This is Why You Can’t Draw: An Introduction to the Mechanics

This one is a little tough to explain with out a visual aid but if you google how the human eye works a lot more of it will make sense.

we’re going to look at the raw mechanics of what is literally happening when we draw, and, based on that, what questions we need to be asking instead of the ones we have been.

Because if I were to take a wild guess, it would be that most of you, while you draw, are thinking in terms of sequencing: I’m going to draw the chair, then the table, then the bowl, then the apple and pear, etc etc.  And problems arise.  Things are out of proportion, they’re flat or lifeless.  We look at the page and it doesn’t match the experience of what we see before us.

So, why is the brain delivering incorrect information to the hand?  Why doesn’t sequencing, saying, I’ll do the chair, then the table, then the bowl, work?  Well, for starters, there is no table.  There is no chair, no apple, no pear.  Those are names we have assigned to those things as they appear in our visual field.

But the eye, as sensitive and marvelous an organ though it is, doesn’t make any decisions about the visual field.  It functions as a passive receiver of light.  All that is literally happening when we use sight is that light travels through space till it hits and enters the eye through a hole called the pupil, whose size will involuntarily widen or narrow, varying the amount of light that can enter the sensitive organ. The light then refracts after entering the eye, projecting upside down onto the back of the eye, which is basically a movie screen with extremely sophisticated receptors.  The back of the eye is made up of about 100 million rods, which perceive light, and about 6 million cones, which need some bare minimum rod action and then they can perceive color.  That’s it. The eye perceives light and color.  It then sends that information up to the computer, the brain, where it gets flipped right side up (thank you brain), and then the brain processes that information and delivers it to us automatically.

It is the mind, not the eye, that transforms what we see in front of us, then codifies it as: chair, table, apple.  Now those objects have names, and are therefore separate from other things which also have names. Another word for this function of separateness is called ego.  Ego gets kind of a bad rep, but the truth is we do depend on it in order to survive.  We need our brains to do this act of separation or else we wouldn’t be able to function.  After all, I’m way more likely to survive a lion attack if I can identify it as a lion, rather than as a broad collection of light and color stimuli.  Ego at this level allows us to do things like eat, and when we eat, to eat this fresh looking sandwich instead of that rancid looking one. Ego allows us to have a sense of identity. It’s intrinsic to our survival, and why as a species we have evolved to conquer the most resources. The problem is that ego, by definition a function for control, that that control in its extreme can be problematic, even damaging.  If we can name things, as ego dictates, we can control them.  We can possess them.  What is colonialism except ego on a macro level run amok.

And when you’re making art, it can really get in the way. This is why in art and in spiritual practices, you will often hear about ego-death as a virtuous aspiration. That may sound harsh or morbid, but in the context of art-making, ego-death is the key to unlearning our false automatic preconceived ideas about the world so that we may access its deeper truths.