It can be a balm to the keyed-up mind and nervous system to rest attention into the HereNow. Visually assessing your environment before moving into action is a useful animal reflex. Orienting to your current physical surroundings can invite you into a more centered, grounded state of being.

See if this experiment refreshes your sight: Pause for a few breaths to ask yourself, "What do you see?"

Respond, internally or out loud, with simple one or two word descriptors of things in your visual field. (Blue cup. Tabletop. Orange light.) Take your time, naming things at a decreasing pace.

Notice the qualities of your eye movements (darting? squinting? smooth?) Watch what's changing.

If you find you're speeding off into a daydream thought-stream, gently and firmly return to simply naming things you see.

Then let the identification and naming of objects slow towards a stop, and continue looking around wordlessly at light, contrast, color, shapes etc for another little while.

Do you notice any shifts, openings, relaxations in your body as you let your attention settle into the present?

"The body is a wonder" --Thich Nhat Hahn. Seeing is a wonder. The world of form is a wonder. NowHere is a wondering.

Watch how your mind organizes what you see, picking out patterns, rhythms, comparisons and contrasts. See how you automatically interpret visual stimuli, how you combine, categorize and divide, summarizing those distant trees into a line, selecting these leaves out as separate and distinct from their background.

All this happens at the speed of thought, an instantaneous gift. Before you make a mark to draw, your visual mind has been engaged in the dynamic creative process of making sense of the world around you.

To draw representing reality, you find yourself making always-evolving spontaneous decisions about what to describe and define, what to leave out, when to linger, when to summarize--all responses to what you see.

That moving dance of creative choice, where does it come from? When the pencil tip touches the paper and the hand gestures, responding to an impulse from vision (skillfully or not): Did 'you' do that? Does it make sense to take credit or blame for the grace or awkwardness of that mark?

"Don't do the dance, let the dance do you....And remember: you are the dance."--Gabrielle Roth

You might want to tip your screen to get the best angle to see this painting by Dozier Bell, since it's so dark in tone. Check out how one area or shape or pattern defines another--dots of light in the background creating trunks in the middle ground, etc. She leaves so much unexplained,  implied, evoked.

Notice as you go about your life: how do you tend to respond when you don't quite understand what you're seeing, when things are murky and undefined and you don't know what to do (yet?)

Do you strain for more information? Do you become mentally active searching out possible explanations? Might you become impatient or frustrated? Do you speed up or slow down? Do you experience fear, subtle or overt? Do you simply let yourself not-know what you don't know and do the next indicated thing?

Just notice.

What might it be like to draw, or live, in greater cooperation with the reality of  Don't Know?

If you find yourself laboring to draw something, struggling to get it right, pause. Rest your eyes a moment. Refresh. Be a witness.

From Tricia Hersey, @TheNapMinistry:
"Both my grandmothers were refugees from Jim Crow terror in the South and part of the Great Migration. They landed in Chicago, poor, raised 9 children each, worked hard and I still saw them both napping, resting their eyes daily, praying and meditating. I'm so grateful."

“May a space to daydream and slow down open to you. May you realize the power of taking rest since no one will give it to you. This is why rest is a resistance and a slow meticulous love practice. We must continue deprogramming from grind culture.”

With functional vision, our minds are able to organize vast amounts of information to navigate 3D space. We're also conditioned to understand the representation of 3D space on 2D surfaces--we make  sense of the depth portrayed in flat images on screens, walls, etc with the ease of constant practice.

As beginners at drawing, we may somehow expect to be able to translate 3D to 2D like a camera does. But most of us can't draw an illusion of space as automatically as our lifelong mental habits allow us to understand it.

This may feel frustrating, as expectations tend to. But it also offers a chance to pull back the curtain on the magician-mind and how it creates our experience of reality.

What we see is our interpretation of the world, not reality itself as if it were separate from the seer.

Every view we see organizes itself around the location of our eyes. Our  drawing holds clues about where we were while we were looking at what we depicted.

For instance, Stephen Wiltshire must have drawn this picture of the Chicago Theater from a position in front of the alcove to the right of the stairs (shown near the lower right corner of the page). How can we tell? He shows us just a sliver of the right side of the column to the left of that alcove, while further from him, on the other side of the stairway, plenty of the right face of the matching column is visible.

On the lower left side of the page, see how the angle made by the bottom of the pedestals along the floor rises slightly towards the rear corner of the room? The top molding above that first tier of columns angles a little bit downward towards the same corner. The artist's eye-level falls between them, below the height of the alcove arches--he shows a bit of their underside.

