There are a lot of benefits of being a Curriculum I student with a single major. Sure, I’ll leave this school in a few short months with a single degree and have missed out on the bonding Curriculum II experiences, and I’ll also have fewer things to put on my resume. However, I wouldn’t trade that for all the opportunities to study new things and get the most out of Gustavus’s strong liberal arts tradition.

I have my major mostly taken care of, and that allows me to take classes completely out of my comfort zone. I can have a balanced schedule that has both academically challenging courses as well as learn things just for the sake of learning them.

This semester I decided to take drawing in the art department. My father being a sculptor, mother a former art major who draws and paints in her free time and having a sister also growing quite talented in the visual arts, I’ve always felt like my skills in that area were exceedingly lacking. A short story to elucidate this comes from a couple years ago: my mother purchased small wooden bird houses for us to paint—one for each of us. My mother’s ended up looking like a woodsy cabin, my sister’s was a very clean-looking blue bird house and my product looked like a three-year old who threw some Crayola markers at something their six-year old sibling had tried to paint. Inferiority complex? Maybe.

I work for my dad in the summer, and he often says things that confuse me (“Could you find a 3/8th spanner?”) or make me chuckle (“Perfect is good”), but occasionally he says something that makes me wonder. I heard him say a few times that he sees the world differently from anyone who is not an artist. I didn’t really understand what he meant because it’s not like he sees in a different spectrum than non-artists or something.

Strangely, I think I found out what he meant through what I’m learning in this drawing class. For anyone who has tried to render the outside world via pencil and paper, you know how difficult it is to get a drawing to look like reality. Buildings, trees, people—even simple things like chairs don’t come out right on the page. I think I’ve discovered why we tend to do this.

When you think about drawing something, you often imagine the object in your mind; you see it not as the thing in front of you, but as a mental concept. You try to draw what you’re thinking about. What I’ve realized is that my thoughts don’t have spatial dimension: if I think about a coffee mug I just see the mug. What I don’t see is the distance from the handle to the rim, or the distance between the near edge and the back edge or really have a particular point of view when I picture the object in my mind.

You can easily try this next to a building or on a sidewalk. Think about the face of the building.  You know that it’s rectangular and also level with the ground. There are plenty of right-angles involved. Now look at that building. Unless you’re facing it directly, you’ll notice that the sides of the building have no right angles, that the roofline and the windows on each floor actually slope downward as the building gets farther away from you and that what you’re looking at is not exactly what you had in (your) mind.

For people with artistic training, I’m sure this is nothing new. But for me, this realization is constantly tripping me out. I walk down Eckman Mall, and all I see are the lines in the bricks that slant toward the horizon. I sit in a room with tiled walls and see that below the plane of my eyes, the lines slope upward, at my eye height the lines run straight, and above my head the lines run downward! It doesn’t compute with another fact my brain knows: that the room is square! All these tiles are squares with right angles, and yet what I’m seeing defies that.

I’ve learned perspective, one of the basic principles of drawing. It’s also shed some light on how our brains interpret and represent sense perception phenomenally, which I think is relevant to my philosophy major. I can only thank providence that I have the freedom in my schedule to try new things and have a greater appreciation for the “arts” part of a liberal arts education here at Gustavus.