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Winter Quarter Essay — January 2006

"The Eye is Part of the Mind" (Leo Steinberg)
Notes on Visual Intelligence
by Andrew Rush   ©2005

"Maybe Grandpa will read you a story," said my son to his three year old daughter Florrie, who was having a melt-down in the midst of all the attention her newborn brother was getting from the grown-ups. A flicker of interest but nothing more. "What if I draw us a story?" sez I. "You could be in it."

OK, that seemed to do it, and so with a couple of felt pens and a school notebook, I concocted a tale about a dragon and a little girl named Florrie. I drew the fiery dragon, who, over several pages, slowly makes friends with the little girl who refused to be afraid of him. What seemed to fascinate Florrie was that her grandpa drew it right there in front of her. Here was a totally new possibility, that someone you knew could so effortlessly and magically 'draw' a story. And she was not just listening, she was in it, even helping to decide how much fire should come out of the dragon's mouth ("None," she said).

It is a given that children are deeply imprinted by what adults do, far beyond what they say. History records successive generations of actors, politicians, composers, car mechanics, or cooks that continue to practice life's skills decades after they were naturally imbedded in the everyday life of their families. Truly, the first inspiration for learning is physical and personal, and starts by watching a sympathetic and adept person make the process accessible and ordinary.

Until recently, drawing * could only be studied in the context of a professional art school as one of the specialist skills required by the art trade. For the general public, however, drawing is not considered to be an essential life skill, even now, although it is conceded a place as an interesting but optional recreational pastime, like bird-watching or playing the tuba. Little wonder that there is scant cultural encouragement for children or adults to study drawing, much less to see it as a core skill for critical thinking in life, as the great art educator Rudolph Arnheim pointed out over 35 years ago. **

Ironically, most of us who live in an urban society today consider ourselves to be visually literate. And indeed, if the test is our huge capacity as consumers of the many visual languages of the new global communication media, then we are. But it is curious that at the very moment when the media images have come to dominate every niche of our waking day, many people are beginning to suspect that something is missing, that maybe visual literacy is not necessarily visual intelligence.

Because something is driving an enthusiastic increase of interest in our adult and teen drawing programs at The Drawing Studio these days, as evidenced by not only our rising enrollments but the growing phenomena of 'drawing associations' springing up all across the country. It may be that as the media invades every inch of our visual and private spaces-from e-bay to on-line museums, from pornography to advertising on racing cars and our fridge doors-that we are opening up some deeper questions about the role of images in our lives. How do we learn to see as we do? And even more relevant, how can one participate in the visual languages of our time as a creator, not just a consumer?

I believe that a curriculum for visual intelligence starts with learning the skills and tools of observation. From long experience in art, I also know that the guided practice of drawing plays an essential and central role in its development, and the earlier the better. I think it is time for The Drawing Studio to become much noisier in advocating the study of drawing as a general subject for all ages, on a par with reading, writing, and math.

While we artists can provide the first teaching staff for this greatly expanded mission, artist/teachers will need to surrender some very outworn ideas of art's exclusiveness in favor of a broader definition of art's purpose in the world. Led by such a corps of artist/teachers, I believe that cultivating the skills of observation in our children and ourselves has broad implications and relevance that will come as we 'open our eyes' and 'see' the possibilities for human understanding in our time, for ourselves.

Several days after drawing with Florrie, my son called to say that she had read the dragon story to herself and to him several times, with particular emphasis on the part where the dragon gives her a ride in front of all of her school friends. We are eager for our next drawing conversation together.

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* I prefer the Italian word for drawing, disegno, as implying the larger root meaning of visual intelligence.

** "Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident (because) the most effective training of perceptional thinking can be offered in the art studio."
— Rudolph Arnheim: Visual Thinking, Univ. of California Press, 1969)

©2005 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission