Practicing Presence Through Drawing

Written by Sandra Marshall

How can we foster the awakened state? Practice presence?

Draw.

Here’s why. If you draw what you see in the world, you can’t judge what you’re looking at. Or can you?

Okay. You will judge, but it will be a different kind of judging. You will be judging spacial relationships, evaluating shapes, tones, and colors. You most likely won’t be deciding whether or not you like what you see…at least not in the moments of actual drawing. You will be really trying to see things. Really. Like never before.

Try this…look at your hand. Just hold up the back of your hand and look at it. Notice the spaces between each finger. Notice the skin that is to the left and right of your fingernail on each finger. If you don’t draw, you may have never even seen that before.

An artist sees all of that in a hand and everything else. We look for it. We look hard for what we might miss. We look at how things relate to each other and to themselves. That’s it.

Drawing is not a skill in the conventional sense. It’s a way of seeing. Inside of each of us is an artist waiting to be expressed.

Betty Edwards, a renowned art instructor, is a pioneer in right-brained drawing theory. Her theory is based on the research of psycho biologist, Roger W. Sperry, who received a Nobel Prize for his work on human brain-hemisphere functions. Based on this work, the ‘good/bad’ judging that we are more familiar with takes place in a different hemisphere of the brain than the more evaluative judging. Our left side does our good/bad judging of things. This left side is also our language center, our symbol center, our number center, our logic center and our linear center. All of these are, of course, very important, but they aren’t everything.

Our more evaluative judging takes place in the right hemisphere of our brain, specializing in shapes, colors, the whole picture and spacial relationships. This hemisphere is always in the present…it doesn’t really know about time. You know how you can be doing something and get so caught up in it that you ‘lose track of time’? You are probably anchored in the right hemisphere of your brain during that time. The left hemisphere of our brain is steeped in the past and future.

So…if you want to practice presence…without really giving your brain the option of non-presence, practice drawing. It will change how you see everything, and as a result, will change your life.

Lury Norris is a visual artist and private drawing instructor, teaching classes out of her home, in Los Osos, CA. She teaches some drawing classes through Adult Education in San Luis Obispo and Oceano.