The Illusion of Reality: How Art Shapes Our View of the World

The Illusion of Reality: How Art Shapes Our View of the World

Jeffrey Besecker: This is The Light Inside, I'm Jeffrey Besecker.

Seeing is believing. It's a refrain you've likely heard. Nevertheless, what we see is not always a complete representation of reality. In addition to cognitive biases and limitations, external influences often alter or distort our perception of the world around us. Those who have the ability to experience color can't escape it. We're surrounded by it relentlessly, night to day and from birth to death. Depending on the situation, we may find it pleasing, saddening, calming, or at times, inspiring. Even so, despite our fascination, many mysteries remain about the nature of color. Our world, an infinitely colorful place. Yet, here's the thing. Our perceptual filters not only color our direct experience of the world's hues, they also shape the way we perceive and interpret the broader landscape of our surroundings. In short, what we see is not always an accurate or comprehensive representation of the truth due to a complex interplay of subconscious influences. For instance, selective attention, cognitive biases, perceptual illusions, cultural influences, memory limitations, and other factors all filter and tint how we perceive the things we experience.

Today we explore how Atelier art training techniques and cognitive perspectives can provide an insight into our perspective forming dynamics. We gain valuable insight into shaping and questioning our perspectives and challenge how we choose to see the world. when we return to the light inside.

Color is one of the few tools at an artist's disposal. A tool that serves an infinite number of possibilities when assessing the sensibilities of design and also when forming perspectives. Yet when it comes to teaching the art of seeing, as we'll learn today, seeing in black and white is half the battle, inhibiting us from forming a broader perspective. The finest artists of both today and yesteryear have broadly used color, invoking an extraordinary range of responses from the viewer. According to psychology, intuition is the process of your subconscious mind recognizing patterns, After seeing something, your subconscious rifles through your memories for patterns. The intuition-based design process involves looking back at work we've seen, but haven't done. Perhaps it was a color combination we once saw walking through the city, or a layout from a website we once visited. Although our conscious mind doesn't remember it, our subconscious makes notes about whether or not it was successful. Essentially, intuition-based design uses the subconscious mind rather than the conscious mind as with experience-based design, leaving us to question, is seeing believing or believing seeing? Akin to intuition-based design, our perspectives are shaped by implicit memories, therefore suggesting the dynamic interplay between cognitive processes and contrasting how our estimations lay the foundation for diverse ideological outcomes. Perhaps you've wondered, are artistic talents something that are inborn, or can they be taught? Through her extended training in Atelier studio art techniques, Mandy Tease has evolved her skillful eye as a master artist. Now she uses her finely honed skills to teach others not only how to draw, but also how to see the world. Mandy, I'm excited to explore with you how your specific style of teaching art enables us to see things from a different perspective or in a new light, so to speak. Hint, hint. In art, there is a perspective of discipline known as atelier train. Atelier is the French word for studio, is it not?

Mandy Theis: Yes. Yes, that is correct. And although it has kind of a fancy name, English-speaking people, it's just the French word for studio. And it's actually a very humble word. And it's a way to describe a specific kind of drawing and painting practice that focuses on drawing and painting realistically. So this isn't abstract art. This isn't a blank canvas. This isn't scribbles on a page. This is people that are trying to represent the world around them as realistically as possible using drawing and painting and preferably or usually and not always, but most often without the aid of photography. So it's pure observation of your eye and your hands and creating realistically the world that you see around you.

Jeffrey Besecker: It sounds like such a fascinating process. Could you share with our listeners what Atelier training entails and where its origins begin?

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. So atelier training is not a new thing. It's just that we haven't been widely practicing it as a society for about 100 years. So it seems like a new thing. But atelier training has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. For example, Leonardo da Vinci didn't wake up one day and paint the Mona Lisa. He actually trained in an atelier in Italy for 10 years in order to acquire the skills that he needed to execute that particular vision to make the Mona Lisa painting. So it's a studio practice where you have a master artist and you basically have apprentices under them that are learning the skills of drawing and painting under the tutelage of someone who already knows them. Now, in the contemporary sense, the way Atelier training works, and yes, Atelier still exists. So if you've ever wanted to paint like Leonardo da Vinci, you can do that by going to an Atelier. But there aren't that many Ateliers in the world. This training fell out of a favor for the last hundred years, and it's just now kind of experiencing a renaissance. And ironically, it's become the countercultural movement in the art world. So if you go to an atelier today, and that's spelled A-T-E-L-I-E-R, if you type it into the internet, you can find them. I run an atelier online, for example, and I train in an atelier. I train in several ateliers, one in Seattle, one in the Boston area. So the way atelier training works. is that typically you start with drawing projects and you start by copying drawings of the old masters. And once you learn a little bit about drawing and start learning and seeing what the old masters knew, then you start drawing your own objects, your own still lifes, things like that. And so the typical progression is you start with drawing, usually for one, sometimes two years, you do nothing but draw. And then you work with a limited palette. Sometimes that's painting what's called Ingres Eye, but painting in black and white. And the idea behind painting in black and white is that you're practicing the same skills as you were in drawing because you're still only using values to describe the world around you, lights and darks. But controlling and manipulating paint is so much more difficult than controlling and manipulating a pencil, right? So it's a way to kind of transition you into learning how to control your paint while using the same skills that you've been practicing as a draftsperson when you were drawing. And then eventually you start adding colors onto your palette until you become a full color painter. So that's essentially how the training works. It takes you from, you don't have to know anything about drawing and painting. If you just have a desire to learn how to draw and paint, that's all you need. And the training will teach you what you need to know. Sometimes students come to me and they're like, oh, I don't think I'm good enough to come to your Atelier class, Mandy. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's my job to teach you how to be good at drawing and painting. It's your job to show up and do the work. Right? So anybody can learn how to draw and paint at really high levels at a very realistically when they go to an atelier because ateliers have people that have inherited these hundreds and hundreds of years of artistic information and have that knowledge base to share with you.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's kind of interesting to see how only seeing things in black and white does not always give us an accurate representation of what we're seeing. Correct.

