Drawing on The Dominant Eye

Description

A fascinating follow-up to the beloved bestseller Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain–with new insights about creativity and our unique way of seeing the world around us

Millions of readers have embraced art teacher Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, from art students and teachers to established artists, corporate trainers, and more–all discovering a bold new way of drawing and problem-solving based on what we see, not what we think we see. 

In this highly anticipated follow-up, Edwards illuminates another piece of the creativity puzzle, revealing the role our dominant eye plays in how we perceive, create, and are seen by those around us. Research shows that much like being right-handed or left-handed, each of us has a dominant eye, corresponding to the dominant side of our brain–either verbal or perceptual. Once you learn the difference and try your hand at the simple drawing exercises, you’ll gain fresh insights into how you perceive, think, and create. You’ll learn how to not just look but truly see.

Generously illustrated with visual examples, this remarkable guided tour through art history, psychology, and the creative process is a must-read for anyone looking for a richer understanding of our art, our minds, and ourselves.Betty Edwards is an art teacher, lecturer, and author, best known for her classic guide Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which has sold five million copies worldwide and is used as a standard text in many art schools around the world and a staple on the shelves of artists and art-lovers everywhere. Through her company, DRSB Inc., she continues to teach her groundbreaking method to help individuals gain better access to visual, perceptual functions of the brain through learning to draw. Her lifelong mission has been to return basic drawing instruction to the public-school curriculum nationwide. She lives in La Jolla, California.One of the best-known quotations,  origin  unknown,  is:  “The  eyes  are  the  windows  to  the  soul,”  telling  us  that  by  looking  deeply  into  someone’s  eyes  we  can  find  the  hidden  “real person.”
 
A more modern (but less poetic) version might be, “The dominant and subdominant eyes  reveal  the  mind.”  But then questions arise: Which eye are we talking about, left or right or both? And which mind, since there are actually two “minds,” the left and right hemispheres of the brain? And why are the eyes designated differently, “dominant” and “subdominant,” since  they  seem  to  most  of  us  to  be  pretty  much  the  same?  In  fact,  our  two  eyes  are  visibly  different,  one  from  the  other,  reflecting  our  two  minds  and  our  two  ways  of  viewing  the  world.  That  difference  between our two eyes is observable and, at the same time, strangely  unrecognized.  Might  the  difference  be  helpful  in our search for “real” persons?
 
At a conscious level, we know that what we see with our eyes is intimately connected to what we think and how we think and, at the same time, what and how we feel. Oddly, we seem to be unaware that when we look closely enough in a mirror into our own eyes, or look into other people’s eyes face-to-face, we can actually see which eye is reacting to  the  words  we  are  speaking  or  hearing  and  which  eye  may be feeling but not attending to the words. Most people are unaware of this difference. But again, we use this information subconsciously in our daily lives, most notably to guide our interactions with other people.
 
Those  interactions  are  complicated  by  the  so-called  crossover  connections  of mind/brain/body.  For  most  of  us, our left-brain hemisphere “crosses over” to control the right side of our bodies, from head to toe, including the function of our right-dominant eye. Likewise, our right-brain  hemisphere  “crosses  over”  to  control  our  left  side,  from head to toe, including the function of our left sub-dominant eye.
 
The right eye, then, is most strongly connected to the verbal brain half, which (for most people) is the left hemi-sphere. In both casual and important face-to-face conversations,  each  of  us  subconsciously  seeks  to  connect  with  the other person’s dominant, verbally connected right eye. We seem to want to speak right eye to right eye—dominant eye to dominant eye.
 
In face-to-face conversations, we often subconsciously avoid the other eye, the subdominant left eye. It is mainly controlled  by  the  nonverbal  right-brain  hemisphere  and  is visibly more disconnected and unresponsive to spoken words.  Nevertheless,  it  is  there,  looking  a  bit  remote,  as  though dreaming, but in fact reacting to the tone, the tenor, and the more visual and emotional, nonverbal aspects of the conversation.
 
My personal awareness of this strange visual difference in our eyes has come about over many years, as a result of both teaching and demonstrating portrait drawing in our Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workshops. The more I have observed, the more it has intrigued me. Thus,  this  book  examines  how  all  of  us  “draw”  on  the  dominant eye.
 
 
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