Casa Jonsson

I’ve started reading a book on a subject I never thought I would study. Like many people, although I love visual art I’m all thumbs when it comes to creating it myself—with the possible exception of photography. I’ve always thought that you’re either born with the capacity to acquire visual-artistic skills or you aren’t; if you aren’t gifted, there’s little use trying. I’m beginning to think I was wrong.

Like music, visual art has always been a part of a complete education. If you were to pull aside any gentleman in an Edwardian parlor and get him to sketch the room and its occupants, he could produce a decent account of what he saw. Probably he could plunk out a recognizable minuet on the piano, too. Till now I’ve thought of musical ability as teachable and visual awareness as innate and arcane. This is clearly a contradiction.

My dad just lent me Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Leafing through it, I’m getting excited about the possibility of exploring a creative outlet that I’d believed was closed to me. Edwards’s book, first published a quarter-century ago, has a target readership of people with “very few drawing skills and with very strong anxieties about their potential drawing ability” (p. 6). That’s me; the anxiety is expressed in leaving drawing to those who can make a sketch of their hand that doesn’t look like a Thanksgiving turkey in a children’s craft. What’s exciting to me about the book is its credible approach to developing drawing ability in anyone willing to work at it. Edwards compares the skill of drawing to that of riding a bicycle—difficult to explain, but learnable and impossible to forget. She has written an entire book devoted to getting the reader to see the world differently by invoking an underused hemisphere of the brain. As it were, I can expect myself one day to stop planting my face on the pavement and finally look up, look forward, and balance!

In the meantime, there’ll be plenty of dreadful turkey drawings that I may post for you to admire.

Part of what appeals to me about learning to draw is something Rodin alluded to in a quotation that appears on p. 5 of the book: “The artist is the confidant of nature. Flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs toward him.” Nature does “confide” in the observer; theologians call this general revelation. I look forward to having a keener eye for what nature reveals to us about our ever-creative Creator.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
    and night to night reveals knowledge. (Ps 19:1–2)

Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Lk 19:40)