Mandy Theis: And applying

Jeffrey Besecker: How that allows us to see the shades of gray as we're starting to create our lives.

Mandy Theis: Oh, there's so many analogies between painting and life. You know, I think that's true for anybody who's really passionate about one area and they each teach us something different, like sports, teach us something about life. But painting, especially learning how to truly see with your eye, because what this training really does is it teaches you to see things that you've never seen before at a more nuanced level than you're capable of seeing right now. So in your example with the grays and the shades of grays, you know, when I look out there in the world, unless you're colorblind, you are seeing color, right? So in order to determine how light or dark something you're going to make when you're drawing it, you actually have to pretend that the color isn't there, right? So it's incredibly imaginative to be able to draw because You know, every color has a value, how light or dark it is, a chroma, an intensity of the color, and a hue, like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. And, you know, I have this free color class that I teach at the School of Atelier Arts website that will take you through that if you're interested in learning more about that. But what you're doing when you're drawing is you have to take out the hue and the chroma part so that you're only dealing with the value. So you're eliminating two-thirds of the information about color in order to be able to draw it. And that takes an incredible amount of practice and imagination to do well.

Jeffrey Besecker: That also illustrates to me, illustrates, let's use our artistic terms today, how value helps us to shape and form our perception, not only of our experience, the shared experience, but of everything we engage with throughout the world.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. And you know, with drawing, you're really learning how to not just see values, but see smaller and smaller increments of value and nuance and appreciate nuance and appreciate subtlety. And that's definitely something that goes into your everyday life. And you know, meditation is becoming very, very popular. But visual meditation, that's what drawing is. And it's about really knowing something like if you're trying to draw this mug that I'm holding right now, you know, most people will sit down and draw a circle and put two sticks on the side and kind of a half moon for a handle, right? But to draw this mug, to be this specific mug, we need to know, is it taller or is it wider? How big of the hole is in the handle? What's the exact shape of the handle? Is it square? Is it rounded? If I had to describe this handle with three lines, you know, which three lines would I pick to describe this handle? And then you go through life and you start noticing all sorts of subtleties in everything. You notice that somebody's collar is a little bit curled on the side. You notice that there's a glint of purple highlight under a certain skin tone, you know, when you're looking at someone's face. You can just extract so much more knowledge, so much more beauty and so much more appreciation in the world when you train your eye to see really well.

Jeffrey Besecker: What are some of the advantages of learning art in this manner as opposed to some of the more freeform expressions of creativity?

Mandy Theis: Okay. So this is a great question. And I would like to address this with the second part first, and then go to the first part. I'm struggling in pronouncing my words today. So in my opinion, you know, I'm a licensed art teacher. I've been teaching arts for many years. I run a university program that teaches atelier training to art teachers specifically. And the thing I want to emphasize more than anything else is how incredibly important it is to be careful how we think about creativity in the arts. that I have are the ones in their artwork, the on that's in their head in t compromise. And in order you have to have skills. If you develop a skill set, it's like having a toolbox, right? And, you know, if you need a hammer, you have your hammer. If you need a saw, you have your saw. But if you can only do the expressive kind of art, like do what you feel, what your emotions take you, that is one tool in your toolbox. But let's say you have a vision for a pony riding through a forest, all right, and you have a specific way that you want to execute that or how you see it in your head, but if you are only able to do kind of this free flow move where the materials take you, you're probably not going to have the skills you need to execute that vision as you intend to. So in my opinion and through my experience and through my expertise in art education, I can't emphasize enough that creativity comes from choice. Creativity comes from the ability to create what you intend to without compromise.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, would you say having that diverse range of tools themselves allows us to have greater creative expression? Absolutely.

Mandy Theis: And something that people don't realize is that you need a massive amount of tools. Because when you are trying to draw something in front of you, we'll go back to the mug, right? If you're trying to draw this coffee mug, you see color, you see shapes, you see lines. There's so many different things that you see here. And you might decide you need different tools to describe it. Right now, this mug is a three-dimensional object. We have two eyes. We're seeing in 3D. We're taking in a massive amount of visual information. But we're trying to recreate it in a drawing that's only 2D, right? So what are we editing out? And that is a creative choice that's just incredible. And that's one of the main differences between drawing and photography, too, is that a camera is a machine that largely edits out the same way. You know, you can tweak some things on a camera, like its focus, and it's not that you don't have any control, but you have massively more control in a drawing, because everything you put on a page is a choice. You're deciding so many things when you're translating 3D information to 2D. You cannot draw this exact thing exactly the way it is because it's three-dimensional and you are drawing on 2D paper.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's an interesting comparison again to how we can see those different dimensions of life. I want to point out a great creative endeavor I saw online today, looking at a glass bottle. You know, we often think of art being limited to 3D art. third-dimensional art. We often look at life being limited up to a third-dimensional view, and now we're starting to creatively explore expression as fourth dimension and beyond perspectives. Going back to the art, this glass artist, a sculptor, had sculpted a bottle. It was called a bottle. It looked more like a vase, vase, however you want to Call that from my perspective of it. It looked more like one of those. But relating it back to the artist's expression, it was meant to be a bottle with a neck that went beyond the third dimension into the fourth. The neck of the bottle went into the actual belly or holding vessel of the bottle from the actual orifice or opening. into the middle and then out through the side of the glass without breaking the continuity of that bottle and wrapping back around back into the very belly it was filling. So somewhat symbolizing, I don't know, I'm trying to find an analogy here, maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mandy Theis: I was thinking like circle of life.

