Creative01

I did not see with the eyes of an artist. When I attempted to do some drawing or painting on my own, a white page made me panic, and my inner critic was ruthless. That is when I realized that creativity is scary, and that I will have to face my own imperfections in order to reach the Artist-within.

But how does one do that? As part of my education I learned about the enormous complexity of information processing our brain goes through in order to make us see. Faced with the world in front of me, I was not sure what exactly I saw. What do we see when we see something beautiful? What makes us recognize someone's face? Where do we look? What do we concentrate on? How are we able to recognize moods and personalities of fleeting passersby? Is it possible to convey the essence of that process in drawing and painting?

1st benchmark:
Developing the ability to perceive line quality by relying only on one’s visual capacity and bypassing the “talking part” of oneself.
2nd benchmark:
Developing the capacity to draw pure line drawings of plants and flowers, bypassing the ingrained ideas of what something “should look like”, and by getting wordlessly involved in active seeing.
3rd benchmark:
Developing the capacity for proportional drawing of animal and people’s body positions by retraining one’s visual system’s natural tendencies to exaggerate parts that are paid closer attention to.
4th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for simplified, yet varied abstract line representation of complex patterns found in landscapes devoid of man-made structures.
5th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for charcoal shade drawings of plants, animals, people and landscapes.
6th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for proportional line and shade portraits with emphasis on recognizable features of the model.
7th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for shade drawings that include consistent lighting effects produced by the sources not present in the drawing.
8th benchmark:
Developing the capacity to paint harmonious, captivating, abstract color composition using watercolor or acrylic paint on paper.
9th benchmark:
Developing the capacity to see the “underneath color variations” in plants, animals, people and landscapes, and integrating shape, color and composition, yet bypassing the visual tendency for oversimplification.
10th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for creation of works with “essence”, beauty, pattern and variation.
11th benchmark:
Developing the capacity for fast abstract drawing containing recognizable essence of the subjects, done in charcoal, watercolor or acrylic.
12th benchmark:
Developing one’s own strengths and interests, regardless of “socially acceptable” drawing or painting, and retaining the capacity to see the world as new every day, thus reaching one’s creative center.


"We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes ... Our looking is perfected every day - but we see less and less. Never has it been more urgent to speak of SEEING. Ever more gadgets, from cameras to computers, from art books to videotapes, conspire to take over our thinking, our feeling, our experiencing, our seeing. Onlookers we are, spectators ... 'Subjects' we are, that look at 'objects'. Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once and for all. By these labels we recognize everything but no longer SEE anything. ...