Seeing Peter More Clearly

Students in my classes quickly notice that my handwriting is pretty awful, and I had always thought that my ability to draw was the same. I was wrong. In 1990, I learned that the satisfaction of drawing reasonably well came with disciplined practiced of a series of skills, primarily learning how to see more clearly. I was studying Thai at AUA, where the very unusual teaching method had caught my interest while I was working in Taiwan. At AUA, Thai is taught using a natural method that imitates how we learn our native languages, which we have all done without ever studying them or doing a single grammar exercise. I had already studied a few languages the traditional way, from Latin to Chinese, but had never been very pleased with the results. I never thought I would be able to draw, either. However, in one of our chats, Dr. Brown, the founder of AUA’s radical Thai language course, introduced me to similar ideas about learning to draw, specifically citing a book by Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I was not working at the time, and although spending a few hours every day in my Thai classes, I had plenty of time to spare, so decided to give it a go. First, I accepted that this radically new approach, at least for someone from my traditional background, meant I need to do it the way the teacher instructed. The hardest thing was that drawing is slow. I did a few test drawings before I started, and they took only a few minutes. But the first exercise in the book insisted that I spend at least 40 minutes drawing my own hand. Not only did I have to draw very, very slowly, but I was not allowed to look at the paper at all. This seemed really weird to me. I was wondering how I could draw anything if I was not allowed to look at it. But Betty Edwards, the teacher, was right. the careful focus on the subject and the lines in it, in my hand, meant that I was seeing it more clearly than I ever had as I moved my pencil slowly, slowly, slowly to match every twist and turn I saw in front of my eyes, which never left the hand they were drawing. When I looked at my finished work, it didn’t look much like my hand, but that was not the purpose of this first exercise. The next day, I moved on to the next chapter, which allowed a very little looking at the paper. This time, after 40 very careful minutes, during which I fell into a kind of meditative state that Edwards explained was a goal, I drew a hand that looked amazingly like my hand. I was impressed. Over the coming weeks and months, I got more and more caught up in following the instructions and putting in the necessary daily time. After six weeks, I had finished the book, and had learned that I could in fact draw very well. Picasso was in no danger of being overthrown, but had discovered that I thought was a talent that I just didn’t have was in fact a skill that could be developed by following instructions and putting in the necessary practice day after day. From her concluding chapter, I even discovered that the same principles could work with handwriting, but I’ve also learned that if you stop doing the deliberate practice that improves a skill, it withers and dies, as my scratching on the whiteboards at AUA prove.