Jeffrey Besecker: Or maybe even taking that idea of the self out of it because what's filling what there? It was an interesting thing to see and question with curiosity how that simply shifted our condition perception.

Mandy Theis: Yeah, I think it's fascinating when artists are able to really challenge us to, you know, our perceptions, especially visual perceptions. Obviously, I adore the realm of visual perception. And it's a choice, right? Because that artist needed techniques and skills in order to be able to sculpt something to match their vision, right? If I tried to make that, even if I had the same idea, with my very limited sculpting skills, because I'm not a three-dimensional artist. I love 2D, and 3D just messes with my brain. I really struggle with it, right? But I would not have been able to sculpt that, because I don't have that skill set. I haven't developed that skill set. I haven't trained in that skill set. So even if I had the exact same idea as that artist, I wouldn't have been able to execute the vision. And I think that's, again, where creativity and technique are joined hand in hand.

Jeffrey Besecker: So going back to Atelier training, are there any limitations you perceive, Mandy, in utilizing this perspective when learning both visual concepts and then adopting those ideas and bringing them into form?

Mandy Theis: The biggest struggle actually that my students have, you know, when I'm teaching, whether I'm teaching art teachers or younger students, is that your ideas of what good is changes when you have access to technique and when you train seriously in technique. And I will give you actually my own personal example. I trained in the atelier and, you know, when I first got to the atelier, I saw a student who was in year three who had just started their painting. and I was just blown away by this painting, and I was so inspired, and I thought to myself, if I could just paint like that, I would never want for anything else in my art heart, right? Like, I would be happy for all time if I just had that level of skill set. Well, you know, fast forward three years where I'm at a comparable level, and then I look back at that same painting that had inspired me, and I was like, oh, wow, I want to paint better than this. This isn't very good, right? So what happens as you train is that you get better, your eye gets better, and a frustration for students is that your eye gets better before your hand and your execution, right? And so there's this part of training when you're trying to learn how to draw and paint at a high level, where you have to accept this lifelong struggle between where your eye is and where your vision is, both in your head and what your eye is seeing, and where you are skill-wise in your execution. And that is a constantly shifting, was it the Overton window, I think is what it's called? Yes. So, you know, it's constantly shifting where, you know, the work you make now, you would have killed yourself for chopped off your left arm for, you know, five years ago, but now it's not satisfying your standards anymore. So, you know, you have to think of it as a journey and no matter where you are, if you have access to Atelier training, if you have access to an instructor that has Atelier training, because that's another mistake people make all the time. They come to me and they say, oh, Mandy, I just don't have it. I wasn't bopped on the head by the talent fairy. And I'm like, no, anybody can learn how to draw and paint. The problem is that you were training or took a class with somebody that didn't have the skill set that you were trying to achieve. So if you are trying to draw realistically and you go to an artist to take a lesson that paints white canvases, they don't have the skill set to teach you what you want to know. if you want to draw and paint realistically you need an atelier trained instructor and luckily they're more accessible than they've ever been you know all sorts of ateliers are popping up online now where even five or ten years ago I had to quit my job move across the country I paid like thousands and thousands and thousands like tens of thousands of dollars to get the training and now I have students that I teach online you know that can don't have to move across the country, right? So, you know, and I get jealous of them sometimes. I'm like, do you know how lucky you are? Like, get out my old man cane, like back in my day. You had to quit your job to access this knowledge because it nearly went extinct, you know, over the last hundred years, where painting and drawing realistically fell out of favor. And, you know, it was these very small pockets of places that barely kept that knowledge alive and Today, maybe there's a few thousand people in the world that have this training. And it's my vision and my goal as an art teacher to help provide broader access because it's so essential to see. Even 100 years ago, you couldn't be an engineer if you didn't know how to draw. How are you going to describe what you needed to do? You had to have a very high level of accuracy in drawing. And that's true for many professions 100 years ago that now think, oh, I'm an engineer. Drawing isn't for me. engineer thing to do. So it truly is. It's like not being able to read, right? Like not being able to draw realistically. Like it's like you see all these books around you, but you don't know what they are. And now that you know how to read, you know how magical they are. Well, the same is true about training your eye to see. And if you can draw well, if you have Atelier training, or if you start Atelier training, it's like the whole visual world changes around you. It's like every tree you see is its own book that unfurls its pages to you.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, it seems like it's a form of internship where we use that mentor or mentorship to gain that valuable feedback to change and evolve, to grow our skills and tool set.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. It's like someone teaching you how to read. That's what an Atelier instructor is doing. It's just that they're teaching you how to read visual forms instead of letters on a page.

Jeffrey Besecker: So going back to my own acquaintance with art and my own art training, all the way back to junior high school when my love for art and creativity first started to bloom.

Mandy Theis: I love this already.

Jeffrey Besecker: Critiquing that process itself and the outcome becomes a crucial step, does it not, in any type of art training and especially and perhaps in T.L.E.A.

