Artist's Notebook

Hoping students discover (or rediscover) the visual imagination.

Someone asked me recently, “At what age did you become an artist?” I replied that I had never unbecome one — that like most kids I’d always drawn and made things, and as I grew up I never stopped. I explained that for a number of years I taught young kids, and it came as a shock when I first encountered a five-year-old who had already given up drawing.

The word imagine has linguistic roots in the act of forming a mental picture. Drawing, painting and building one’s mental pictures are intrinsically fascinating to kids because they are such a direct means of messing with and figuring out the world. Children picture what they’ve seen; they make it their own.

Yet once children embark on the difficult process of learning to read, many seem to feel a need to unlearn their own idiosyncratic way of depicting and playing with the universe. It’s as if learning an agreed-upon system of marks on paper makes their own marks suspect. Preschools and kindergartens have paints, blocks and dress-up areas, but these messy things are usually banished from first grade onward, when reading and writing monopolize the lesson plan.

Over the past several months, I’ve been an advisor to UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, working with a group of doctoral candidates in fields like anthropology, history and geography. These students are working to develop innovative ways to integrate visual information in their research. In the past the university has discouraged the mixing of written and visual material. Going against longtime practice, these grad students are, I believe, headed in the right direction.

Like some of the parents I dealt with when I taught preschool, the university seems very concerned that if the students are encouraged to embrace the open-ended world of visual phenomena, the academic system itself will be undermined. The fear seems to be that if they are exposed even a bit too long to the arts, these students will fail to develop the discipline and discursive skills necessary to become rigorous scholars.

"It came as a shock when I first encountered a five-year-old who had already given up drawing."

Text-based learning establishes a built-in structure for cause-and-effect linear thinking; as the reader moves down the page, the argument progresses. The world of images and imagination seems to move in the opposite direction. Trajectories fly every which way. We separate text and image in school while at the same time, right here on the Eastside, the vibrant technology companies are salient evidence that the left-right, up-down reading of the world is far from the only game in town. Much of IT “architecture” (certainly the most creative and often the most innovative) relies on intuitive, nonlinear processing of information.

School kids, taught like university students by instructors who were brought up in the world of delineated answers, are given very little chance to develop competency in the nonverbal realm — or even to experiment with it. This sketchy world is deemed questionable. But who decided questioning was something we should leave out of the learning process?

The grad students I am working with have been well prepared to find and develop answers. They seem much less comfortable with ambiguity. Because visual information is always open to a number of interpretations, it produces a multiplicity of dilemmas and possibilities.

Exposure to the rigors of visual thinking can enrich a person’s bag of tricks, out of which a commingled approach to surveying the world can arise. For an artist, just as for a scholar, following those possibilities is the act of looking: searching, exploring, observing, using one’s eyes, hands, brain. What the artist brings back from his/her research is not just works of art, but ideas.

The word idea comes to us from the Greek verb “to see.” As a society we can ill afford to separate ideas and seeing. It’s not that we need more artists. But we could certainly use more people asking penetrating, difficult questions. It’s by questioning, searching and looking anew that we learn what we didn’t know we didn’t know.