Real, serious drawing classes last three hours. I didn’t know this until I was chosen to study free at a prestigious, private college, during my senior year of high school. I couldn’t afford a degree there, but I got to experience it for a few months. One day after class, I walked out with an older woman. She confessed her frustration, saying our teacher discouraged us and his methods confused, rather than clarified. I agreed, but I wanted her to keep coming, because I liked her company. Accordingly, I suggested we lean toward the teacher’s thinking, for a minute. “Let’s be Roger and examine this environment as we would a drawing in his class,” I said. I pointed to the objects around us. “See the straight lines of the sidewalk,” I said. “They contrast sharply with squiggly curves in the oak tree branches. The branches reach up to the sky, but the whole tree arcs down toward the grass, reaching for us.” That’s when it happened.

At first I was just imitating our pompous teacher’s “art talk,” but as I listened to it coming out of my own mouth, everything changed. Suddenly I wasn’t just aping him. Each branch and leaf and blade of grass revealed itself, like a planet in space. I saw the visual gravity between the sidewalk and the grass and the trees, pulling them into a single, greater system. My horizons expanded in every direction. Each object sprang to life. The trees weren’t still poles, rooted in the ground, but surging armies, invading the sky. I remembered something I’d read, that vision takes place in the brain, not the eye. My brain changed and the world around me transformed. From that day forward, everything I saw—even dull, ordinary objects—fascinated me, in every moment. This may be hard to believe; it’s hard for me to believe.