Mandy Theis: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's just like checking in where you are in a process and, you know, understanding what you do know and what you don't know, right? And that's what part of the critique process is. You know, I teach in my online atelier. Twice a week, students come. They bring whatever paintings they've been working on. And it's so fabulous because not only are they getting the information that they need, but all the other people on the call are learning from them as well, right? And so they can see not only where student A's strengths and weaknesses are, or, you know, the one thing that I'm having them focus on, but they're also, everybody else is like, okay, thinking about that, seeing that, and they're avoiding the same mistakes, or they're learning from those mistakes, and they're learning from the successes, too. Often, you know, a student will come after struggling with a concept, and they finally get it right, and we'll spend a lot of time talking about what the difference was between the first attempt and why the second attempt is more accurate and is more in line with the goals that we have for that painting. So it really is a process, but the critique section, people are afraid sometimes, especially when they first start training with me, they're so afraid that very first time, right? But it takes time to establish yourself. We have a fabulous community of people. We're all there to learn together, and everybody's so grateful because we recognize that we're learning for ourselves and also from others, and that only works we're willing to be vulnerable and put it up there, you know.

Jeffrey Besecker: So from my own experience, that process tends to be one of mutual affection. You're sharing that creative bond and journey and becomes one that's a very open space for dialogue.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because, you know, people think when you're drawing and painting realistically, it's right or it's wrong. And that's not the case at all. You're taking mass amounts of 3D information and putting it into 2D. So you can edit it out in an infinite number of ways, right? And you can interpret that information in infinite number of ways and still have a realistic painting. So, you know, sometimes, and I love, I love this because I think someone's painting personality is as unique to each individual as their handwriting. I can tell you, even when I'm doing master copies with my students, even when we're all painting the exact same painting, I can tell you just by the choices different students are making who painted which exact master copy, even if we're all painting the exact copy of the same painting, right? Because the choices about how they're laying down their paint or what they're emphasizing or what maybe they haven't learned yet, it's all just out there to see. And, you know, again, it's like reading a book. And once you know how to read it, you know, this infinite world of possibilities opens up to you. But, you know, I have some students that just adore like intensity of color and anytime they get an opportunity, they will emphasize that part of their painting, and I have like the engineering types and dentists are like this to the engineers and dentists that I teach, they, they love precision so much you know they're like technicians right there's a a French painter, Ong, I-N-G-R-E-S. And he was a technician type of painter, right? Like he would make people sit for him when he was doing their portrait 200 times, like 200 times times three hours, right? For one portrait, right? That's unheard of because he was like an obsessive technician and you can see that in his work, right? And so it's just, it's amazing. There's endless, you know, even if you think you're not an artist or you're not a painter, you absolutely are. You just haven't figured out which techniques are your techniques, and you can't figure them out unless you train in techniques, right? So you can read, you can learn how to add. Like, can you imagine if your math teacher was like, oh, you don't know how to add already? I guess you'll never be a math teacher. I guess you'll never count your money because… And unfortunately, that's a prevailing mindset in today's society, largely because we've eschewed technical skills in art, but it doesn't have to be that way. Even if you think that you are not an artist, that you'll never be an artist, that someone told you once upon a time that your art isn't for you. if you want to if you have the desire to learn it and if you're willing to put in the time right you know some people just don't care about art they're not gonna put in the time like I can't help you if you don't put in the time but if you decide that you want this if you decide to train anybody can learn how to draw and paint like even my worst students like I had one student a few years ago and It was the first time I ever felt like, okay, Mandy, maybe your philosophy isn't right, because this student is not getting it, no matter what you're doing. Like, just really, really struggling. And this went on for week after week after week. And I was like, you know what, I just don't know what to do. And then, like one day she came into class, and it was just like everything clicked. right? So like the way I've learned with her, and now she's a quite good painter, but the way I learned with her is that she didn't learn gradually, you know, it wasn't like one step and then another step, you know, she would just plateau for like a long time and then just make this huge jump later. But that was the closest I ever came to thinking, okay, maybe, maybe you're wrong, maybe you know, art can't, maybe art, but I was right. It was learning it and kind than I had seen with my o I have never met a student experience, what's, wheth a paintbrush, whether the hard their whole life and do it for whatever reason anybody can learn to do this, it's just that most people haven't had access to an atelier instructor. And so if you're trying to learn something from somebody who doesn't know it, of course, it's going to be frustrating. Of course, you're going to feel like you don't have it, because how can somebody teach you something that they don't know?

