Dreaming in Pictures – One: Beginning
by Brian Fox
I have always had a dream of showing people the pictures and images in my head. There are few things so encouraging and powerful as an image. Whole realms of imagination and thought could be given in a form other than words. But I have never had the ability to show anyone these feelings, thoughts, and pictures, because my skill in drawing resides at the level of a 1st grader’s stick house with a sun in the corner.
I mentioned this lack of ability and the yearning to create pictures to my friend Dave, who can paint and draw (and I always have loved his work). He recommended that I pick up the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It described a process whereby a person learned to separate the form and Platonic ideal from the actual thing you see — before you and in your mind. 
It talked about learning to see the way an artist does and turning off the symbolic left brain representation which inhibits drawing what you truly wish. Then it gave me a couple of exercises to try. Initially, my drawings were, well, horrible. They were unequivocally and terribly childlike. They were the product of someone who clearly cannot draw.
But then the book gave me a different kind of exercise, where I attempted to reproduce a drawing by looking at it upside-down and taking it minutely, line by line. The work was excruciatingly slow, but I rather enjoyed the pedantic examining, reproducing, and seeing each tiny line in relation to the others. Rather than working on a picture, I was having fun doodling lines on paper. But I was shocked and immensely pleased with the way it turned out.
Some of the proportions seemed wrong but when I looked at the original picture right-side-up, it was disproportionate, too.
This reproduction of another work gave me hope that by seeing things differently, more as they are and in detail, I might be able to make a picture rather than a representative symbol (like my stick house). For the first time I experienced the hope that an artistic medium that had hitherto been closed to me had just had the door cracked open. Even if I never produced anything that was professional, it would satisfy my own artistic craving to produce the pictures that I saw in my mind. And satisfying that yearning would be enough.
Of course, this was completely different than making my own scene and putting it on paper, but I still created something, even if it was a reproduction. The possibilities were the key to hope and therefore the key to the discipline necessary to continue. But I became distracted by life and left drawing for a time, until the idea of writing about my learning inspired me to continue and try again.
