I am a...VERB

  WORDS AND CONCEPTS CAN BLIND US VISUALLY As I've said, we're conditioned from infancy to look at 'things', not shapes.  Our parents point to various things and tell us what they are: 'that's an apple,' 'that's a tree,' 'that's a face,' 'that's a hand,' etc.  This is great as far as enabling us to learn language, but it's a disaster for creating a visual artist. Through the use of language, we see things conceptually rather than visually, and we separate each 'thing' from the whole.  Krishnamurti used to say that once a child learns the name of something...of a bird or a flower...the child never really sees it again.   I noticed in teaching drawing and painting, one of the most powerful obstacles for the students in learning to see was that they were paralyzed by words.  They would say 'I can't draw faces', or, 'I can draw trees but I can't draw noses.'  And so on. As visual artists, we

  TWO-VALUE EXERCISES: The obliteration of separate things  and  the formation of new integrated shapes   After the students had become familiar with using line to define shapes, I introduced an exercise of observing 2-value shapes in these architectural set-ups of boxes and barrels, further taking the students away from 'thingness,' and separate objects, in order to understand value as the integration of 'things' into new integrated, abstract shapes.   Once again, they had to consider the whole page as a complete and tight composition...no 'vignettes'.  To emphasize this binding of shape, I dramatically lit the set-ups... The students could no longer rely on seeing 'things' but rather had to see relationships and the binding together of form into abstract shapes.  They used a variety of materials and techniques in dealing with the assignment...charcoal, ink washes, and chalk on black paper.  The challenge was to reduce an infinite variety of values into

  LINES CREATING THE BOUNDARIES OF SHAPE AND FORM A significant aspect of drawing is learning how to translate the 3-dimensional visual world into line and shape in order to create convincing images.  One of the tools for creating convincing spatial relationships is what we call 'perspective', but I wasn't interested in the traditional, conceptual way of mechanical one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective.  I wanted the students to learn how to observe and record the  shapes  that create that illusion simply by looking at the shapes and angles of the objects carefully.    And I wanted the students to learn this experientially, through direct observation not through learning mechanical systems...working from large architectural structures that presented these challenges.  Using just line, the students had to  see   the shapes of objects ('positive' shapes) in space together with the shapes of the  spaces  between the objects ('negative' shapes).   I