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, it seems like the process requires collecting data or information, making measurements, and then forming predictions about an accurate representation of what we see.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's so spot on. And you know, one thing that makes Atelier training so special is that if you just sit down to draw and you want to draw my portrait, it can be overwhelming. Like you're going to see my brown hair and you know, my lips are what size and what color are my eyes and what shirt am I wearing? You know, it's so much information, right? But what Atelier training does is it creates a process where you're only thinking about one kind of information at a time, and then you're adding it to the next piece, and you're adding it to the next piece. So you're not trying to sit down and do everything at once. You only have to think about one thing at a time. When I teach portraiture and, you know, what I do is I have my students, okay, what's the height of the head compared to the width of the head? And that's the only thing we're worried about. We're not worried about earlobes or nostrils or anything else, right? What's the height versus what's the width of the head? Okay, and then if you could describe the head shape with like five lines, which five lines would you use, right? And so maybe your jaw is a little narrower, so you're going to, you know, put an incline at the jaw and maybe you have a really flat top head. Some people have really flat heads. Some people have very, very round heads. Some people have like triangle, like almost cone heads, right? So like my particular head shape's a little bit coney. You know, if I were to put my hands on each side of my head, you can see that the shape of the top of my head is a little bit, you know, cone-like. But you're only having to think about the overall shape of the head, right? We don't have to worry about other things going on. You know, another thing with drawing portraiture that people don't realize is that, you know, getting a likeness in a portrait is about the relationship of the features to each other. That's more important than the color of the eye or the eyelashes or, you know, the eyebrows or anything else. How far apart are the eyes or close together are the eyes? How far apart are the eyes from the lips? How far apart are the eyes from the bottom of the nose? If you get the accuracy of the relationship of the features together, that's where likeness comes from. And that's why cartoon artists can just put a scribble for two eyes, a scribble underneath the nose and a scribble for a mouth and create a likeness of somebody, right? Or, you know, create this character that we can recognize. What we think we know about drawing is not at all what drawing is oftentimes, and that's what Atelier training really teaches you.

Jeffrey Besecker: In the vast classroom of existence, life stands as our most profound teacher, weaving intricate lessons into the tapestry of our journey. Every moment, every experience, a carefully crafted lesson plan, tailored to sculpt our understanding of the world and ourselves. Much like our patient guide, life presents us with challenges, joys, and sorrows, each holding a hidden gem of wisdom waiting to be discovered. Yet the true essence of this cosmic education lies not just in the experiences themselves, but in our willingness to perceive and internalize the teachings embedded within them. Life's lessons are like whispers in the wind, subtle and fleeting, requiring a keen ear and an open heart to decipher. When we embrace the philosophy that life is our greatest mentor, we unlock greater doors of discovery and growth. Only by acknowledging the profound wisdom concealed in every twist of faith, can we truly appreciate the transformative power of life's continuous lessons. paving the way for a more enlightened and enriched existence. That, my friends, is life. That's a whole other story. But going back to that experience, you know, coming in as a young artist, having that assumption that we have to have the entire picture and start and accurately draw everything we see. but being taught to step back first with our pencils and take the basic measurement. As we place where those eyes are, as we place where the gap is between the depth of the nose and the bridge and the space between the eyes, and subtly sliding your finger back and then stepping back to your actual painting. Compare and contrast. Absolutely.

Mandy Theis: Where am I at?

Jeffrey Besecker: And if you don't get it right the first time, as you mentioned, you're just kind of roughing in the idea.

Mandy Theis: Mm-hmm, absolutely.

Jeffrey Besecker: Basic values and forms. What framework are we doing to even start to frame the picture before we're done framing the final perspective?

Mandy Theis: you should know what your painting is going to look like and the area it's going to take up on the page with the first few lines you put down, right? The whole composition is set at that point.

Jeffrey Besecker: Met and execute.

Mandy Theis: Yes, yes, absolutely. But you know, a lot of students come to me and they think that I sit down with a painting and I start in the upper left-hand corner and I just go and then by the time I'm on the bottom right-hand corner, ta-da, it's like, and that's not at all how it goes because there's so much information. You can't just think about everything at one time. You know, you have to isolate different concepts and build them together. And generally speaking, in the Atelier method, what we teach is going from big ideas to small. So the shape of the head is a much bigger idea than the shape of a nostril. You know, the relationship of the features is a much bigger idea than the teeth, right? So it's this, it's a philosophy, it's a concept, you can apply it to almost anything you do in life, right? Like start with the big ideas first, right? And then break it down to the next biggest idea, and then the next biggest idea. You know, sometimes we get distracted in life by, oh, I need to make this phone call, and I need to do my laundry, and I need, you know, those are all the details, right? What's the big idea? The big idea is that I want to have a peaceful house, okay? And then what's the next biggest idea? Okay, cleaning, but I need my house to be clean in order to be peaceful. Okay, now what's the next big idea, right? You know, working from big to small, it's not just for painting, it's for life.

Jeffrey Besecker: In that regard, that process is not only additive sometimes, where we're adding additional elements. Sometimes, aren't we also, throughout that art process, taking away certain aspects to get that? Oh, for sure.

Mandy Theis: Especially in Atelier training, it's often a choice that is frequently made in Atelier training is when you have a shadow area. So let's say you're painting a face and there's a shadow on the side of the face and the neck. Often artists will minimize the information there. They will make it one dark value, even if they see reflected light in there, even if they see, you know, color changes in there. they will purposely minimize, especially shadows, into one flat value. And you'll hear that a lot in Atelier trading, a flat value for the shadows, right? And the reason for that is that if you really de-emphasize all that chaos going on in a shadow, then the emphasis will be on the forms in the light. And that's what that contrast between really creating beautiful form in the light by flattening the shadow and not allowing distractions for the eye in the shadow, it creates these luminous, just absolutely beautiful effects that you can see, you know, in all the old masters' work. You know, Rembrandt is an obvious example, but it's a way that you're deciding as an artist, like, even though I see something in this shadow area, I'm not putting it in because that's not where I want the focus of my audience to be. I want the focus to be on this beautiful light.

Jeffrey Besecker: In an art, we call that creative license. Am I correct in my assumption and prediction?

