I’m always being told how lucky I am to “be able to draw”.  Everyone seems to assume that any artistic ability – musical, visual, poetic or whatever – is an innate skill and that you either have it or you don’t.  Harder edged skills – reading, writing, arithmetic – on the other hand, are basic abilities that everyone should be able to develop.  Now in my work I get the opportunity to blur the edges between what’s hard and what’s soft.  Every day I structure information, solve problems, tell stories and make new discoveries for clients by translating their concerns into visual form.  It’s incredibly powerful.  It’s so powerful, in fact, that I sometimes wonder what it would be like if they could do it for themselves rather than relying on people like me.  So, is drawing a freak skill or something anyone can do?

Now let’s be clear from the outset that for a normal, healthy human brain, drawing should be difficult, because we don’t see things in 2D.  When you look at a table top, you are conscious of its rectangular shape, even though the retinal image received by your eye is probably a trapezium or a rhombus or something.  The brain is more concerned with what your environment is good for (its affordances) than what exactly it looks like, so to be able to draw anything you have to “unlearn” the way you know things are in order to re-create the way they appear.

One group of people who are very good at this is autistic savants (think Dustin Hoffman in Rainman).  The Economist last week had a report into savant-skills, and referenced one of the most famous autists, Temple Grandin, who has (with a lot of effort) written books about what it is like for her to “think in pictures”.  The thing I found interesting in the report was a reference to new findings that suggest a lot of these skills may be learned rather than innate.  My understanding was always that savant-skills were already there in everyone’s brains, but were normally “masked” by other abilities; in autists these abilities (empathy for example) were somehow “switched off”, allowing the brain’s incredible computational powers to run riot.  But what if this “switching off” wasn’t “unmasking” unlearned skills, but rather freeing up time for practice?  To quote the article, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”  So perhaps the visual savant who can draw photographically from memory has developed this skill because his/her pathological disinterest in other more “normal” human concerns has freed up time to observe the appearance of things with microscopic precision.

This is all very well for prodigies and geniuses, but what about the rest of us?  Well I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made with the everyday skills we take for granted.  Just stop and think for a moment how complex a task reading and writing is – the ability to learn from scratch an (almost) completely abstract system for notating spoken language.  Yet whenever we pick up a newspaper or start writing a note we aren’t at all conscious of alphabets or grammar or syntax – it all just flows naturally.  It’s a skill we take for granted because we were all forced to learn it over many years from infancy.  What would happen if primary school children were forced to spend the same length of time learning to notate music, for instance, as they currently spend learning to read and write?  Everyone recognises (and most people can hum) melodies, but no one can write them down because no one was ever taught.  We all know when someone is singing out of tune, even if we don’t know how.

Similarly, everyone knows when a drawing someone else has created is wrong, but very few people have learned how to correct the mistakes.  I saw a presentation a few years back at the RSA about the experience of some schools who brought in an artist to teach primary school children how to draw.  The results were astonishing – within a few weeks of being taught the rudiments of proportion and perspective the children were creating imagery that would have shamed most adults.  What was more astonishing was the reaction of some of the parents, who were upset that the lessons seemed to be “corrupting” their children’s innocence, on the basis that “real” children draw people with eyes at the tops of their heads and houses with windows in the corners.  This seems strange, because I don’t know any parents who encourage their children to carry on making spelling mistakes and adding up wrong because it’s sweet and adorable and childlike.

So, can anyone draw?  I think the answer is yes.  Obviously it comes much more easily to the naturally gifted than to the rest of us, but then that’s true of everything.  I think the reason people can’t draw is because they aren’t taught, and the reason they aren’t taught is firstly because there’s no one to teach them and secondly because no one sees any real need to.  Which is a whole new article …

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