Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain: Mikaela Joyce

Drawing is traditionally considered to be an act of creative expression. Yet it is also a skill; it takes keen perception and attention to detail, as well as spatial awareness to accurately capture a subject in a drawing. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain discusses this phenomenon, and what neuroscientific elements underly the drawing process. The human brain is split into two hemispheres; each hemisphere associated with different functions. The left is associated with quantitative skills; calculations, analysis, systems, and language. The right brain is expressive and lateral; it is associated with creativity and emotion.

 

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain poses interesting questions. What hemisphere of the brain needs to be engaged for art-making? Can people “trigger” one side of the brain or the other through following a distinct process? It proposes two drawing exercises that the author argues, cannot be executed through left-brain functionality. The first is producing a “vases and faces” optical illusion. The second is drawing an upside-down replication of Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Igor Stravinsky (1920). Regardless of the artist’s direct experience in drawing, these exercises are designed to trigger right-brain activity.

In the “Vases and Faces” exercise, the reader is challenged to draw a profile of a face on either the left/right hand side of a paper. Then they replicate the mirror image of the face on the opposing side. The premise is simple; but it often creates feelings of dissonance or confusion for the reader. The instruction to create a second profile is simple. Yet in practice, it feels like completing the outline of a vase. This optical illusion can be viewed as two facial profiles, or one vase. Faces and vases are entirely different objects, that the reader has entirely different understandings of.

Two faces, or one vase?

While completing this exercise, I felt I had to “override” my intuition. I had to hyper-focus on the curvature of the lines, and think about facial anatomy as I replicated the second facial profile. The first face was very simple to draw; the second took about three times as long. I felt my hand shake and my confidence in what I was doing decrease. My brain wanted to see the whole, but I was operating based on the sum of the parts. I used a horizontal piece of paper to line-up the eye, nose, brow, and lip placements. After completing the second profile, I decided to shade in the “vase”, or the negative space between the two faces to better highlight the illusion.

 

The second exercise was replicating Picasso’s Portrait of Igor Stravinsky (1920). The twist was, the picture was inverted. The artwork is fairly “readable” as a man in a chair when viewed in the proper orientation. Upside-down, on first glance it looks like a slew of overlapping lines. The instructions are to copy the line work, and leave the drawing upside-down. Interestingly, it is very common for people to replicate the drawing more accurately when it is upside-down rather than rotated “correctly”. The focus becomes on duplicating the line work as it is, rather than intuitively filling in how one thinks a man in a chair “should” look.

My upside-down rendition of Igor Stravinsky

I think the abstraction of this piece makes it really interesting for this exercise. If I were copying it without the rules in Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, I would likely proportion the man’s features according to my understanding of anatomy, or stylistic inclinations. Having the drawing upside-down, directly next to my canvas, measuring the lines and their angles with a ruler and my fingers, and using very calculated strokes, I believe I produced a more “accurate” duplication than I could or would have had the picture been rotated normally.

 

Drawing things “as they are” has always been a challenge for me. In high school I took a figure drawing course, with live models. I had a tendency to draw body parts the way they “should” look, rather than distinctly looking at the shapes and shadows I actually saw. There is a tendency to “correct”, even though ironically the “correction” decreases accuracy. 

Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain is illuminating in that it discusses these visual and cognitive biases, and challenges us, as artists to seek truth.