Mandy Theis: Yeah, I mean, it's not just copying everything you see. It's creatively choosing how you want your viewer to experience your art. And, you know, that happens so much in realism. You know, so many people think, oh, why bother painting at all, Mandy? We have cameras. Like, why not just take a picture? But they're not at all the same, you know, we had discussed this a little earlier, that they're not at all the same. And the choices artists make, they create a completely different experience. There's a reason people still love to go to museums and look at real paintings. You know, and even when I was a student, we would sell our work, you know, dirt cheap, you know, just trying to pay our tuition off and stuff. And often, People would come to our shows and it was the first time they could ever buy a real painting, right? Because we were selling these like little studies for like $100, right? And you know, people would have access to real paintings and it would be their first painting. And they would come back year after year because we did this sale every year. And they would be like, I get so much joy out of this painting. And they'll come and talk to you about it. And they're like, I never noticed that red until I had it, like, for six months, right? And there's more to see every time. And then they start looking. Like, let's say you did a painting of flowers. Then they start looking at the flowers in their house a little more carefully. Like, why would she put red in there? I don't see red. And they'll come and ask me, right? They'll be like, Andy, I'm not seeing the red. Where's the red? And then I'll explain that because the reflected light with a dark yellow center can create a really hot note in a painting. And then they see it, right? So, you know, even if you don't want to make realism paintings yourself, having a painting instead of a print on your wall, I can't believe how many people live in multi-million dollar houses that are just full of prints. Like, if you can afford a multi-million dollar house, like especially Atelier students, they'll sell you really beautiful paintings at like crazy cheap prices.

Jeffrey Besecker: Sometimes Studio Art itself makes some of the great things. I know all of our kids, literally all three of our grown adult children, have some form of art of both myself and my wife in their house. From our studio days, they all went to our storage unit where, you know, as artists, we hoard all of that stuff.

Mandy Theis: We're not going to talk about that. Yeah, that's a whole episode all to itself.

Jeffrey Besecker: In and of itself, we inherently understand the core value of even our practice efforts. And that itself is an art form.

Mandy Theis: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Jeffrey Besecker: Others can also adapt and see that perspective.

Mandy Theis: As you grow and change too. your art isn't for everybody, but your art at different stages isn't for the same people either, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: Sometimes it finds its audience later in life.

Mandy Theis: Right, you know, and, you know, for different reasons. Sometimes it's financial reasons, sometimes it's subject matter reasons, sometimes it's visual reasons. It just depends, you know. I once, I have a great story for you. So, towards the end of my training in the atelier, I painted a few peony paintings, like two of them. And the collectors that I had at the time were fighting over who got to buy these paintings. And it was hard to pick one person, so I sold it to one person, but I agreed to do a commission of another peony painting for the other person. Well, while I was painting the commission, more of my collectors wanted to buy this skinny painting. So I, like, just however I was painting peonies just really resonated with the people that liked my art, right? And I call this my peony purgatory period because for almost two years, I did nothing but paint peonies, right? Like even, you know, and it was great, you know, I was just getting started in my career and I was able to live off of- That's how all the great masters get locked in, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: They find that period, that era, you know, just like tennis, basketball.

Mandy Theis: Well, they don't tailor today.

Jeffrey Besecker: They find that era, which is usually guided by that thing that clicks.

Mandy Theis: Yes. Well, and I love painting flowers. And even to this day, I paint flowers. It's still my favorite subject, but I have not painted a peony since then. Maybe one day I'll be ready again, but I just got burnt out on it. But in the atelier world, we call those pot boilers, right? Like the ones that we know we'll sell that we can practice our craft. Yeah, absolutely. And also they're beautiful paintings. I don't regret painting a single one of them, only that, you know, I got locked into something beyond the point where I was the one initiating the reason to paint it, right? And so I have since stopped taking commissions because I realized commissions make me resentful. So now I don't do commissions. I only paint what I want and I sell those.

Jeffrey Besecker: I've got mountains of those just a few feet away over here in a corner of our lot.

Mandy Theis: Yes, yes.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's a whole other… Right here in my studio. Right. Where I'm creating.

Mandy Theis: Right. It's true. It's an endless battle because, you know, you want your work to be out there and live in the world and you want it to have a life after you paint it. But then there's also the ones that you're reluctant to sell. And then I really don't believe that as an artist, we know which works are our best. Yeah, totally. I think only time and distance gives us that information. And frankly, other people, because if I create a peony painting, because I want people to feel inspired by this glowing orange light created by the slight translucency of the petals, I'm succeeding if other people feel that, right? And if that's something that is marketable, great in this case. Yes, that was a very marketable skill that both I liked and other people liked, and it was communicated cleanly. But there's, you know, failures too, right? Like one of my favorite paintings I actually sold, and then they asked me to sign it. It was a study, so it wasn't like a serious painting. I hadn't signed it. And then I signed it, and then the people who bought it returned it because they didn't like the way I signed it, right? But I'm so grateful to have this painting back. Like, you know, I was like mourning the loss of this painting. And, you know, they asked me to, you know, make the signature look different. And I was like, nope, nope, here's your money back.

Jeffrey Besecker: Really?

Mandy Theis: Interesting. And it came back into my life. Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: Interesting. I'm just curious. To me, I go back again to we inherently build that grand picture of sometimes doing the Sistine Chapel, yet what inherently people come back and find the most value is, is that humble art of practice.

Mandy Theis: Yes.

Jeffrey Besecker: Smudgy, blurry, sometimes distorted things.

