Look in the square

“The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.” – Publilius Syrus

When I was in junior high and high school, I was an artist, taking drawing and painting classes and expecting my parents to hang my oversized and pensive and hormonal portraits of Monarch butterflies over the fireplace, that place of honor. They did.

At that age, I was a taller version of the small child who makes a “stained glass” vase from an Ivory dish soap bottle in Pre-K and a balloon papier mache bowl with painted yarn in bad colors and awkward scrolls in Vacation Bible School, proudly presenting the treasure, noticing whether or not it was displayed afterwards in the TV room.

Perhaps I am still an artist—aren’t we all?—but life pushes it out of us. As Picasso said, "all children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

My digital camera is broken, having died a Terrible and Tragic Death at the Hands of a Toddler Who Shall Not be Named, but who is 38 inches tall and whose initials include a "T." That’s all to say that I’d love to illustrate this story with the pencil drawings around which it circles, but can’t at the moment. So imagine, if you will, two pencil drawings, one of an old man in a weathered hat, standing with his arms hanging limply by his sides and looking straight into your gaze. The other, a woman also staring straight ahead, but sitting, her hands gathered in her lap. They are big drawings, framed in wood from my uncle’s old homestead, a satisfying gray wood, weathered by the years, the sun, the rain. He gathered the wood when the house came down, crafting frames for these drawings from the timbers, a surprise for me.

These many years later, my daughter Emma is a cartoonist; her drawings (okay, I’m biased, but surely this is close to the Objective Truth) are fantastic feats of cartooning. She has a well-honed sense of gesture, of tone, of movement, of glance and humor—she can even do hands!—and this week, she has ventured out from the cartoon world to drawing from life, a pencil portrait of her friend Brittany one of her first works.

She was disappointed by her effort.

I tried to reassure her in a way that might not have been all that reassuring, really: "It’s tough drawing people from life—I’m no good at it, but you have great potential." "But Mom," she protested, "those pictures you did of the old man and woman hanging in Grammy’s kitchen are amazing."

But I didn’t draw them from life, I said. I drew a matrix of 1-inch by 1-inch squares on photographs of those two people. Then I drew a matrix of the same number of squares on the drawing paper. And then I drew what I saw in each square, not a nose, but abstract lines in a box. Not an eye, but solid moments of dark against sharp whites, dots of gray on islands of black.

And in such a way I drew those people—the thing divorced from my knowledge of the thing, the image itself the point, not the word that we use to describe that part, freed up from my belief that lips are too hard to draw, freed up from my perception of “lip-ness,” disconnected and unfettered from my understanding or lack of understanding about shadow.

What else of life could benefit from the same approach?

What would happen in my daily life if I divorced the lifetime of history I have with the thing in front of me—the object, the situation, the person, the opportunity—and simply looked at the components of the thing instead, the discrete pieces that make it up, the 1-inch squares of lines and shadows, not my expectations that they will form a lip, an eye, a nose? What if I divorced my perception of it from the thing itself, if I stopped seeing what I expect to see and saw what I really see.  As my friend David wrote recently:

“Seeing is not as easy as it might seem. Visual artists train for years to see what is there, not what they think is there. Seeing requires a return to the time before you had words, concepts, and definitions for every thing. You’d be amazed at how many colors there are in a ‘yellow’ #2 pencil when you look past the idea of ‘yellow pencil’ and actually see the shapes, shadows, and light.”

Seeing. We are trained for dullness, David says. Yes, we’ve lost the skill of seeing, we’ve begun clinging to the beliefs we have about the way things are, building life rafts of “pencil,” the idea, not the thing in front of us, not really.

The story is told of a man who recognized Picasso in a train compartment and took the opportunity to ask the artist why he didn’t paint people “the way they really are.” When Picasso asked what he meant by that, the man opened his wallet and took out a photo, saying “here’s what people look like—that’s my wife, ” to which Picasso responded, "She’s rather small and flat, isn’t she?” Life is an infinite regress of referred meaning. What would it take to shed the outer layers to uncover the real thing, the thing all those meanings point to?

David Hockney’s hundreds of Polaroids create layers of meaning and angles of vision (okay, I’ll mention him, but I’m still miffed with him over his theory on the use of optical devices by old masters); Chuck Close’s squares connect pure color into meaning (I think perhaps he stole the idea from me; I’m considering suing.)  What are we made up of, if not these small squares of color, tone, story, meaning?

What if I looked past the idea of “criminal” or “gang member” or “homeless person” or “alcoholic” or “teenager” or “CEO” and actually saw the shapes, shadows, and light that make up those people? Would that change the picture I draw of them inside my head and the one I act on outside of my head? Would it involve stepping back from my reductive story of them to see all the hues and colors that make them up, all the stories that have created meaning in their lives, all the ways in which they have become the person who stands in front of me? Would it mean that I need to grant them the same level of specificity that I grant myself? That I need to change my perspective in order to see them, just as I do when I see a self-portrait by Chuck Close?

What picture would I create of others if I really looked at what was there, not what I imagined was there, if I really saw the shapes and shadows of their lives and not my interpretation of them?

As Thoreau has said, the question is not what you look at, but what you see.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Teilhard De Chardin said that “the whole of life lies in the verb seeing.” See again. See what is, not what you believe. See what is, not what you expect to see. See what is, not what you have named in your own mind. Go back to a time before you had words, concepts, and definitions for every thing, when the possibility of a person, an object, a situation was unlimited, full of shapes and colors and a meaning all its own.

Just see.