Why It Is Crucial That We Draw? (Video)
These are some of the reasons both adults and children should pick up a pencil and paper and try and recreate what we see before us.
It is curious how our times demand that we return to older times, to the analog world, to the world of objects, things that we can feel with our skin. Those who have a voice and a perspective call for silence, boredom, and walks, or to abandon the mobile phone and to draw. It is enough to see how coloring books are the top-selling genre on Amazon. That is coloring books for adults. And as Jung said, “drawing is a magnificent healing tool.”
This suggests that we are in some way ‘sick’ from so much technological abstraction, and there is perhaps some truth in that. We are still on the cusp of a digital era that has left us awestruck and we don’t know quite how to return to this, to the earth and the skin. We don’t know how to combine the two worlds in order to not fall ill. The recommendations to draw – and which the British writer John Ruskin highlighted in his time, and without it being as urgent back then as it is now – are especially opportune due to the ubiquity of mobile phones with cameras.
Photographs have their own and unique charm, but in many ways we have replaced landscape with the photography of landscape. This is a grave error in the sense that we have robbed ourselves of a valuable and fundamental capacity to enjoy the planet, to marvel at our investigation of the forms and folds of nature. One of Ruskin’s examples is a couple that goes out for a walk in the forest. One of them draws and the other does not. There is a huge difference in how landscape is perceived by both individuals. The one who does not draw will see a tree and perceive that that tree is green, but will not think much more about it. They will see that the sun is shining and that is has a joyous effect. And that is all. But the one who draws, with their eyes accustomed to looking for the source of beauty, will penetrate hidden parts of nature. They will look up and see how the rays of light touch each leaf. Here and there they will see a branch emerging from the foliage. They will see the glow of the green moss and the strange forms of the lichen. Is it not worth seeing all of that too?
With the simple act of attempting to recreate what we see, we study it as we never would do when taking a photograph. The world will reveal itself to us like the codes that reveal themselves to spies that know how to look. In the following animated video, The School of Life tells us about this beautiful art that we should implement. Ruskin’s manual for drawing, on the other hand, is a wonderful and highly contagious read.
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