A different perspective...

I never quite understood how I could be so crap at drawing. It was a standing joke that my people always had a touch of Picasso about them… in that their features weren’t exactly in the correct positions on their faces.

There’s a popular misconception that the more you practise, the better you will get at something, and sure, sustained repetition of something can bring some improvement, but it’s also a little simplistic. If all it took was practice, then I’d actually be able to play the guitar, and I’d also be able to draw… but both still elude me.

When I applied to art school, it was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’d just finished a second course in photography, and while I was still dabbling in acrylics and pastels, I wouldn’t have considered myself to actually be an ‘artist’… a photographer maybe, but not an artist.

I quickly hurried some stuff together to create a portfolio for the interview. Both interviewers looked sceptically at the work. I’d also been set a task for the interview, and that was to do a study of an open drawer with ‘stuff’ hanging out of it.

Well, let’s just say it wasn’t Ikea furniture.

The drawer was crooked, the ‘stuff’ was pretty unrecognisable, and although I did manage to get a light source from one direction, when it came to perspective… that was a big fat nope.

They must have been down on numbers that year, cos I actually got an unconditional offer, although they did suggest that I spend the time between the interview and the course start date doing observational drawing.

I didn’t, though. I knew there was no actual point. I knew it wouldn’t improve.

Now, that’s not meant to sound defeatist or anything like that… it’s just a pattern I’ve learned to accept in a way. The same inability to work with numbers, the same way I can make a million mistakes in one small music piece, no matter how many times I play it.

And you know, I have books on how to draw. How to structure the face as shapes, but something happens between what I see and what my hand does. The bizarre thing is that it doesn’t follow me into applying paint in the same way.

But I think I might actually have figured out what the issue is.

As everyone knows, I am spectacularly myopic. I have a -8 prescription coupled with an astigmatism. But a few months ago, I became aware of another issue. I assumed it was because I had spent the last 16 months intensively painting to create work for the exhibition. Lots of close-up work, coupled with a crap Scottish summer, meant I was also outside much less, so there was very little variation in focal distance.

I first thought there was something a little strange happening when I saw a jogger running towards me – with two heads.

I blinked and looked elsewhere, and everything else was… ‘normal’, but when I looked back, the guy still had two heads until he was a few feet away. I quickly looked at the other people around. A woman pushing a pram didn’t have two heads. Neither did the guy on the bicycle.

My liminal-tuned brain, of course, went to the most obvious solution… maybe I’d just seen some otherworldly entity… jogging up the road, because apparently, even demons need to keep fit. It happened again a few weeks later…another two headed jogger.  Geez, they actually do walk among us I thought.

When I was working on Union – the painting with the girl and the lion – I was doing a lot of close-up work. And in a previous newsletter, I explained how, close up, she looked fine, but the further back I went, the more her face seemed off. I also got some serious eye strain working on the piece. But, I did that painter thing where you close one eye and look through the other, and when I closed my left eye, something strange happened...the image changed and was perfectly focused. I swapped eyes and closed my right eye. The girl shrunk… quite considerably.

I went from one eye to the other. The girl went tall, the girl went small, and with both eyes open, my poor brain was having to try, a bit unsuccessfully, to match up the two images.

I still couldn’t understand why it was only happening with some things and not others, though. I’d be passing the sheep in the field, and one would have two heads while the rest would look okay. Then I realised the sheep with two heads was chewing, while the others were just standing watching me… perhaps movement was a factor. But even then, the wind could blow and the tree branches would still look normal. And it wasn’t consistent, because the house opposite had a bend in the roofline.

Turned out it wasn’t just movement, but also a particular focal distance.

So I went to the optician.

He covered one eye and pulled up the chart. I read the letters, he altered the prescription, and I read the even smaller letters. He did the same with the other eye and then pulled off the cover.

I said, “Yep, now I can’t see the letters, cos there are two sets of them.”

I explained that with my left eye alone, text isn’t straight. It does a lovely gentle wave along the line. I told him all about the two-headed people and the wavy roof, and he didn’t flinch.

He brought out another lens, and as he turned it, the letters started to merge together. Not 100%, but enough that I could read them easily.

“Is it the astigmatism?” I asked him. “Well, partly, but I’m also adding a prism to your lens.”

Now, for anyone who, like me, had never heard of a prism being added to glasses, it doesn't actually make things sharper in the usual sense. It bends the light, shifting the position of the image so that the two eyes have an easier time lining up what they're seeing. Essentially, it helps my brain turn two slightly mismatched pictures into one. Or at least, that's the plan…

And a few weeks later, I got my new glasses.

Now, I’ve worn glasses since primary school, and I remember the first pair I ever had… I practically fell off the kerb. Walking around in the garden with these new specs, I had the same sensation. Suddenly, everything felt three-dimensional, like looking at one of those lenticular cards.

And I wondered how long the world had been two-dimensional for me…and then I wondered… was that why I couldn’t draw? Is that why I struggled to read tablature, because the lines run into each other?

Who knows, maybe I am just naturally crap at drawing… but I have to say, thank goodness for my projector. Otherwise, I may never have got back into painting when I was always going to struggle to transfer an image to canvas accurately. Catch you in the liminal xx

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