“An awakening of the eyes”

There is no doubt that artists see things just a little differently. Betty Edwards in her book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” describes how by perceiving things in a certain way anyone can improve their proficiency at drawing within a short space of time. It often surprises me that drawing is considered a secret revealed only to the talented few and yet from a young age it seems to come to children as naturally as breathing. It was Picasso that said, “ Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up”.

The benefits of nurturing the artist within, however, are greater than at first imagined. I was amused when a friend commented after attending art lessons for just a few weeks that she was seeing things that she had never noticed before. Her wonderment at the world around her and her refreshing honesty highlighted the fact that we are often “out of tune” with our world. Drawing enhances our ability to see. It trains our eye to perceive deeply and accurately and enables us to enter a receptive state where we appreciate the play of light on form or the relation of one object to another. Few people say, “I want to attend art lessons to learn to see”, but students stand around afterwards reveling in the sunset, with a heightened sense of colour and beauty.

Henri Matisse wrote: “The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage and this courage is essential to the artist who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.”

An artist is one who wants to sit in the window seat, fascinated by the play of light and shadow on the landscape. Drawing can be a way of teaching the eye to see and as Leonardo da Vinci said, “The eye encompasses the beauty of the whole world.”