2. Drawing skill represented
2.10 Sculpting and shaping towards expertise
Elsewhere, Sutton (2007: 763) explores the difference between “explicit autobiographical remembering” and the type of habitual or “procedural memory” involved in the
complexity of embodied skills such as those found in playing cricket. While acknowledging that “thinking too much” can at times interfere with accomplished embodied skill, Sutton thinks that experts actually do use mental techniques to regulate their performance. He suggests further that such explicit thoughts and recollections need not be rigid, but can be as active, dynamic and responsive to the situation as implicit cognitions have been taken to be by various writers (Sutton 2007:763).
One way to avoid drawing a hard and fast line between knowing and doing is to zoom in on the intelligence of embodied thinking and the diverse ways in which thinking and doing interact. To be truly expert it will have to be possible, and sometimes necessary, to mould and fine-tune skills. For this implicit knowledge-how may need to be supplemented by explicit knowledge. Experts sometimes need to ‘go back to basics’ in order to reconstruct a particular embodied sequence, restore focus or remember a particular relevant principle to bring to bear on a current task (2007:773). Sutton (2007, 2008) uses the example of experts
using verbal hints and labels as “instructional nudges” to show that personal-level thought processes and the sub-personal processes that underpin proficiency are more intertwined than the simple top-down reprogramming of a merely mechanistic skill. Sutton (2007: 773) refers to pianist David Sudnow’s idea that condensed sayings such as “jazz hands”
constitute “embodied maxims”, in which all kinds of history are “condensed … into the arms and shoulders.” The language in cases like this – often usefully fuzzy metaphors or phrases – becomes a kind of abbreviated compendium of “caretaking practices” whereby entrenched habits can be tweaked and remodelled (2007: 774).
The notion of caretaking practices is compatible with the suggestion made by Cohen (2005) that artists’ novel attentional strategies enable them to depict what they perceive more accurately. Artists’ schemata are examples of such strategies when they serve to rid the perception of an object of all the effects of practical knowledge on that perception.
Kozbelt and Seeley (2008: 157) examine a range of findings to support their argument that artists’ schemata can influence perception in various ways: “They direct attention to features and characteristics of an object or scene that might otherwise go unnoticed or unperceived. Further, they provide artists with frameworks for the relative placement of objects and their parts, which help locate their expected positions in the visual field (e.g.
the central features of a face form an inverted equilateral triangle horizontally bisected by the midline of the head)”.
These methods of visual analysis validate Clark’s (2008: 48) suggestion that inner rehearsal can play an important affective role or support a kind of “perceptual restructuring” via the controlled disposition of attention. Skill can sometimes require purposeful simplification of the task at hand in order to rein in the mind and make sense of otherwise confusing and perplexing problems. This often involves suppressing entrenched cognitive-affective- embodied routines so as to turn such problems into “tractable pattern matching tasks”
(Sutton, 2007: 777). Clark’s notion of “material symbols” suggests that such schemata are not instructions imposing explicit contents on the body: as a material symbol such a schema plays a temporary but critical role as “a new fulcrum for the control of action”
which may for instance smooth out the cognitive flow sufficiently to help us re-orientate it (Sutton, 2007: 774).
The openness that is needed to cope with highly dynamic conditions shows that “part of what it means for embodied procedures to be genuinely inhabited and alive is that they
alter and develop further: this depends on the existence of a flexible set of links between doing and knowings, between skills and plans, between action and memory” (Sutton, 2007:
775). A study by Ellen Winner (1993) investigating exceptional artistic development in children takes as its point of departure the way in which exceptional drawings made by ordinary Chinese children seem to challenge Arnheim’s conception of visual thinking.
Arnheim (1969: 297) had argued that “no…training of the mind is accomplished by the mechanical copying of models, aimed at measurable correctness”. Winner uses China as a striking illustration of the prowess evident in children who have been taught skills through painstaking and repetitive exercises. Children as young as three are given very basic
schematic formulas to copy in a methodical accumulation of increasingly complicated steps.
The result is that the average Chines child produces drawings and paintings as skilled as those of much older children, or even adults, in the West. The method of teaching is based on copying in an additive and highly formulaic manner (Winner, 1993: 40).
