Everybody draws in one way or another. Football coaches sketch out plays on locker-room blackboards. Engineers draw. So also do architects, archaeologists, cartographers, geographers, geologists, mathematicians, and urban graffiti "wall writers." By downplaying, even dismissing the importance of drawing, many K-12 institutions are gambling with the future. Drawing teaches us how to reason visually in the same way that other artistic pursuits like music reinforce mathematics and poetry improves language skills. Drawing is seeing made active by graphic means. By allowing us to measure, move, and animate space, it lets us look beyond horizons and within what we behold. Imaging technology can record the visible, but only drawing allows us to write pictures of things that encode our unique, personal memories of how we experienced them. Drawing lets us eat the whole world through our eyes and to indelibly burn the vision onto our mind as a durable memory. Drawing lets us own what we see, all by using nothing more than the tip of a pencil.Moral of the story? Put down the electronics. Grab a book and a pencil and enjoy the simple life.
Work cited: McElhinney, J. L. (2012). The Visual Language of Drawing: Lessons on the Art of Seeing. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing. p. 11.
