The Art of Seeing

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There will be opportunity to investigate a variety of drawing materials and approaches, to refresh your drawing or stimulate new directions. What will I achieve? Through a series of guided drawing and mindfulness exercises you’ll explore a variety of ways of looking, seeing and expressing your experience through drawing. A practical drawing course engaging a variety of media and sources of inspiration, including the world around us, the imagination and artists’ work. The drawing studio is fully accessible by wheelchair. What will we cover? Let’s start our practice by using the barrel model to examine American culture. We can begin by simply plugging in some simple descriptions of American infrastructure, social structure and superstructure. to correlate the methods of visual education with the findings of modern psychology and critical philosophy. My purpose in making this correlation is to demonstrate the essential reasonableness of a method, which turns out to be nothing more or less than the practical application to the problems of vision of certain theoretical principles, universally accepted as true. [1] The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes” Marcel Proust

There are numerous rules of compositions that can aid you to be more creative with your photographs. I have often heard, and I am sure you have too, that “there are no rules in photography,” or “learn the rules and forget them.” There may be some merit in these statements, I will leave that discussion to others, but for me and my photographic journey, increasing knowledge of my craft every day has helped me make better photographs. I want to discuss just a few rules, guides, and tips that I use most when out photographing. Zebra Stallion Standing Guard Suitable for those with experience in mindfulness and/or drawing who wish to re-fresh their practice or stimulate new approaches, as well as enthusiastic beginners.

The first is connected with the silly craze for shutting out the light, described in an earlier paragraph. Using patterns in your photographs help create rhythm. Patterns appear everywhere in nature, try and photograph a pattern that has a repeated shape as in the image below of lines in the dunes, these repeated patterns will add rhythm that the viewer will easily follow. In this image, I used a low angle of view and tilted the wide angle lens to create diagonal lines and exaggerated the stormy sky which adds mood. Engage a toolkit of methods and resources for exploring and developing mindfulness and drawing. What level is the course and do I need any particular skills? Given the complexity of culture, it can be useful to have a model. Anthropologists have devised many models and metaphors for understanding culture. Many of them refer in some way to the idea that culture can be divided into three levels: infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure. Here we will use the “barrel model” developed by anthropologist Harald Prins to demonstrate what these levels refer to and how they are interrelated.

We value and nurture individualism in our schools when we give out individual grades or champion a student’s unique creativity. We celebrate and elevate sports and movie stars for their unique individual talents. We seek individual salvation or enlightenment. The values of independence, individualism, choice and freedom permeate our lives, from infrastructure, to social structure, to superstructure. We can try to tease apart the culture and find causal relationships . Does capitalism cause individualism? Or does individualism cause capitalism? Or more broadly, does infrastructure cause superstructure or vice versa? Martin Gardner described The Art of Seeing as "a book destined to rank beside Bishop Berkeley’s famous treatise on the medicinal properties of ‘tar-water’." [4] To cure the optical defect of an eye––whether it has existed since youth or acquired in the course of a lifetime––he had a set of eye exercises. Included in the Bates Method was “sunning,” exposing the eyes to the sun. Also advised was “exclusion of mental strain” by covering the eyes with the palms, and then uncovering to focus on a target, whereupon any optically-defective eyes should note a flash of visual clarity. With practice such flashes should, supposedly, merge into a continuum of sharp eyesight. Not only could the Bates Method treat optical failures of the eye but his regime, said Dr Bates, could also cure many pernicious diseases of the eye. He wrote, in 1920, with adamantine conviction. I stepped onto the court and noticed that for the first time in my life, I was taller than everybody else. Even better, the rims had been set to about 8 feet, perfect for dunking. I rushed in for a massive dunk on my first opportunity, putting my team up 6-0. I looked to my friend Kodenim for a high five, but he looked concerned or even angry as he slapped his hand to his forearm as if to say, "Foul! Foul!"You will be introduced to a small toolkit of mindfulness and drawing approaches to help you connect to the drawing process with greater ease, simplicity and clarity. The faculty of perceiving is related to the individual’s accumulated experiences, in other words, to memory. Second, at the level of social structure, we can say that it is socio-logical. It makes sense socially. Witchcraft beliefs encourage people to be kind to each other and take care of their relationships in the absence of formal rules and laws. Furthermore, if a relationship does sour, there are rituals such as the washings described earlier that heal relationships. Huxley goes on to stress that when legs are imperfect, every effort is made to get the patient walking again, and without crutches if at all possible. "Why should it not be possible to do something analogous for defective eyes?"

Culture is like water to us. We’re so immersed in our own ideas and assumptions that we can’t see them. It can be useful to jump out of the water now and then. This is one of the great virtues of encountering someone or some place that is radically different from what we know. We see the contrast between how we do things and how they do things, and we can then see ourselves in a new light. What was apparent as an insider was that our choice to pay or not pay the compensation would have life and death consequences for the village. We could pay the compensation, thereby reconnecting two family networks and saving the village, or we could simply choose to move out and start a new village. It turns out that witchcraft, more than the depletion of nutrients in the soil, is the engine that keeps people moving. Most villages trace their origin to a witchcraft accusation. If you stand on a high peak and look at the villages dotting the landscape, you are looking at a history of accusations, deaths, and failed compensations. In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of seeing through his now-famous monologue known as “Ode to a Flower.” My father offered to wash Kodenim as a show of his innocence. Washing is a ritual thought to “cool” the witchcraft. If my father was the witch, the soap and water would cool his witchcraft and remove it from Kodenim. With such a strong emphasis on good relations, there is no need for formal or written laws, rules or policies. There are no lawyers, rulers, or police. All people have a natural incentive to be good and to build and maintain good relationships with others because their livelihood depends on it. Since nobody has any official power over anyone else, and there is no division of labor, it is mostly an egalitarian society, with very little difference in status and wealth.

I owned the court. I grabbed a steal and went in for another dunk, looking to Kodenim again for a fist pump or cheer. Instead, he gave me a stern look and pounded his bicep with his hand. He was trying to send me a signal, but I wasn't getting it. Second, it is a book by and about (to some extent) Aldous Huxley. He was an intelligent writer and it is interesting to read his take on issues that affected him so directly and so significantly. In this gift economy, it is the relationships that have lasting value, not goods or money. People work hard to maintain strong relationships because they know they can then call on them when they are in need. There is no incentive to hoard goods, since most of their goods (like sweet potatoes and bananas) would rot and wither away.