Negative Space

On Seeing More Accurately

I always like to remind my students that art is (pretty much) learning how to see.

We (well, most of us) take seeing for granted. It’s just something we do. But Ralph Ammer discusses how we tend to boil down our world into generalities — “tree” “bird” “dog” — and drawing trains us to hone in on specifics¹.

We can have problems with this honing in process w…