1. Intuitive Gesture
by Brian Curtis
© 2002, The McGraw-Hill Companies

2. A PowerPoint lecture series to accompany DRAWING FROM OBSERVATION

3. TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE Language skills Math/logic skills
Analytic reasoning
Short- and/or Long-term memory
Pattern recognition
Body awareness and coordination
Spatial awareness
Sound discrimination
Rhythm/time sensitivity
Interpersonal skills
Sensitivity to nature
Artistic sensitivity
Intuitive problem solving

4. Perception
the act of apprehending the world around us by means of the senses.

5. Rational thinking complicates our perceptions
Rational thinking is characterized by a preponderance of preconceived ideas and a heavy reliance on the use of language. It is an essential and valuable component of our ability to make sense of countless aspects of our lives, not the least of which is helping us interpret our visual environment. However, when drawing from observation, an over reliance on rational thinking obscures and distorts our visual perceptions because it substitutes preconceived, generalized mental constructs for specific and concrete sensory data. Rational thinking complicates our perceptions because it frequently substitutes generalized mental constructs for the specific, concrete sensory data that is actually our experience.

6. Don’t think about what you see.
What this means, paradoxically, is that when we are drawing the process must include “not thinking” about what we see.

7. This conceptual drawing of the coffee mug is based on common ideas regularly associated with coffee mugs. It is a logical construction that uses clear stylized symbols to represent our most basic understanding of a coffee cup and, as such, is a straightforward, informative and highly intelligent drawing. It includes the circular opening out of which we drink our coffee, the flat bottom upon which the cup sits securely, the parallel sides that connect the circular top to the flat bottom, and the curved handle that is attached to the side. This image contains general ideas that relate to most coffee mugs, but it makes no attempt to tell us how our personal coffee mug appears on the table in the morning.
Conceptual Cup

8. To safeguard the accuracy of your perceptions, you will need to temporarily suspend the rationalizing influence of analytical information processing until your intuitive and spatially sensitive intelligence has had an opportunity to react directly to the visual information in your visual field.
In this perceptual drawing of a cup, generalized ideas have been replaced by specific perceptions that reveal individualized characteristics of a particular coffee mug and its relation in space to an observer. The opening we know to be circular now appears as an ellipse, the stable flat bottom appears as a pronounced curve, and the handle angles downward. To translate the visual experience of the cup into this image requires a substantially different vocabulary than that used in conceptual drawing.
Perceptual Cup

9. An over reliance on rational thinking obscures and distorts our visual perceptions because it substitutes preconceived, generalized mental constructs for specific and concrete sensory data. When you rationalize your perceptions, what you think becomes more important than what you see and the clarity of your immediate perceptions becomes severely compromised.
This results in an attempt at a perceptual drawing that fails to break free of its conceptual baggage and is less effective as a result. Even though this drawing does have a certain naive charm, it is a damaged hybrid. When rational preconceived notions are mixed in with intuitive spatial perceptions, both the intellectual clarity of the conceptual drawing approach and the complex, sensuous information of direct perceptual experience are seriously compromised. Hybrid images lack consistency and integrity, and vacillate unconvincingly between the idea-based and perception-based styles of processing information.
Unfortunate Cup

10. COGNITIVE STYLES associated with Left Brain
COGNITIVE STYLES associated with Right Brain
Logical
Scientific Skill Intellectual Pragmatic Objective Verbal reasoning Successive Trial and error Digital Watch
Intuitive Artistic Sensitivity Sensuous Impulsive
Subjective
Non-verbal understanding
Simultaneous
Guessing
Analogue Watch
Limiting the influence of rational thinking on your immediate perceptions is essential for accurately recording your observations in a drawing, and in its place you need to develop intuitive, non-verbal approaches to informational processing. This should be a natural process but one that is surprisingly challenging because our formal education actively perpetuates the misconception that one’s facility with the three “R’s” (language skills, reasoning, and math/logic) is the only true indicator of intelligence. You will need to actively counteract this bias and shift your attention away from "thinking" about what you see and toward a non-verbal, big picture oriented, three-dimensionally sensitive, intuitive style of visual processing. Shifting your experience away from the familiarity of ideas and toward the concrete immediacy of sensory perception will be directly proportionate to your tolerance for dealing with patterns of information that are ambiguous, complex, and, at times, at first glance, seemingly contradictory (paradoxical).

