Westosha Art: Create > Upside Down Drawing

Create > Upside Down Drawing

Gustav Klimt 1907 “Adele Bloch-Bauer I”

Goal:

Create a mindful switch from the verbal to the spatial state of consciousness.

Access Prior Knowledge:

Take the Spatial Visualization Test > http://www.aptitude-test.com/spatial-visualization1.html

Spatial Visualization tests are used to assess a person's ability to mentally manipulate 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional figures. Spatial Visualization tests are often used in the recruitment process of engineers, architects, designers, chemists and more.

Spatial visualization can also be called Spatial Ability, Spatial Reasoning, or Spatial Intelligence.

New Information:

Drawing upside-down provides the right conditions to consciously recognize and experience the shift in your state of consciousness from the verbal to the spatial. Familiar things do not look the same and become unnameable (they shift from verbal, I can tell you what it is, to spatial, I can describe the visual qualities)

Apply Knowledge & Skills:

Instructional Strategy

Nonlinguistic Representations

Learning Activity

Create > Upside Down Drawing

Studio Activity:

Understand, that by inverting an image, forms become unrecognizable and ‘nameless’. this turns down the dominant verbal state of thinking (you don’t name things) and allows the spatial state greater moment to moment awareness. The spatial state of awareness like mindful meditation induces positive and satisfying emotional consciousness that lasts long after.

Prepare with a blank page, a pencil and the image I give you.
Take a deep breath and prepare not to speak for 30 minutes.
Turn the image upside down and like Trukese sailor navigate by constantly checking and rechecking visual qualities. For example; this line goes up and to the left, starting halfway down the middle of the page and ending near the upper left edge of the paper.
Do not speak or attempt to name things.
Start your drawing with any line and build off it with an adjacent line.
Keep building and adding adjacent lines, putting it all together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Think “this line curves up and to the right, and this line loops back to make this weird roundish shape, and this line leaves the paper just left of the upper right corner...DO NOT NAME THINGS - stick with your visual and spatial awareness. Learn to make the cognitive shift when perceiving things in their normal right-side-up positions.

Trigger Mechanisms: Awareness, Silence, Observation

Generalize, Reflect & Publish:

Instructional Strategy

Providing Recognition

Learning Activity

Publish > your drawing to our G+Community > Concepts & Creations category

Understand > Two important points of progress emerge from the upside-down drawing activity.

First is that you learned to recognize the cognitive shift from the verbal to the spatial and can now bring that shift under your conscious control. The second is your awareness that shifting to the spatial state enables you to see and draw accurately like trained artists.

Respond > in the comment section write the following reflection.

Obviously you can’t always turn things upside down (models, still lifes or landscapes) so your goal is to be able to look like an artist. What will that take?

Visual Examples: