(Or "Things my drawing teacher never told me.")

In "Part 3 -- Drawing, Without Knowing (Or, The Art in the Doodle)," I started talking about the central and peripheral areas of our vision. I suggested that paying attention to the qualitative difference between central and peripheral vision (sort of "looking at the looking") may help one realize how ambiguous our vision actually is and, by almost automatic extension, how much we take our experience of our visual world for granted.

Our experience of our visual world is above all made of non-differentiated "images" (more accurately, I should call that "potential for images") in which we project a sharply focused and differentiating "beam" (our central area of vision) as if it were a searchlight probing into the night.

However, this searchlight metaphor is only half the truth, another facet consists of the intention that drives the searchlight, making it pick "this, " and not "that," and putting the resulting overall "image" together based on a predetermined "project."

Culturally, we are conditioned to using this "beam of differentiation" according to societal norms, lighting up this and that element (almost like "making it up") in order to constitute/compose an overall image that corresponds to what we have been conditioned to anticipate.

In other words, the world we "see" is the world we constitute by constantly picking and organizing bits of information; a picking and organizing that is directed by an intentional project ("deriving meaning from our experience while simultaneously projecting meaning into it," as Merleau-Ponty would say). It's very similar to assembling a bicycle following a set of instructions. (Imagine that, "reality by number," or at least, by design! ;-)

Look At How You Look
Here's an example: We are looking at a face, and we are going to give its features a different musical value (C, D, E, etc.). Let's say that the nose is "D," its left eye "E" (as we look at it), its right eye "F," and the mouth "C."

All original artwork © Jean Detheux.