CAW Teaches Art Students To See Instead Of Look

Drawing, said artist and instructor Steven DiGiovanni, is ​“learning a new language.” But part of that was about removing language from the equation. ​“What you’re drawing has no name,” he said. That was because it was about the difference between looking and seeing.

These were among DiGiovanni’s opening statements in his introduction to drawing class, offered virtually through Creative Arts Workshop’s Creating Freely programming, which started at the beginning of the pandemic and is continuing with new offerings every week, ranging from communal art-making and studio tours to classes and exhibitions. The New Haven-based DiGiovanni is a working artist and teacher at Creative Arts Workshop, and for his first online drawing class, which filled its enrollment of a dozen students, he went deep.

It was, he said, about cultivating the ability to ​“start to see things objectively.” There were, for example, no lines in the actual world. ​“A line is nothing more than a symbol that indicates an edge,” he said, a border between light and dark, or between colors. ​“A contour is a descriptive line.”

He brought up a drawing by artist Ellsworth Kelly that depicted the petals of a flower with stunning accuracy and economy. For DiGiovanni, what made the drawing noteworthy wasn’t that it was simply beautiful, but that it communicated so much with so few lines. ​“This is a contour line that is essentially telling you everything a line can tell you,” he said. He then turned to a drawing by artist Alberto Giacometti, which in some ways seemed the opposite of Kelly’s. It was a drawing of a woman in a room, but the lines jumped off the figure into the air around her. Giacometti, DiGiovanni said, was ​“giving us a spatial analysis of what’s in front of him. It’s a drawing about the atmosphere and the space.”

In both cases, he said, the artists had succeeded in truly seeing, not just looking at, what they were drawing. In drawing, he said, ​“there is no agenda.” To Giacometti, he said, ​“there is no woman there.” It was about ​“reprioritizing the way we see.”

This suggested a crucial difference between seeing something and looking at it. ​“The way we interact with the world is through looking,” DiGiovanni said. By that he meant that we look an an object and label it — house, car, bird. ​“The name of the thing refers us to a general image,” DiGiovanni said, one that could also be cartoony, a caricature of what our eyes actually see. ​“Forget the name of the thing,” he said. ​“That picture that is in your head is no longer useful to you.” It was about getting past looking at an object, and seeing the light, shadow and forms that made up the visual information that the brain assembles into an object.

He brought up a drawing by artist Georges Seurat. ​“You’ll see that there are a lot of missing edges” in the drawing, he said. ​“There are no contours whatsoever.” Seurat’s style of drawing showed that ​“there’s no need for the abstraction of the contours” because he was able to build texture. ​“Notice how evocative this is,” DiGiovanni said. ​“He gives us just the suggestion” of a face. Our eye put together the image, including a lot of details — her ear, the bun in her hair. In some sense, you could say that Seurat saw the woman; we looked at his drawing.

DiGiovanni then gave the class its first exercise. He had asked each student to procure a pad of paper, pencils, and charcoal. ​“We’re going to draw ellipses,” he said. Using a soft pencil, he said, ​“I want you to fill pages, a couple pages front and back, with ellipses.”

He demonstrated. Ellipses, he said, are just a ​“foreshortened circle,” a circle looked at from an angle. ​“Think of the ellipse as a constant curve,” he said. Shapes that looked more like footballs or cigars wouldn’t do. ​“I’ll give you 10 minutes,” he said. ​“Fill up one side of the page. Fill up the other side. It’s a dexterity exercise.”

He broke down what he meant by that. In part it was about being more aware of the connection between hand and eye. ​“When you’re putting the ellipse down, where does the eye go?” he asked rhetorically. He also suggested using the arm and shoulder, rather than just the wrist, to move the pencil ​“so the movement is much freer.”

The students got to drawing. ​“Keep in mind, well-made ellipse drawings make great gifts,” he said. There was laughter across the Zoom meeting. ​“This is the part where usually I’d be wandering around the studio,” he said. ​“It was the only way I’d get exercise.”

Do you hold a pencil like you do when you write? a student asked. ​“That’s a great question,” he said. The answer was no. ​“Hold it like Zorro signing a Z on a wooden door. When we write, we think in terms of precision,” He wanted the students to think ​“in a broader sense” — starting with holding the pencil farther away from its tip.

“I can’t make the lines meet like you do,” one student said.

“Try doing it more slowly. And give your eye an inch and a half lead,” DiGiovanni said. He encouraged them to try charcoal. ​“See how you like the drag” of it on the paper, he suggested. It was about ​“developing a sense of the feeling of the material on the surface.”

The students practiced for another few minutes.

“How are your ellipses going?” DiGiovanni asked.

“I can’t wait to give them as a gift,” a student said.

DiGiovanni then introduced a ​“wrinkle”: ​“I want you to assign line value according to size,” he said. ​“The smaller the ellipse, the lighter it is. The larger, the darker. There’s a visual effect we’re going to get.”

The students worked at their pads more. ​“You’re all going to be dreaming ellipses tonight,” DiGiovanni said. He then held up his own page to demonstrate the visual effect he was talking about.

