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Summer Quarter Essay — May 2004

On Words and Images
by Andrew Rush ©2004

"In the country of the blind, a one-eyed man is king."— H. G. Wells

Featured in this issue of The Drawing Studio summer newsletter are some well-observed studies of small animals by Susan Day, a TDS associate and one of our founding members. Her drawings are preliminary to a children's book-in-progress, and they remind me of how good children's books are a child's first magical introduction to words. Artist pictures help bring the words to life, and out of this collaboration of words and images the magical wonder of language is reborn in each child, again and again.

Curiously one sees almost no recognition of the obvious lifelong partnership of words and images after the primary grades. While practicing language skills dominates the school curricula, no such program co-exists for the practice of the visual skills of drawing, design, or the role of images as being important to modern communication. So I began to wonder, what might a world look like which continues to ignore the development of visual intelligence in our children in favor of the written word? To illumine what is too close to see, there's nothing like a fable:

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, there was a remote village called Wordville. Its inhabitants had come to believe that it was where words -and numbers, which are a kind of word--were invented. Naturally, the schools in Wordville taught children about words and numbers so they could grow up and find work in the local word factories, like their parents before them.

The act of 'seeing' was still involved, but in a curiously selective way. In Wordville, the word part of the brain came to dominate the visual part of the brain and would allow the eye "to see" an object only if the language had a word for that object. If, however, the word brain had no word, then that object for all intents and purposes remained invisible, i.e., it did not exist. For this reason the visual arts were not taught nor considered important, since the origin of everything known was of course a word. Should any outsider be curious to know what the inhabitants of Wordville 'saw' with their eyes, one only had to consult a dictionary. Hence the biblical observation, "In the beginning was the Word…"

Of course there were a few oddities about called pictures, sometimes in church windows or commercial billboards, and they were powerful and magical images that made you think about secret things, or buy magical potions for example. But as there were few artists in Wordville no one knew where pictures came from, much less how they were made, since schools only taught about words and numbers.

Once in a great while an occasional artist passed through Wordville, often with a gypsy carnival, and it was very exciting to see her paint a golden horse on the town gate. In time, as people became more curious about images, even more artists began to appear, and although the government never actually banned them, they were closely watched, like all gypsies. Mothers cautioned their children, calling them foreigners. "They do not know how to make a living with words like we do. They are oddly dressed and not quite trustworthy, if you know what I mean."

The youngest children were not to be fooled, however, because they sometimes 'saw' things for which there were no words. But because that was the way the world was, the young children of Wordville struggled along, conforming as best they could, and soon thought no more about what lived in between the cracks of words. The End.

By now it is all too obvious that the 'Wordville' public schools of our own time are under serious siege by the world-wide multi-media communications revolution in our face everyday, largely built on visual images and fueled by forces outside the control of educators. This revolution carries profound implications for our future, but the convention-bound culture of our public schools continues to define and teach 'language' as mostly verbal and written skills, ignoring the other centers of perception, notably the visual.

There are some signs that the domain of visual intelligence is beginning to be addressed educationally, although not politically as yet, since we see no serious school funding for the arts. And while not a 'reason', it can be noted that the ability to communicate and share our visual intelligence had to wait for 500 years after the invention of type-set printing to produce the technology (e.g. popular computer graphic software) that allows ordinary people to participate in image-making, in the way the printed book expanded literacy. Like writing, visual communication is also a two-way street and until it belongs to everyone, it lives in the domain of 'secret knowledge' just as the word did, until the invention of the printing press.

Until our Wordville educators 'get it', our kids can't wait to escape the prison of school and race to the movie houses, the TV and the Internet, where words and images live as natural partners, just like the books of childhood. And do these media manipulate our kids? You bet. The answer? Teach kids what images are, where they come from and how to communicate with them. Because they are going to find out anyway. And oh yes, the lucky ones will be at our TDS Art of Summer III program this summer, for an intensive experience in the practice and skills of art as communication. At TDS we sense the importance of developing this curriculum for visual intelligence and are groping our way through new territory, comforted somewhat by Wells' observation, "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Peace.

©2004 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission