Shape

9 Answer Number Two—Three More Ways to Look at It That Tell a Story
difference with many professions—but it’s thinking all the same. Designing is what
some people do. It goes with everything else people try.
Answer Number Two—Three More Ways to Look at It That Tell a Story
Getting Started—What I Wanted to Know That No One Could Tell Me
Let me begin early on. I’ve been interested in shapes for a long time. It all started when
I was a child. Miss H—— was one of my teachers. She was the daughter of a renowned
American painter, so I thought she would know the answer. I asked Miss H—— how
to put lines on a blank sheet of paper. Everyone in my grade was good at drawing
the usual stuff—cats, dogs, flowers, horses, houses, insects, lakes, mountains, people,
rivers, trees, etc.—so my question wasn’t about that. No, my question was about creative
design, and pictorial composition and expression. Miss H—— understood this
perfectly, and her answer was swift and sure.
If you don’t know that, you’ll never be an artist.
This surprised me then—I guess she wanted to be certain I wouldn’t ask again—and it
surprises me today.
Miss H—— was intelligent and educated. She had good ideas about verbal and
symbolic material in basic subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic, and also in geography,
history, language, and science—in subjects with rigorous standards and tests
to measure your strengths and weaknesses. You could always depend on the results.
There were answers that were right or wrong and true or false. But when it came to
the use of visual and spatial material in design—to seeing and drawing—I was supposed
to know already, or not to worry too much that I didn’t. Miss H—— was happy
to let me figure out lines for myself, maybe even a little embarrassed that one of her
pupils was worried about design. There wasn’t anything to teach. Why didn’t I see
that? It was clear to everyone else. The standards were missing—what tests could you
take to tell how well you were doing? There were no answers. It was all up to you.
Even so, Miss H—— wanted to help—that’s what dedicated teachers do. So she
tried again a little later in a desultory sort of way. Almost anything—meaningful or
not—is better than nothing when you’re trying to teach. But in fact, there were precedents
for it, and it was much more than it seemed at first sight. Miss H—— asked
everyone in my class to connect dots that were located randomly on a sheet of paper—
we all tapped our pencils with our eyes tightly closed—to make nifty patterns that
could be colored in. Miss H——’s exercise was like the occupations in Frederick Froebel’s
famous kindergarten method. And I enjoyed this for a while—what a marvelous
discovery. Miss H—— had something useful to show us about points and lines, and
how they combined to make planes. The progression from one dimension to the next
was kind of neat—these were relationships to remember. But my interest didn’t last.
How did I decide which dots to connect? I could sift through the possibilities counting
them out one by one, but this didn’t answer my question. I was connecting points