“Our composition of ellipses is opening up the picture plane,” he said. The lighter ones looked farther away. The darker ones looked closer. He offered another demonstration of what he meant by taking a fresh page and drawing a straight line across it.

“The moment I draw this line across the surface, the flat space opens up,” he said. ​“We see a horizon.” He drew cacti against it, and the line became the horizon. He erased the cacti and drew a sailboat, and the horizon was transformed again. He gave one more ellipse exercise — to draw it in one stroke, and make the line darker on the tighter curves and lighter on the broader ones.

“I’m sure you’re all NASCAR fans,” he said dryly. ​“If you need to make car sounds when you’re doing it, that’s all right…. It’s almost like playing an instrument loudly or softly.”

The students worked at it.

“How’s It going?” DiGiovanni said.

“It was getting better, and then it got worse,” a student said. ​“I got into my head.” The students held up their notebooks and DiGiovanni offered advice.

“Those look like olives,” he said of one student’s page.

“I’ve got a martini!” the student said.

Going back to idea of an ellipse as a foreshortened circle, DiGiovanni continued building the students’ perceptive skills. ​“See if we can create the illusion of a circle going up and down above and below eye level,” he said. He drew a cross from two lines, a set of axes. The ellipses closer to the horizontal line would be flatter, above and below the line; as one moved farther away from the line, the ellipses looked more circular.

Then the next step was to make a stack of ellipses of different sizes, join the sides of the ellipses, and then ​“erase the curves of the ellipses that I don’t want,” he said — meaning the ones that wouldn’t be visible if the stack of ellipses were a solid object. The result was something that looked a bit like a candleholder, but suggested physical shapes with weight.

“You’re learning a set of codes,” DiGiovanni said, that, once mastered, would let the students ​“constructed three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.”

The students practiced. ​“As you all do this, keep in mind the broadening and lightening up” of the curves, DiGiovanni said, ​“being aware of the pressure you’re putting down on the implement…. The contour can tell you things about the form that give it some complexity.”

He elaborated; there was a ​“visual rhythm” to the changing textures of line that made it more interesting to look at, a ​“stronger sense of volume in the form.”

“I have drawn an esophagus,” one student said of her form. The class laughed.

DiGiovanni then said he would give them an ​“exercise to occupy them for a week.”

“That’s what I need, something to occupy me for the week,” one student said.

“I can give you some of my job to do,” another student said. Laughter again.

The class talked more about the use of the ellipses to achieve perspective, a sense of three-dimensionality. One student was a little frustrated by her own work. ​“Yours look rather perfect,” she said of DiGiovanni’s example.

“Not if you get too close to them,” DiGiovanni said. He went through the students’ work as they held it up to their home cameras. ​“Very evocative,” he said of one student’s work that had leaned into the idea of darkening lines when they intersected and lightening them when they didn’t.

“I got rid of everything I didn’t want,” the student said.

For the week between this class and the next class, DiGiovanni suggested practicing ellipsis composition. ​“Start noticing the ellipses around you,” he said. And ​“I’m going to give you one more thing to do…. It goes contrary to the way you’re using to interacting with things,” he warned, and was ​“going to be an absolutely mindless activity. No mind. Don’t think.”

The idea was to draw ​“a corner of a room where there’s something going on…. You’re going to find a spot, an edge.” He demonstrated. ​“I’m placing my hand on a corresponding spot. Then I’m going to follow with my hand where my eye goes.”

His hand followed his eye as it traced the contour of his bicycle in the corner of his studio. ​“All I’m doing is following where my eye goes.” From the bike to the objects around it — portfolios, boxes, other parts of the bike.

“That doesn’t look much like a bike,” he said of his drawing. But the point was to develop ​“the habit of leading your hand with your eye.”

“It discourages us from thinking before we draw,” he added. ​“We draw with no mind.” That was an aspiration as much as an observation. He recalled an artist whose work he admired, who created his paintings by ​“continually asking himself ​‘what am I seeing?’ ​‘what am I seeing?’”

The technique could be practiced on just about anything — a ​“pile of clothes in the corner of the room, a jacket hanging on the wall…. It doesn’t matter how complex it is. The process is the same. What’s nice about this is that you don’t think about whether you’re doing a good drawing or a bad drawing. You’re just following the edges.”

Which brought him back to his philosophical beginning. The idea of the class wasn’t simply to learn to produce accurate drawings of things, though that was certainly a benefit. Rather, he hoped to cultivate the idea of ​“drawing as an aid to seeing. It’s a great way to enhance one’s perceptive capabilities.” Maybe it sounded ​“corny,” he said, but to him, drawing was ​“a point of contact, a place where you can actually verify your own existence in relation to things.”

“What am I drawing?” one might ask themselves, but the observed reality was that ​“there is no what.”

Rather than asking what they were drawing, DiGiovanni said, the students might pose a different question: ​“Where am I looking? What is happening there?” Not an object, but a dark edge against a light edge. Not a lamp, but a shape that is circular. The difference between looking and seeing.