Mandy Theis: Yes. I'm going to issue an unpopular… I also think that we should be pursuing our truth. Whatever your truth is, whether it's your art truth, I think we all have a purpose, you know, in this world, and that we have a truth. And I have a very unpopular opinion, because you brought up the Sistine Chapel, that I think the Sistine Chapel is a travesty of an artwork. And this is a very unpopular opinion. It's our default go-to. Well, I think it's beautiful and inspiring and has a lot going for it. The reason I feel it's a travesty is because Michelangelo was 10 times the sculptor that he was a painter. And he got literally bullied, like the Pope was sending an army back to Florence to get him to come paint this chapel, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: Paint this darn ceiling.

Mandy Theis: And, you know, what he painted in there were all of his designs for sculptures. You know, if you look at it today, you know, they're very sculptural. But, God, he was such a good sculptor. You know, you can't look at, you know, his sculptures without just your breath being completely taken away. And how much better would the world have been if we had those sculptures? And, you know, that was how many years that the Pope stole from us. as a, you know, world culture of beautiful sculptures. And Raphael should have been painting the ceiling. He was a much better painter.

Jeffrey Besecker: I would agree from that time frame and without going into too far of debating. Mainly because those were a lot of the classes I like to sleep through in my art training in college. In the end, it's all about representing what we experience, expressing, forming those predictions, and then letting it go. We're each going to see it differently.

Mandy Theis: Yeah, absolutely. You know, art is just such an amazing vehicle for visual meditation, for visual experience, for visual emotion, right? You know, we like to think, oh, emotions are just in our body, but no, like our eyes are obviously like a key emotional intake. And it's just incredible what Even if you don't want to be an artist just learning how to draw just a little bit or learning how to mix colors like I teach this free color class. At the School of Italy arts website and my guarantee it's one hour it's free and my guarantee is that people will learn to see colors that they've never seen before. Because someone who sees more colors than you can right now can actually teach you to see a color you've never seen before. And how cool would it be if tomorrow morning you woke up being able to see more colors than you could right now? And that's the power of training under an Atelier artist. That's the power and beauty of, you know, learning what your eye as a sense, you know, one of our major senses can do for you and bring into your life and bring into your world.

Jeffrey Besecker: Going back to that concept of the beginner mind, I can go back and relate that to at the age, probably about seven or eight, where I first started doing doodles. I'll call them doodles. I call them doodles now. And I look back and see that beauty of the kids coming back and seeing those quick, basic studio sketches that were no different. Absolutely. Going back to that relationship, having that outside nurturing source, having that feedback, truly shifted how you make those predictions inform that perspective.

Mandy Theis: Yes, absolutely. One of my earliest drawing memories was I grew up in Ohio and we used to have these crazy cool lightning storms there, like just thunderstorms. Like, you know, you don't get them everywhere in the country. Like we never got a storm like that in Seattle, but you know, like the shaking in the house and the boom and like that, you know.

Jeffrey Besecker: We're due for some tomorrow. So I'm preparing for those.

Mandy Theis: I miss that so much about Ohio because, you know, I barely, rarely have experienced them since I left. But I wanted to capture these lightning streaks. It's my earliest drawing memory was sitting on my mom's bed. And, you know, page after page of just trying to like capture the lightning and, you know, not having any idea of how it's going to do it, but just feeling that inspiration to do it. And it's something that I still love to do, even though Like trying to draw lightning is almost an impossible task, but that's what I love most about it, right? You have like a half a second to practice your visual memory, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: It's so ephemeral. How do you capture it? You know, that's a great analogy for life. It's so ephemeral. How do you form an accurate picture of it? Because every instant is hearing gone and changing.

Mandy Theis: Yes, but on the rare occasions that I do see a storm, I still love just pulling out my little sketchbook and trying it and knowing that I'm not going to succeed even because, you know, it's an impossible task, but just appreciating it for what it is, right? And enjoying the visual experience and having some record of that visual experience in my sketchbook.

Jeffrey Besecker: Every experience of life is sometimes quite technically from a scientific level, forming predictions, it is simply shaping a perspective. Absolutely.

Mandy Theis: Learning how to use your eye at its full capacity, like you're literally changing your perspective, you're literally changing what you're able to absorb in the world, what you see, when you see it, the order of which you see things, the emphasis with which you see things. It's like I don't know how to describe it to people who haven't gone through the process, but I woke up, you know, after I started training, just feeling like I was seeing the world as like a baby, like for the first time, you know, everything was new, everything was different. Like, I have a friend that is you know, struggling, you know, emotionally. And I was like, just learn to see a new color today. And then, like, let that bring you joy, right? Just, just that, just do that today.

Jeffrey Besecker: So from that aspect, that process of forming that perspective can be such a challenge sometimes, even from that emotional perspective.

Mandy Theis: Yes, it's scary to let go of what you think you know and what you think you see in order to see something new. Like especially in Atelier training, students are so afraid to use the method I'm teaching them because they work so hard to be able to draw the way that however they could draw when they come in. And their drawings always get worse before they make an improvement. And it is so hard for them to let go in order to move forward. And for that reason alone, I almost prefer working with people that don't have art experience coming into the Atelier. Because emotionally, it's really hard for those people in the beginning. But, you know, if you don't have much experience, then you don't have all that baggage with you, you know, when you're trying to learn how to do it differently. But, you know, sometimes in order to see something new, we have to let go.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in general, to wrap up here today, as we're forming those perspectives and we meet some of those challenges in seeing things, what are some tips or tricks, tools from the Atelier training we can learn about shifting perspectives?

