Our manual capacities are critical to our understanding of the world. Our hands, fixed on the ends of our arms, brought us news of the world, and we evolved rapidly to take advantage.
Our brains got bigger when our thumbs moved into an opposable position vis-a-vis our fingers. There is a physical dimension to this, too. Drawing works in exactly the opposite way: close observation of almost any particular engages the senses and heightens experience, making the world seem bigger, not smaller. That’s a narrow result from a general inquiry, and one version of how aggregation keeps us from seeing a wider world. When we ask for something from Google Image Search-say “airplane”-we get contemporary definitions of same, which in that case yields thousands of pictures of commercial airliners. “I am a slow thinker, and have to spend a lot of time before I can clean up my ideas and make progress.”Įven if you’re not tackling hyperbolic geometry, drawing is useful for our daily affairs from giving directions, taking meeting notes, outlining an presentation, or making grocery lists. It fosters close observation, analytical thinking, patience, even humility. “The process of drawing something helps you somehow to stay connected,” she explained in a 2014 interview.
Scientists are often avid doodlers, like the Fields-Medal-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, for instance. Diagrams, maps, doodles, smiley faces: These are all drawings!” Drawing helps us think betterĪt its core, drawing is a problem-solving tool. “The self-consciousness associated with ‘good’ drawing, or a naive form of realism, is mostly to blame,” he explains to Quartz. ”If you take a step back, and define drawing as symbolic mark-making, it’s obvious that all human beings draw. Our anxiety around drawing starts around puberty, when we begin self-critiquing our abilities to render a perfect likeness, Dowd says. For centuries, schools have lumped drawing with painting and confined it in an “aesthetic cage,” he says. Mistaking drawing for art is embedded in our institutions, says Dowd, a professor of art and American culture at the Washington University in St. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning, something that can be done anytime, like taking notes, jotting down a thought, or sending a text. It’s not just for the “artists,” or even the weekend hobbyists. Put another way: Drawing shouldn’t be about performance, but about process.
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