Practiced drawing some “compound” forms today.

I was thinking more about the idea of “practice” in the rawest form, and how much it has been removed from so much of what I do vs. how central it is in something like drawing. For example, Eviston talks about the value of practicing drawing basic shapes – circles, ovals, lines – tens of thousands of times. Even if you accumulate all the conceptual knowledge of how to draw these things in the first five minutes (how to hold the pencil, how to “ghost” the form, how fast to make the marks, etc.), there’s value and learning in the thousands of iterations after. One way to frame this is that there’s lots of physical, non-verbal, “tacit” (h/t my friend Emma) things you need to learn about how to draw a line which just cannot be transferred/acquired through raw verbal or visual means – e.g. being told or shown how to do it is not enough to master it.

It’s interesting how little even our academic institutions emphasize this kind of pattern of learning, outside of maybe art and instrument-learning music classes. Elsewhere, learning and education is mostly framed around acquiring facts, knowledge, frameworks, understandings and so on. We might think that these things are just separate, but it’s also interesting to reflect on the intellectual analogue of this kind of physical/embodied/tacit knowledge of “how” to draw a line. This might be things more like your patterns or habits of thought – when you’re confronted with a new idea or situation, what ideas, questions, reactions, emotions show up for you? What is your intuition about what to do, what to think more about, what to question etc? If there’s something you don’t understand something, how do you respond to that? As with drawing circles, there’s lots of ways someone could advise you on these topics, and yet there’s a continued practice required to really cultivate them.

One example this brings to mind is something like cognitive behavioral therapy, which in my understanding focuses on a set of these patterns; even if you can learn about, say, cognitive distortions, there’s still a work or practice required to build the habits and capability of recognizing them, re-patterning the “way you think” (vs. what you know). Another analogue that comes to mind is virtue ethics vs. other types of more rule- or principle-based moralities.

Anyhow, I’ll be practicing more drawing circles.