Without artist or viewer needing to be conscious of it, these consistent cues add up to give a sense of scale relative to human height and position, even without including figures in the composition.

I love watching how Stephen Wiltshire sketches--his focused, peaceable attention and his joy in seeing.

Some people have a particular gift for creating the illusion of space, recording exactly what they see. But the rest of us can learn this skill and play with it. It can be like studying a different language--something to keep the mind limber, without expecting instant fluency.

Drawing perspective can show us our habits and assumptions and put them on tilt for a moment, like a visual joke. Does the floor really wing up the page that steeply while the ceiling swoops down at such a different pitch? Those parallel posts--they're actually equidistant from each other--do they really look that much closer together at the far end than the near?

Beginners may try, unconsciously, to compromise between the angles and shapes they're really seeing and their habitual interpretation of 3D reality (the ceiling is not falling into the far wall etc). This makes for a flattened, tamed portrayal of perspective. It can help to experiment with exaggerating angles and asymmetries to correct for this bias.

Artists over the centuries have invented tools to help themselves translate from 3D to 2D more accurately--often variations on sighting compared to a grid or a horizontal/vertical reference.

Maine artist Alison Rector sometimes builds a scaffold out from her canvas to rest one end of her ruler on when the scene's vanishing points are located beyond the frame of the picture. (You might want to google 1, 2 and 3 point perspective if you're curious about vanishing points).

As described during our meeting, you can use an imaginary clock face hung on a transparent wall between you and the view to help gauge angles. It can help to use two pencils or thin skewers, one to hold a horizontal or vertical standard (at 3/9 or 12/6 on the imaginary clock) and the other to overlap the angle you're looking at (how many minutes +/- is that?). Be sure to check that you're not tipping your reference stick(s) into the space--keep them on the plane of that imaginary transparent wall in front of you.

Accuracy isn't an end in itself, though. Distortions and variations on expected ways to portray space can express something important about what and how the artist is seeing. Also, the post-Rennaissance Western approach is far from the only way humans have come up with to show what they observe about how things-in-space fit together.

I'd suggest starting with a study of corners. Sketch the corner of a room, showing both ceiling and floor, checking angles. Keep it simple. Then move your position and draw it again. Also, try drawing the corner of something smallish, like a table or an ottoman, followed by drawing the corner of something bigger, like a building.

Otherwise, as you draw whatever you like, just bear in mind that things which are closer appear bigger. And check where your eye-level falls, noticing what you see the top surface of, what you see the under surface of, etc.

Take you time, and enjoy yourself! What a lot there is to see.

When your eyes happen to fall again on the mugs you drew during our meeting, do you notice a difference in how you relate to them now? Did giving your attention to them shift your sense of intimacy with the beingness, the particularity, the realness of the things you drew?

As you look and draw, keep asking yourself questions of relativity: how long is this part in relation to that one, how much of this whole shape is taken up by that feature and so on.

You may catch yourself making aspects that interest you more prominent than they actually are, or squishing areas that don't seem important to you, without meaning to. There is no objectivity without subjectivity.

Searching for accuracy tends to be a humbling exercise, in my experience. Trying too hard to draw exactly may produce a tight, mechanical quality--there's life in the search, even if you never get it anywhere near 'right'.

Are you willing to not-know? Are you willing to estimate, make a mess, recognize where you're off and look again? Airplane navigational systems are off-course and correcting for it 99% of the time. Take a flight in your sketch book, giving attention to journey rather than destination.

If you'd like tools to map out proportions more exactly, here's a tutorial of a classic art school lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTVuDcwIF3M (The elements of the still life they used have all been painted a flat grey to lessen distractions of tone and local color).

Pausing at the beginning of a drawing to take notes on proportions and spacial relationships can offer a satisfying sense of orientation, freeing you to explore what you're seeing without wrangling sometimes frustrating puzzles of distortion.

If you find yourself frustrated or disappointed in your drawing, check in with your expectations. Were you (maybe subconsciously) comparing your work to an imaginary ideal, or to the skills of 'famous' artists? Did you identify with the notion that a more pleasing-to-you result would make you better than how you now rank yourself?

Contemplate the role of this kind of comparison in your experience of other areas of life. Remember times when you've realized an unconditional regard for yourself, innocent of attachment to outcome. How might you give yourself more breathing room to explore and create from where you are rather than measuring yourself against an image of expertise or achievement? Even if that mental habit of comparison is robust, could you take it less seriously?

