Learning How to See

Two Pupils in Greek Dress, Thomas Eakins, American, 1883, platinum print, The Metropolitan Museum

This photo was taken in 1883 by Thomas Eakins, a painter who used photography to study the human form. Here, two of his art students stand in front of a relief, in poses that echo the sculpted figures. Eakins used photos as a tool to help him make his paintings feel closer to life: “the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical drawing, a tool the modern artist should use to train the eye to see what was truly before it” (from The Met).

I am not a painter, but I did take a drawing class during a summer study abroad program in Florence (a highly recommended curriculum choice). Our class would go to green spaces around the city, from the Boboli Gardens to the grounds of old Medici villas, and our task was to pick a perspective to sketch.

This was harder than I thought it would be. I am a perfectionist, and it was challenging for me to commit a line to the paper when I felt so unskilled. The sketches by the Renaissance masters in the Florentine museums I was visiting made drawing look so effortless. But when I tried to draw a leaf or the detail in a wrought iron gate, the results looked off. The scenes I drew were distorted, but I didn't know how to fix them. I felt clumsy and frustrated.

I was having a hard time figuring out how to see.

I started sneakily pulling out my phone to take a photo of the vignette I was trying to translate onto paper. I was always surprised at the scale of things (“I didn’t realize that fountain takes up a whole third of this scene!”). It also helped me be bold and put my pencil to the paper. In the flattened view of the photograph, I could see the composition of the scene more clearly. I got faster at starting my drawings, spending less time spiraling in my thoughts and more time trying to really see what was in front of me.

While photography didn’t quite turn me into a master drawer (when looking at my final project displayed for the end of session exhibition in our villa’s dining room, my professor called my technique “delightfully naive”), it did teach my eye how to look, or rather that there was a different way to see what was truly before me.