11. Intuitive Gesture
Intuitive gesture is a quick, all encompassing simultaneous overview of the wholeness of forms and their relationship in space. It is energetic, flexible, non-linear, non-specific, intuitive, and constantly open to adjustment.
Intuitive gesture focuses on where the sources of sensation (material things or changes in light intensity) appear on the drawing surface, how big these sources of sensation are relative to one another, and how much space there is between these sources of sensation.
Intuitive gesture does not approach visual information sequentially, systematically, or through symbolic representations. Instead, it tends to jump non-logically around the visual field as it attempts to capture the “big picture” without getting bogged down with the shape or details of individual elements.

12. Making intuitive guesses about where things are is a fluid process, and as such, should not be viewed as right or wrong but as progressive stages of perceptual sensitivity. In fact, it can very helpful to start the intuitive gesture without even touching the paper. “Phantom” movement around the drawing surface allows you to seriously consider placement information before making any marks at all. When the pencil does make physical contact, it should leave the faintest of marks as notations for approximating placement and relative size, as well as conscious estimations about how much space there is between the positions occupied by the objects.

13. Gesture drawings must be flexible, spontaneous, and continuously open to re-evaluation, adjustment, and refinement.

14. The more carefully we look and the longer we can remain receptive, the better will be our understanding of the overall relationships among the complex visual patterns being perceived. At the earliest stages, therefore, you must “feel” your way along and avoid making marks that are definitive statements about spatial relationships that you have really only begun to experience and understand.

15. To react intuitively you must ignore the details and pursue the whole
To react intuitively you must ignore the details and pursue the whole. This will demand a certain degree of mental toughness. The greater your tolerance for working through the predictable frustration that inevitably arises during this rapid, non-linear, gestural estimate of the size and placement of the overall "whereness" of things, the greater will be your ability to resist falling back on the familiarity of symbolic, conceptual, rationalized representations.

16. An intuitive gesture is not a drawing of objects, it’s a progressive search for information about the placement, size, and relative proportion of "where things are" and of "where things aren’t."

17. An intuitive gesture is not a drawing of objects, its a progressive search for information about the placement, size, and relative proportion of "where things are" and of "where things aren’t.” These drawings illustrate the progressive development of a gesture drawing and the gradual emergence of recognizable shapes. These shapes, having begun as vague notations of size, placement, and proportion, slowly evolve into depictions of recognizable objects.

18. Layers of delicate, energetic marks gradually congeal into the individualized “parts” of the perceptual “whole.”

19. When you can begin to attach names to these emerging shapes it is an indication that the rational, cognitive style is gradually becoming involved in the process. Rational thinking is unavoidable but you can limit its interference with the immediacy of your perceptions. Even though there will be instances in this very text where you will be encouraged to apply conceptual analysis of objects as a means of increasing your visual understanding of them, it is far too early in the intuitive gesture process to allow yourself to consider symbolic depictions that are derived from preconceived ideas.

20. Look at this image for at least a minute
Look at this image for at least a minute. While you are looking at it try to become conscious of the movement of your eyes as you take in the objects in your visual field. You will soon realize that your eye darts around, jumping from object to object.

21. These quick, darting movements that occur as the eye scans a visual field compensate for the fact that the fovea (a tiny region in the back of the eye that is packed with rods) can only register about 2% of your visual field in sharply focused detail. Incredibly, this means that even though our field of vision extends to at least 180°, any object larger than a thumbnail at arms length must be scanned if it is to be seen sharply focused.

22. Of the two procedures, gesture is the simpler by far.
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY
There is a striking similarity between an intuitive gesture drawing and the hypothetical StarTrek transporter.
Both start out with empty spaces, both begin with vague, generalized approximations of the size and location of forms.
Both progressively become more specific and detailed as the process gets into full swing.
Both require a focused and knowledgeable operator if the transfer of information is to be successful.
Of the two procedures, gesture is the simpler by far.
A physicist has calculated that to actually build a transporter one would need to heat matter to a million times the temperature of the sun, expend more energy for this one machine than all of mankind currently uses, and improve computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion.

23. This concludes the lecture
Intuitive Gesture