This already brings up the need for a different way of drawing ("drawing without knowing") to which I will no doubt come back several times before the end of the planned six articles.

We are trained to "look, understand, then do."

This is getting us in a serious dead-end if we are sincerely involved with trying to bring the totality of our vision onto paper (we just saw that when I "get" one mode, I lose the other). If the understanding has to precede the doing, it limits the doing to the plane of the already known, which is exactly where we get stuck when we try to draw the totality of our field of vision.

What we need is a reversed approach, "look, do, understand" which brings into the "picture" something else, something "other" which is, though unknown, a formidable source of help.

If one can come to the experiencing of the limitations of the habitual ways of working (made of "look, understand, do"), and if one continues on drawing anyway, one has entered a new level of work, the one opened by "look, do, understand."

Picasso said it very well: "What saved me is that I became much more interested in what I was finding than in what I was looking for."

Giacometti was even more in touch with the flavor of this experience when he said: "When I no longer know how to hold this knife, then, and only then, if I persist, have I got a chance for any kind of breakthrough." (That knife is a tool he used to carve and shape the wet clay he was working on.)

It is only when that "stuckness" manifests itself (and we are quite capable of setting up conditions in which that will be almost inevitable) that we are finally starting the real work.

In essence, we not only have to accept the risk of being stuck, we need to find ways by which this "being stuck" will become almost inevitable, even desirable!

By the way, when I talked about "looking at the looking" early on, I meant that.

But if so, and if we indeed can do that, with what are we looking at the looking?

That is one of the things we will try to explore in part #5, in about two months from now.

Jean Detheux is an artist who, after several decades of dedicated work with natural media, had to switch to digital art due to sudden severe allergies to paint fumes. He is now working on ways to create digital 2D animations that are a continuation of his natural media work. He has been teaching art in Canada and the U.S., and has works in many public and private galleries.