Drawing on The Dominant Eye: Decoding the Way We Perceive, Create, and Learn by Betty Edwards

Drawing on The Dominant Eye: Decoding the Way We Perceive, Create, and Learn Reviews

• 
  Robert

  This is a narrowly focused but provocative book by the master drawing teacher Betty Edwards. The major finding that she reports is that almost all of us know whether we are right- or left-hand dominant, but few of us know whether we are right- or left- eye dominant. Turns out that 65% of us are right-eye dominant and 34% left-eye dominant. The remaining 1%? Who knows? And what does this mean in terms of vision and connectivity to the right or left side of the brain, Edwards' special interest? Who knows to that question, too. More research is necessary.
  
  But you can find out which is your dominant eye, and beyond that, you can pretty easily guess which eye is dominant in almost everyone you meet. Edwards tells you how. Further, she helps you read the different functions of the eyes in interpersonal relations and uses these insights to advance her proven ideas about recovering a visual life and energy that most of us cease to develop at age 7 or 8, when we stop advancing beyond crude, symbolic drawing.
  
  Edwards' plea remains that we make more use of our "right brain," the part of the brain that gives us pathways into the arts, the intuitions, and, I would say, both useful sources of intelligence and a greater sense of personal happiness and fulfillment.
  
  Today's world is definitely a left-brain world--verbal, analytic, systematic, and logical. We think a lot, but we don't see in equal measure. Our wholeness has been diminished by the overall utility of the left-brain's functions. As Edwards says, visualization in depth, detail and gestalt has atrophied because we have so little recourse to right-brain abilities. She offers some thoughts on how to recover our lost talents in this book, but it is not one of her drawing guides or workbooks. It is a book more focused on the neglected powers of the brain and the costs this neglect imposes on us.
• 
  Sally White

  I have read Betty Edwards previous books and enjoyed them, this is really a re-hash with a few more up to date illustrations, the dominant eye existence is established, but very little information about what this means, how to make the most of it. The book feels a little superficial and the fact I managed to read it in about 3 hours, made me feel it did not have much substance. Disappointing from such a generally helpful author
• 
  Jammy Wammy

  I don't know what I was expecting, but this just wasn't for me.
• 
  Beth Nieman

  Betty Edwards, author, artist and teacher, has a new book out, “Drawing on the Dominant Eye.” It’s a follow-up to her bestseller, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” which millions have used to improve not only their drawing skills but also their thinking skills. Edwards’ first book deepened readers’ understanding of the way our brains have our distinct verbal and non-verbal information processing skills.
  Why this new book? Edwards directs readers to the split-brain research done in the 1950s and 1960s at California Institute of Technology, showing the two hemispheres of the brain have very different ways of processing information from the world around us. One side is “verbal, analytic, and sequential, mostly using language and logic to think and converse. In the other hemisphere is another ‘person,’ whose main mode of thinking is nonverbal, visual, perceptual, and global, seeing and intuiting the whole all at once,” explains Edwards. She further explains a structure in the brain called the corpus callosum connecting the two halves, allowing us to experience our thoughts “as one person, and the two ‘languages’ meld into one.”
  You know whether you are right-handed or left-handed, but did you know there is also “footedness?” According to Edwards, the foot you most often step out with is your dominant foot. And then we come to the “dominant eye” concept referred to in the book title, another outward sign of the way your individual brain is organized. “About 65 percent of humans are right-eye dominant, and 34 percent left-eye dominant. For 1 percent, both eyes are equally dominant,” notes Edwards. Those who are aware of how to detect the dominant eye of another person “can gain some insights into another person’s true self.”
  Edwards comments on what an image-saturated world we live in, and suggests that the advent of cameras, film, television, and, more recently, the Internet, may lead to “a new world of improved and broadened visual perception with less dependence on language in all its forms.” Can you think of any pictures, videos, or even half-time commercials which, without words, have moved you in some way?
  As an art teacher, Edwards believes that students could benefit from having drawing instruction as part of their regular curriculum. “Drawing slows down perception,” she writes. “Visual information that might be glossed over or actually not seen at all in more casual ‘looking and naming’ provides a pathway to the real goal, understanding. This is the difference between fast seeing in order to name, and slow seeing through drawing, which provides a pathway to those true goals of drawing: perception, comprehension, and appreciation.”
  With beautiful visual examples from the Old Masters to student drawings, and several drawing exercises to try at home, Edwards persuades readers to consider that there is more than one way to see the world, and that within every human being there is a pathway towards enriched perspective through drawing. Readers who enjoy art, psychology, or creative expression will want to Edwards’ book.
  
• 
  Roger

  Fascinating as a way of understanding how we see and our limitations
• 
  Steven Siswandhi

  This is great like all her books. I never knew that besides right handedness and left handedness, there is such a thing as left eyedness or right eyedness. Fascinating as always.
• 
  Paul Young

  As a person without formal training, but an interest in drawing, this was very informative and supportive.