Chinese nursery children surprised Winner in an informal unrehearsed test when they produced highly skilled observational drawings of a western baby pram in which they went way beyond the formulas which had been used to teach them. Because the quality of their drawings surpassed that of the average western child of the same age, Winner (1993: 40) infers that these children may have indirectly gained skills in visual thinking and
observation from their laborious copying exercises. For Arnheim (discussed by Kozbelt, 2001:719), both seeing and creating involve the “grasping of significant structural features or patterns through principles of visual organisation”. Perhaps it is their particular expertise regarding the essential characteristics of images or objects, and their acquired habit of using these characteristics when drawing, that explains the edge these Chinese children have over their Western peers, suggests Kozbelt (2001:719). It is evidence of the openness to and attentiveness to the specifics of the situation that is required by the adaptable exercise of embodied skills found in expert knowledge. Sutton (2007: 49) views such expert knowledge as a forging of active and flexible links between knowing and doing, where action is not insulated from thought.
The same flexibility is evident in artists’ deployment of formal strategies. Although such strategies are first acquired as explicit rules, they are later enriched by spatial schemas.
These schemas are obtained implicitly as the artist learns to exploit the possibilities of the techniques she has mastered for producing marks and making visual discriminations.
Learning entails selective attention, however, so that it is “more efficient if implicit
processes are bootstrapped by explicit knowledge, and declarative knowledge of basic proportions and drawing techniques should provide a perceptual advantage to trained artists in at least some contexts” (Seeley and Kozbelt, 2008: 163). Kozbelt’s (2001: 707) research on expertise in visual cognition found several artists reporting that they use formal methods or systems (such as mathematical systems of perspective) in dynamic situations which require active visual pattern analysis. This suggests that these strategies might contribute to their expertise.
Leonardo da Vinci (cited in Kozbelt, 2001: 707) advised the painter to always “have in mind a kind of routine system to enable him to understand any object that interests him”.
Ingres advised artists to “draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil”, and Paul Cézanne taught that “nature should be treated through the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” (Kozbelt, 2001:707). Clark (2008: 48) argues that in cases where experts use such self-scaffolding they are “doubly expert”: expert at the task in hand while at the same time expert at using well-chosen prompts and reminders to maintain performance in the face of adversity. Artists and designers often report idiosyncratic ways of directing their perceptual attention. One example is artist Paul Kaiser’s account of a “doubled vision” depending on whether he views ordinary movements of the body with “dance eyes” or with “film eyes”
(Thain, 2008:78).
Another relevant issue to add to the discussion of skill concerns the location of expert skill and knowledge. Clark (2002b: 387) proposes that it is possible that aspects outside the neural system - such as the tone of the muscles or length of the fingers - also play a vital role in the expert’s ability to respond so deftly to the demands of the world. Haugeland (1998: 228) asserts that performance depends on a range of other specifically relevant permanent changes in bodily structures: “muscles of the requisite strengths, shapes, and limberness must be developed and maintained – differently for different skills”. Clark (2002b: 387) argues that when expertise relies on engagement with – or mediation by – for example a blind man’s cane, expertise “also threatens to leak out into the surrounding environment”.
If the relationship between explicit knowledge and the fluid wisdom of the body-mind is not one of direct competition, but rather a situation in which expertise is partly “the easy, fast mastery of the links between memory and action, between thinking and doing”, then the intersection between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ will be better addressed by theories which focus attention on the “intricate interweaving” that takes place between ‘thinking’ and
‘doing’ in the performance of skilled activities (Sutton, 2007:776). Sutton (2007: 779) concludes that,
both developing and enacting high levels of skill require us not to cut intellect and emotion off from our embodied, grooved performances, but to achieve and then access unusual flexibility in linking thought and action, knowledge and motion, conceptual memory and procedural memory
In all the cases considered above, the two-way commerce between brain, body and world shows that the forms of our embodiment, action, and engagement are not fixed. It suggests that although conscious knowledge and bodily knowledge are distinctive ways of knowing each with its own distinctive effects, they often function in a coordinated way. Drawing can thus be understood, as Katherine Hayles (2006:9) suggests of literature, as a technology, which creates new pathways between these different types of knowing which “typically remain unevenly articulated with one another”.