Here is an article on the principle of Innocence you might find relevant to this: http://www.stinkwanink.com/2015/06/innocence.html

As an art major at a fancy university, I had some teachers who acted dismissive and snobby, as if we should all have been born knowing how to do what we didn't know yet. The competitive culture of measuring achievement was deeply embedded there.

But I've always remembered a comment from the painter Gretna Campbell as I was struggling with a still life.  She said, "See that orange? Just love it." I couldn't get the orange to look round just then, but yes, I could learn to love it more. I can still see it glow in my mind's eye 45 years later.

Treat yourself to noticing the play of light and contrast anywhere you look. Could you try taking quick visual notes on what interests you, what piques your curiosity?

While looking and/or drawing, investigate the possibility of seeing without prioritizing your interpretation of what you see. Instead of trying to define things with your drawing, explore your direct experience of the light/contrast that all vision is made of. Let your hand respond to the dance of your eyes between the marks on the page and the view. 

Some of our inner explorations are inspired by the Open Focus Exercises of Les Fehmi--a neurological researcher who found that questions like "Can you imagine the distance between your eyes"  facilitate a shift to a more creative, relaxed brain state.

Sometimes we feel far from enjoying such an open-minded state of well-being. Fearful mental patterns of attack/defense can get in the way of exploring creative practices, even if you also long to give yourself over to trying them.

When you meet reactivity or resistance, you might want to ask: What if simply recognizing this passing turbulence of inner-world weather is enough? What if there is nothing to solve or resolve?

You could revisit the question you may have found during our meeting--the question about something you want to know that you don't know (yet). You were invited to ask yourself if you were willing to not-know this for now, to stop thinking about it or trying to figure it out, to turn it over to Not-Know Mind.

Meet this question anew. Or is there another one forming already? Touch on it lightly, like a koan. Listen to it like you hear birdsong. See where you've already enlightened yourself about it.

Would you like a quick reading on how the principle of Gentleness can help you disperse difficulties?  Check out this loose interpretation of Hexagram 57 in the I Ching Book of Changes.   www.stinkwanink.com/2020/02/gentleness.html 

Noticing

1). Can you feel the support of the ground now, through your feet and your whole body? Can you sense the constant of gravity anchoring you to this present place and time? What does it feel like to attune to the spaciousness behind, below and all around you?
 
2). Explore the habit of mentally defining, identifying and labeling things. Try  greeting whatever you see by bestowing a simple one or two word name on it. Watch how strings of association and story could spool out from identifying any thing. Gently withdraw attention from mentally traveling to what's not here. Step back to plain naming, that ancient creative play of attaching verbal tags to what you see.

What's it like to mentally step back further, to seeing what's here before, during and after naming anything? Witness the unnameable realness of the world that is 'too full to talk about' (Rumi).

3). As you walk around looking, become aware of the play of background and foreground as your attention settles on one aspect of the scene and then moves to another. See how the thing you noticed (say, leaf shadows) meets what surrounds it (say, the bright patch of not-shadow) and how they define each other visually.

Drawing

Play with defining shapes, features and things by giving attention to the space around them. Use patterns of marks that vary.

Other Media

Check out how you arrange a garden bed, a plate of food, things on a table. Play with awareness of the space around and between items.

You could write about something or someone describing them by what they are not like.

Where does your curiosity nudge you to practice with this kind of shift of awareness?

We all have deeply grooved habits of vision, so useful for life in Earth School (as Byron Katie calls it)--skills like the ability to pick things out from their surroundings and identify them. Just noticing how skillful your habits are can help loosen fixation on them and open your mind's eye to a fresh view that sees parts integrated into the whole.

There's something magic and alive about this shift of attention to a more inclusive mode, dancing foreground and background around, seeing things and the space around and between them at the same time.

Scrounge up the following ingredients if possible--adapt to suit:

a quiet, private, comfortable space to be in for an hour--for instance, could you drive and park somewhere with a fresh view or, sit in your favorite chair and see the familiar view afresh?

a way to listen to a phone call hands-free

a sketch pad (with willingness to 'waste some paper')

a few pencils/pens/crayons/mark-makers that you like

a few not-favorite mark-makers that you haven't used in a while: neglected pencil stubs, skippy ballpoints, semi-dried felt-tips.