Sometimes Michael would have us begin with the left hand, which made a loose and lively start to the drawing. After a time, we were allowed to use the right hand especially if more precision and control were wanted.

If the drawing became too controlled and tight, we could switch back to the the left hand.
This would lead to a lovely dialogue between the left and right hands. Not that all the results of our efforts were something to frame and display. However we experienced some connection between the rational and intuitive within ourselves.



Other ways of exploration in Michael's classes were to hold two pencils in one hand, or hold a pencil in the left and and brush in the right. We even tried painting holding a brush in our mouths.

I have come to appreciate life and energy in art so much that I sometimes prefer the initial drawing or sketches of an artist to their finished oil paintings. Something I really admire is when a finished oil painting carries the life and energy of an original drawing or sketch. But this is a subject for a different lens.