YOU SEE SHAPE

I happened upon course planning material for early grade teachers.  These sources use the terms 2D Shapes, and 3D Shapes.  They never use the term form.  Shapes are not Forms.  

So let’s say you are an elementary school teacher, and you want to give your class an explanation of how humans see the visual world.  With sources like these, you will then explain to eager young minds that everything is a shape.  The students will be told that some of the shapes have more dimensions than others.  Students are taught that they are all shapes. I have included a few screen shots of some of this educational source material.

Shape, as a superordinate category, sets everyone down the path of Representation.  If everything is a shape, then art must be the arrangement of opaque shapes on a flat surface.  Go into any museum, and on the walls there will be nothing but shapes of opaque blobs of paint arranged on a plane.  And if your cultural precepts are in alignment, you will “understand” the piece.  It will have “meaning” for you.  

These pages elevate form to it’s proper cultural level.  Yet, gauging from what people write to me, as well as in person reactions to my book, it is clear that most people really don’t know what I am talking about.  Form, as a holistic geometric construct, is not a component of our cultural beliefs.   Shapes are what you were taught to think about since kindergarten.  This repetitive cultural reinforcement has become a very powerful perceptual filter.  No wonder nobody is understanding this.

Yet, the Transparent Drawing mindset is incredibly simple to adopt.  Each and every one of us has the capacity to knowledge, or understand, complete forms.  

If you get nothing else from these pages, from now on, can you please not use the term shape when you are referring to a holistic form?  The pepper grinder on your kitchen counter is a form; it is not a shape.  From now on, when you go into a museum, can you perceive the opaque, flat, paint blobs on the canvas as shapes?  And when you use the term form, can you please acknowledge inherent perceptual simultaneity?

This will be a small step toward the transcendence of our culturally induced filtering.  You will become more open toward what was previously unimaginable.