Knowing How

I don't know how to draw, but I developed a technique that consists of making marks on paper randomly until a drawing emerges, somehow, and then making it more drawing-like by emphasizing certain parts of it. Witness my pianissimo caveman.  

What does it even mean to say you cannot draw, though?  Standing by itself, it is a meaningless statement. Everyone can draw to some small degree at least. Some have large amounts of skill and at the extreme there are drawing geniuses, so to speak. All the rest of us range from beginners to intermediate. The least amount of effort possible makes one into an intermediate student. 

So how are people's beliefs about themselves structured? I believe I cannot play basketball, for example. I see at the gym people throwing up shots, without being guarded, and coming nowhere close to the rim. These people also cannot play, yet they are doing so, somehow. 

The belief in oneself as essentially unable to do something normal like this (cooking, drawing, singing) is a kind of protective belief to shield the ego from failure, perhaps. For this reason it is good to assume the position of the beginner or "intermediate" learner. 

Visual

I think of myself as much more inclined toward music than toward visual art, but this is probably a fallacy, in that it is not really a zero-sum proposition. There was a lot of nonsense about right versus left brain thinking, but really people are not left-brained in the way that people are left handed. You need both hemispheres of the brain to do anything, and the fact that certain areas of the brain have responsibilities of their own is fairly meaningless. There really aren't "visual learners," etc... We are all very visual (those of us with sight) and we all use our sight in more or less the same way. Of course we can train ourselves to make marks on paper that will be two-dimensional representations of 3-d objects.  Some people are better trained to do that than others, or can become trained more quickly.  

Gang of 15

Your Choice

Suppose you can't draw, or play the piano.  That, essentially, is your own choice.  If you would like to draw, or play, you can choose do to that, and at the level you want. This does not mean that you will be Leonardo or Art Tatum, or be able to win a game against Federer. What it means is that you get to decide what you want to commit to.

We are told that so much is beyond our choice, and that is true. But everything that is our choice, is the source of enormous power.

Landscape