Mandy Theis: Oh, oh, there's so many good ones I want to share with you. I would say the number one is to go from big ideas to small and just try to come up with what the essence of the thing is, right? You know, I had this microphone in front of me, you know, for this podcast interview, like, what's the essence of this? If I had to just describe it in like, one way, I might say, there's like a bulbous stick. Right? Like, what's the essence of the thing? You know, even if you just ask yourself, what's the essence of something? It's something that will, you know, help you think about things and shift your perspective on it. The opposite of that is to break things down into smaller and smaller pieces. So if I'm looking at this microphone, okay, what's the biggest idea? What are some of the small ideas? Well, maybe the smallest idea is this tiny little screw here. So think big and small, and then try to think of big and small at the same time. Okay, so the big idea is this bulbous stick. That's what we're calling our microphone. And the smallest idea might be the screw. How does the screw relate to the hole, right? Well, in this case, it's towards the bottom. It's not centered. It's to the right. You know, like, what's the relationship of the smallest thing to the hole? Right? And, you know, that's something that we can do with any problem in life, any anything that we're faced with. What's the gist of the problem? And how does this little thing that's bothering me relate to the whole, right? Like, you know, sometimes my partner and I like fight about the garbage who's taking out the garbage, right? Like, that's the little problem, right? The big problem is that we feel like there's an imbalance in the chores in the relationship. That's the big idea, and is exemplified by this little problem of who took out the trash today, right? So you can take that perspective to almost anything.

Jeffrey Besecker: Comparing the two, I would say that they're both related to just seeing the basic pattern.

Mandy Theis: Yes, absolutely. Practicing big ideas, practicing how little things fit in the little hole, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: I can relate for my own experience of going back and when you get those frustrated moments and your mentor sensing that, your art instructor, whoever your guide is, and saying, you know, I'm having trouble seeing this and being told, well, you're looking at that microphone, you're looking at the portrait of that person from one perspective. You know, you don't necessarily turn a person on their head. So what did we do to solve that? We turned our canvas upside down and changed the perspective. Or with mirrors or with that microphone, literally turning the object on a different angle. And it wasn't even the same perspective, but it allowed you to see more nuance about the context.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. It's incredible. You know, it's interesting how just seeing it from a different perspective almost makes us feel like we're seeing something completely different, even though it's the same person or object or whatever. When I paint portraits, it is, I always, I've learned now, before I paint a portrait, that I need to talk to my subject and be like, okay, most people have gone through their whole life looking at themselves face forward with their heads face on to the mirror. And that's what we think that we look like. Very rarely do people see themselves with their head turned in a three quarter view, which is the standard portrait pose, right? And no matter what, Like, some portraits are better than others. I don't want to, like, discount that, right? Like, the quality is not always, like, 100% every, you know, some people are easier than others to paint and draw for whatever reason. But you have to warn people that you don't know what you look like from three quarters view, right? You have to bring in the friends and family for an assessment of accuracy, because that person cannot actually tell you what they look like. They don't, or what they think is true about what they look like is not truthful, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: and it's only the friends and family that can be like… Not truthful, maybe not truthful, just a blind spot. Something we don't necessarily see.

Mandy Theis: Yeah, because we don't see ourselves from that angle. All of our visual information and all of our preconceived ideas about who we are and what we look like often come from only looking at ourselves straightforward. So, I encourage everybody, start when you look in the mirror in the morning, do a three-quarters look, side glance, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: Creating and constructing a different perspective of self.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely, absolutely. So like you learn more about yourself, and you take yourself literally from a different perspective, like just tilt that head and see what you think about what you look like, you know, use a mirror to flip yourself upside down. So if you get like a small little compact mirror, right, and you hold it, you can flip yourself vertically or horizontally, if you put it on your nose, or if you put put it, you know, down and look up. So you can just see yourself in a new light. And there'll be new things that you find that you just absolutely love about yourself. And you'll find interesting things that you didn't know about yourself.

Jeffrey Besecker: I want to thank you, Mandy, today for bringing me back into that light, to remembering that some of those basic formations and basic values are the simplest lessons in life.

Mandy Theis: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute delight.

Jeffrey Besecker: Namaste. The light in me acknowledges the light in you. What can I do to help your program out?

Mandy Theis: You know, just getting the word out that A, atelier training exists, right? A lot of people don't realize, you know, they've had an experience where they like to draw as a kid and then they think that they didn't have it and so they quit, but it is atelier training. Like if you like drawing and painting or if you did as a kid, you would probably like atelier training. So A, Atelier training exists. B, you can get it and it's more accessible than it ever was. Type in Atelier into your search engines. Maybe consider joining us in the School of Atelier Arts online Atelier class. It's called Yay Painting Bootcamp and anything in between. If you're not sure Atelier training is right for you, I have a free quiz at schoolofatelierarts.com on the homepage. You can take a little quiz and just find out, you know, are my goals in line with Atelier training? It'll let you know. And I encourage anybody to join the newsletter too, if you're curious about Atelier training and what's going on in the Atelier world. We have a very popular art newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers. So I hope to see you in our community and possibly in our online class.

Jeffrey Besecker: This has been fun. It truly has been such a growth experience for me today. Thank you.

Mandy Theis: My pleasure. Thank you.

Jeffrey Besecker: Each person sees the world in a different way. Therefore, there is no single unifying objective truth, and we're all limited by our perspective. Truth is something greater. It's above deduction or induction, above coincidence, and beyond what appears before us. In order to see things differently, sometimes you need to see different things, pause, breathe, and surrender to all the wonder that is life. We hope this episode has provided a pathway that allows you to consider things in a new light. If you found value and meaning in today's show, please share it with a friend or loved one. As always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.