The great drawing power of touch and observation
Children love to draw but self-consciousness in the teenage years can divorce many of us from an innate facility
The world can be divided into those who can draw and those who can’t. It’s an ability that has been invested with an almost mythical power.
Drawing packs a potent currency. It makes the ordinary person special, gives kudos to the outsider and protects the geek from being bullied by the jocks. And it’s often colonised by the solipsistic parent.
Most children are happy to draw. That is, until they hit puberty, when what professor of art and American culture at Washington University and author of Stick Figure DB Dowd calls “aesthetic anxiety” descends and many give up.
How many of us were told we couldn’t draw or that our drawings just didn’t make the grade? And so, shamed by our inadequacy, we gave up.
Responses to the importance of drawing range from absolutely to not at all. But Dowd suggests we’ve got drawing all wrong. He writes — surprise, surprise — that drawing isn’t about drawing well. Instead he promotes drawing as a tool for learning.
Drawing, in Dowd’s book, helps us think and, better yet, makes us slow down, be patient and pay attention. He even goes so far as to claim that drawing makes us better humans, in the sense that it trains us to wrestle with evidence and challenge assumptions.
In a similar vein, the architect character in Anna Gavalda’s book Consolation points out that if you want to understand something, sketch it, because observation leads to understanding.
In 2009, while teaching drawing skills to art and design students, University of Cape Town (UCT) fine art and social science graduate Leonard Shapiro developed an observational drawing approach involving the sense of touch as an important observation sense. Shapiro named this approach the Haptico-visual observation and drawing method. He teaches this method to medical practitioners and students at UCT’s medical school.
This multisensory observation method involves
the sense of touch (and sight of course), coupled with the simultaneous act of gesture drawing. “As you feel the threedimensional form of a bone with one hand, you draw it with the other. Feeling it involves movement and so does drawing it, especially using gesture drawing.”
Shapiro’s method acknowledges the research around haptics since the late 1960s by professors Susan Lederman and Roberta Klatzky from Queens University in Canada in which touch — in the form of different hand and finger movements, including lateral stroking and grasping — are used by humans to understand an object.
“We gather so much information about objects through our hands using our sense of touch,” says Shapiro. “Our hands take up a large part of the sensory cortex in our brain. We navigate through our world and we explore and observe objects through our sense of touch, even if we don’t realise it consciously. With this method, we use touch actively.”
While there has been a smorgasbord of techniques to make drawing easier, Shapiro’s method, with its emphasis on touch as an observation sense, is a first in drawing for use in anatomy education, he says.
“My thinking was that if I could help medical students become better observers, they would potentially become better doctors, better diagnosticians and better surgeons,” he said.
Interestingly, prior to 1934 in the US, Shapiro points out that it was compulsory for students in the sciences to learn to draw. He believes in the democracy of drawing, that given the chance everyone can draw. And so those who take the anatomy observation course he runs learn to observe and draw — from the student to the medical professional. The method has helped, for example, the radiation oncologist improve spatial orientation skills and the ophthalmologist who wanted assistance in drawing the spherical space of the inside of the eye.
One of the outcomes of this method, explains Shapiro, is that “a three-dimensional mental picture of the object is formed in the mind of the observer, who will later be able to retrieve the object from memory and draw it without looking at the actual object itself”.
This is an extremely useful method for visual note-taking in the field of medicine.
In practice, Shapiro’s method means taking medical students and medical professionals through a series of exercises which involve observation using touch, mark-making and gesture. He implicitly “trusts that everyone can do it”. And they do.
When professional artists are shown the drawings made by the medical professionals and students after taking the course, Shapiro says they are often incredulous at the competency of the work. It’s as if gestural drawings in the school of Frank Auerbach greets them from the page.
Under Shapiro’s careful, skilled and compassionate guidance, fear is replaced by confidence and ability. And, most importantly, observation, so critical in the medical field, has taken root.