Betty Edwards Quotes & Sayings

Be clear in your mind why learning to draw well is important. Drawing enables you to see in that special, epiphanous way that artists see, no matter what style you use to express your special insight. Your goal in drawing should be to encounter the reality of experience ... to see ever more clearly, ever more deeply. — Betty Edwards

That is like deciding that you shouldn't take a Spanish class because you don't already speak the language. — Betty Edwards

The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts) The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond) The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion) The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values) The perception of the gestalt (seeing the whole and its parts) — Betty Edwards

Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let's face it, frivolous - especially the visual arts, with their connotation of "the starving artist" and the mistaken concept of necessary talent — Betty Edwards

I will even go out on a limb and say that we mistakenly may have been putting all our educational eggs into one basket only, while shortchanging other truly valuable capabilities of the human brain, namely perception, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. — Betty Edwards

As a teacher and parent, I've had a very personal interest in seeking new ways of teaching. Like most other teachers and parents, I've been well aware painfully so, at times that the whole teaching/learning process is extraordinarily imprecise, most of the time a hit-and-miss operation. Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all. — Betty Edwards

The greatest satisfaction comes from mastering something that is truly difficult. — Betty Edwards

An individual's ability to draw is ... the ability to shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual information - to shift from verbal, analytic processing to spatial, global processing. — Betty Edwards

As a number of scientists have
noted, research on the human brain is complicated by the fact
that the brain is struggling to understand itself. This three-pound
organ is perhaps the only bit of matter in the universe - at least as
far as we know - that is observing itself, wondering about itself,
trying to analyze itself, and attempting to gain better control of
its own capabilities. — Betty Edwards

Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information. — Betty Edwards

As each new skill is learned, you will merge it with those previously learned until, one day, you are simply drawing - just as, one day, you found yourself simply driving without thinking about how to do it. — Betty Edwards

Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new modes of expression; thus it brings into existence something new to the individual and to the culture. — Betty Edwards

In early childhood, children develop a set of symbols that 'stand for' things they see in the world around them ... Children are happy with symbolic drawing until about the age of eight or nine ... when children develop a passion for realism. Our schools do not provide drawing instruction. Children try on their own to discover the secrets of realistic drawing, but nearly always fail and, sadly, give up on trying. — Betty Edwards

Today we are not only testing and grading our children into the ground, but we are not teaching them how to see and understand the deep meaning of what they learn, or to perceive the connectedness of information about the world. It is indeed time to try something different. — Betty Edwards

As parents, we can do a great deal to further this goal by helping our children develop alternative ways of knowing the world verbally/analytically and visually/spatially. During the crucial early years, parents can help to shape a child's life in such a way that words do not completely mask other kinds of reality. My most urgent suggestions to parents are concerned with the use of words, or rather, not using words. — Betty Edwards

Clearly the work of a master teacher who has deep knowledge of his subject and enormous empathy for his students and his readers. — Betty Edwards