Flip it on its head

Perspective shift as a powerful creative tool

Hello dear community,

I’ve been spending most of my free time these past few months reviving an old creative passion of mine: drawing. 

As a kid, I was the youngest of four by more than a decade. My brothers moved on to their adult lives before I started grade school. A de facto only child, I spent most of my days at my quiet house, twenty minutes from our small mountain town. My social life consisted mostly of anthropomorphizing my dog, cat, and goats. As I got older, the phone kept me connected to the lives of my friends through its spiraling, plastic umbilical cord. 

In other words, I had a lot of time to kill. Making art quelled my boredom and my loneliness.

When I was ten, I took watercolor lessons from a soft spoken neighbor who lived half a mile down our long dirt road. Her hair was long and her house smelled of spices. 

These watercolor classes were the only formal art training I had, the results of which now hang on the wall of my grandmother’s tidy apartment. The most prominent detail in this piece of art is the large, loopy “Meggie” painted in the lower right, a time capsule of fourth grade optimism. I probably omitted my standard heart-topped “i” because I suspected it wouldn’t jive with the rocky seascape. 

Decades passed, and I filed away fine art in the messy attic of childhood pastimes. I no longer lived by myself in a quiet house, and if ever I felt a twinge of boredom, I did what exhausted mothers do these days: I picked up the phone and scrolled.

Every once in a while the algorithm provides a spark, and this time it lit a fire: it fed me a steady stream of soothing process videos of sketching and painting, each one a balm for the burns of the news cycle.

I began to feel restless, whiling away the hours watching others do something that I could be doing in real life. I wanted to feel again what I had felt as a child: a present-moment focus so sharp that clock time became a fiction.

I dove into learning academic drawing with unbridled fervor, taking in all of the art instruction the internet could offer. I signed up for a weekend portrait drawing class at my local arts center, and when that was over, I found the online continuing education courses offered by the New York Academy of Art (NYAA), where I enrolled in two courses: portraiture and animal drawing. 

Here are my most recent portraits, after digesting the instruction in my NYAA classes and practicing quite a bit:

And here is my first attempt:

In six weeks, I didn’t learn how to draw from scratch. I already had a knowledge of how to use my materials and create the lines and forms I wanted to make. 

What I did was learn how to see in a completely new way.

As a side project during my NYAA portrait class, I started a self-portrait. I kept bumping into the problem that my initial rendering didn’t quite look like me. I knew my face, and despite hours and hours of looking, drawing, erasing, and redrawing my proportions, it just wasn’t working. I almost gave up, thinking the problem was unsolvable (for my skill level, at least).

But if there’s any life lesson that I’m repeatedly hit over the head with, it is this: to solve a problem, change your perspective.

The magic of a perspective shift is really clear in this in-progress self-portrait.

So I turned my reference photo and my drawing upside down, an exercise I had read about in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

This change of perspective allowed my brain to see the lines and shapes as just that, rather than a familiar human face. I adjusted my lines to fit reality, and when I flipped over the drawing, there I was. 

But this is not a newsletter about learning how to draw. (Though I love the visual of a literal flipping of perspective.) This is a reminder of how to solve all kinds of problems creatively. 

We turn over the problem in our minds. We approach challenges with Beginner’s Mind. We use empathy to imagine life in someone else’s shoes. Our language is full of references to perspective shifts as a prerequisite for problem solving.

It is this perspective shift that brings us out of the nebulous past and future and into the vibrant present moment - the only moment where problems can actually be solved.  

Our brains take all sorts of shortcuts to economize attention, filtering information to allow us to take in only what is necessary in order to make quick decisions. For example, If you see something the shape of a deer that jumps into the road in front of you, you rely on your brain to assume it’s a deer and decide to slam on the brakes. 

When it comes to solving problems that don’t need an instantaneous response, however, it’s always helpful to slow down and shift your perspective. A novel perspective allows you to de-activate your brain’s content filter so you can see more points, more connections, and the relationships between them. 

Try it with drawing. Try it with parenting. Try it with politics. There is no situation in which shifting your perspective is a bad idea. Even if it doesn’t result in the fixing of the problem, you will gain a fuller understanding of the issue, and perhaps a glimpse of the correct path forward.

P.S. If you’ve got an itch to study drawing, I highly recommend both of my NYAA instructors, Rohihi Sen and Elody Gyekis.