Drawing to See

My Grandfather was an artist. He loved nothing more than getting up early in the morning and hauling his paints and easel up into the mountains to paint an old barn when the light hit it just so. And as a young artist, I loved nothing more than to tag along.

We’d set up in a old field somewhere, Grandpa with his paints and I with my sketchpad, and spend the morning quietly painting and drawing. At some point, Grandpa would push his stool back from his easel, stand up, stretch a bit, then ask to see what I’d been working on.

The impromptu art lessons that resulted were among the best I ever received. You see, grandpa had a way of reducing complex visual concepts to a few well-chosen words. One lesson has stayed with me all these years:

Don’t draw what you think you see; draw what you see.

What followed was even better:

Art is nothing more than learning to see.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that one statement set the stage for much of my personal and professional life ever since. But I had finished college before I realized what I had been given.

That’s when I ran across a book by William Zinsser called Writing to Learn. My employer had directed me to read Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well and I enjoyed it so thoroughly that, at its conclusion, I found myself wandering through bookstores looking for something else Zinsser had written.

In Writing to Learn, Zinsser contends that writing is the best way to immerse oneself in a field of knowledge and to make it one’s own.

You see, when you write about something, you have to organize your thinking. You are forced to investigate the subject more thoroughly than necessary for mere recitation on a test. You must be able to grasp it, its relation to other subjects, its subtleties, its nuances.

You have to know it.

When you draw something, one have to organize your perceptions. You must go beyond mere shape and shading to really see the subject, to understand its relationship to its surroundings, to capture the subtleties of light and shadow, the nuances of texture.

You have to see it.

So now I write to help me learn. And I draw so that I can see.