Teaching to See

 liked how Inge encouraged her art students to look at the shapes of the objects rather than the objects themselves.  Completely dissociating what the object is from what elements it is composed of has changed the way I look at everyday objects.  Before viewing objects this way, my mind would take a chair, for instance, and dismiss it because I assumed certain properties of chairness that I knew to be true.  When I think of a chair, however, as a series of shapes and lines and planes and points, it allows me to truly examine it visually.  This can be an exhausting but incredible process.  I feel it takes me back to the wonder of childhood, where everything was new and I did not have sets of generalizations for previously seen objects.  I had to look at everything to see what it really was.  Sometimes I thought I knew an object, but I didn’t, because I had never truly looked.  This relates to the exercise we did earlier in finding points, lines, and planes, which was also truly eye-changing, because I start seeing little things everywhere.  Planes and lines and points now jump out at me wherever I go and I am rather haunted by them.