|
|
|
|
member, Human Development and Harmony Cluster, Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas
|
|
15
1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism 2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine 3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission 5. Civics and Democratic Governance 6. Culture as Community Creativity 7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education 8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony 9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice 10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development 11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations 12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology 13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships 14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace 15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart' . |
Learning to Draw: By Ding Reyes Lead Founder and Executive Director, SanibLakas Foundation; executive convenor, Sanib-Sining Movement for Synaesthetics This article was first published in the 4th issue of the quarterly LightShare Digest. NO ONE is born with an artist’s pencil in hand. Pity the mother who’d birth a babe that clutches one. But everyone is born or – much earlier than that historic day – conceived with the urge to reach out later for a pen or pencil as a groping child and the great potential to use it with developed creativity and skill. The word ‘artist’ is often used to stand for visual artist, even as the Spanish equivalent, ‘artista’ is largely used in the Philippines to pertain to film actors and actresses. Using the word artist in a sense as generic as art itself, we of the Sanib-Sining Movement for Synaesthetics have boldly dared since 1999 to declare: “All humans are artists.” Deniers Simply Don’t Know! Still, many of these artists all around us, including perhaps a majority of readers of LightShare Digest, would vehemently object to that all-encompassing assertion. Put another way, most of the artists would vehemently deny that they are indeed artists. We can blame no one. After all, there are two kinds of artists—those who know that they are artists, and those who don’t. And there are many reasons human beings, who are artists like everybody else, would not know that they are artists, would feel “absolutely sure” that they are not artists. “Why, I can’t even draw a straight line! I can’t even draw a perfect circle!” Well, artists can’t either. And they are not expected to be able to do these things without the tools needed for such mechanical tasks—compasses and rulers have been invented for these purposes. Even as a zig-zagging line cannot fairly represent a straight road, a fairly straight line can. When you stare at that zig-zagging squiggle you just drew on a piece of paper to represent a straight road, you can imagine where the pencil mark should rather be put. So, you can, more carefully now, draw a better line, less zigzagging than the first one drawn, and then use the pencil’s usually ever-present eraser tip and make the more multi-curved line vanish. If you stare at the new line drawn and still think you’d rather improve it further, then you would just have to repeat the process. If you want it straight at first try, reach out for that ruler before touching pencil on paper. If you want that line drawn in ink, draw first a faint pencil line, improve that pencil line as suggested above, then if you feel it is fairly accurate for your purposes, ink directly on the last pencil sketch. Observation, Hand Discipline The first lesson I give to my students in sketching and painting is observation. The better term, actually, is appreciative observation. The eye must be trained to distinguish between two rectangles—one that resembles the body of a cow and another that resembles more closely a skyscraper. The eye must be trained to distinguish between a diagonal or inclined line that points to the hour of four and one that points to 5 o’clock. The best training for the eye is to see these visual subjects with appreciation. Reading them with heart and spirit, instead of only with the eye-brain tandem, enhances clarity of vision. Hand discipline comes next. You might know exactly where you want to put a dot or a line but your hand may decide to disobey and go its own way. Hand discipline is developed with training, with repeated exercises. Cartoon figures may be pencil-drawn on tracing paper. The same figure may be traced over and over again but in shrinking time periods.
That way, under increasing time pressure, the hand would be trained to go where you really want it to go while holding and moving that pencil. After this type of activity is also mastered through practice, one can also get the feel of various ways of using various kinds of drawing instruments. The same pencil used in various angles of slant on the paper, or applied with different strengths of pressure, produce greatly varied results. Sharpness of observation, hand discipline and familiarity with using different drawing instruments in different ways all make up just half the story in anyone’s development as a visual artist. In fact, just this half would not make one an artist. Precision in coming out with perfectly accurate copies of any flat or three-dimensional original is something that machines or gadgets can do much better than humans can do freehand or partially assisted. What are these machines or gadgets? These are rulers, compasses, cameras, or photocopying machines. More Vital Part of Artistry The other half of this story is actually more important. It is exclusively human, for which machines have no capability at all. This is the creativity part, rooted in human ability to imagine, to feel, to choose. Surreal art pertains to works depicting things that do not exist in the artist’s field of experience; realistic art pertains to entire scenes or combinations of scenes that are currently visible or are retrievable from the artist’s past experiences as recorded in memory. What are combined and how they are combined, as well as what are added or omitted, involves the artist’s judgments and decisions springing from the artist’s feelings and intuition. One of my favorite art lessons students is a young boy of seven whom I seldom see. What I have had to do is to give instructions to guide his practice for weeks or even months before I see him again. The two-fold instruction that I gave and now remind him, beyond the scope of mere coaching on this or that detail, is for him to do a lot of drawings, each autographed and dated. And each drawing should combine parts that are best-effort accurate copies of models being copied, and parts that he has invented, something coming out directly from his imagination. Prime Directive: Enjoy! And then I set one very important requirement, a “prime directive” of some sort—enjoy! I ask him to develop the habit of doing drawings often, and to really enjoy every minute of doing it. Once he feels he is not enjoying it anymore, he is to stop and lay aside that work in progress. After all, we try to learn to draw not to show obedience to parents or teachers, not to please anybody else nor anybody else’s friends, but to enjoy our lives as self-fulfilled and growing human individuals. Personal drawings are personal soul expressions and only the one doing them can judge whether they adequately express one’s self or not. This is one area where all other people are mere witnesses and are not validly allowed to judge or criticize. Critics are advised to be creators, too, and to focus their energies on being so. Not only are critics’ idle or overly intellectualized criticisms often utterly useless, negative criticisms often discourage rather than encourage human beings who are still discovering their talents, building their self-confidence.
These opinions only pressure budding artists into improving their skills faster, but they run the risk of pushing them to violate the Prime Directive: enjoy expressing and further developing your artistic talents and expressing your true self. |
|
||||||||
|
FEEDBACK BOX: |
Human social harmony and synergies in all human dimensions, with
commonalities as bonding element and diversity as dynamic factor.
