Chapter 7: Learning to See

"Old School New Art - Craftsmanship: Today's Avant-Garde" - Jeffrey T. Larson

The process of creating a painting begins before the brush ever touches the canvas. The actual painting is, in essence, the culmination of a clarified vision that has been shaped and refined through the eyes of an artist. For a student of art, the primary and fundamental task is not to immediately focus on learning how to draw or mix colors, but to embark on a profound journey of re-training the way they see and perceive the world around them.

You might be thinking, "Don't we all see the world?"

While it is true that we all experience the world through our senses, perhaps primarily through our eyes, our perception is not as straightforward as it may seem. In fact, each one of us processes the continuous and overwhelming stream of visual information that bombards our senses in a unique and highly individualized manner. Our brains, astonishingly efficient organs, sift through this flood of visual data, filtering out the overwhelming majority of it. What we retain, or rather, what we truly "see," is the product of a highly conditioned and personalized mental process.