on line and on paper

This is about a book called "on line and on paper" by kathryn headerson. I totally agreed with her words that artistic rendering skills are not just for frill enrichment, instead they are connected to cognitive skills as basic as mathematics and verbal literacy and equally to all sorts of problem solving- in math and science as well as visual arts. she said "learning to draw improved my capacity to see things precisely, in fine-grained detail, but it also influenced the way I process and manipulate viusal information". Exactly, I believe learning to draw make us more sensitive to things around and can learn things others may not notice. At the same time, drawing has its own language to help people observe like structure, brush stroke, texture, palette, depth or flatness of space, narrative or abstract content. With enough sensitivity, observers can inpretate these language to reveal the contextual information of the artwork, like the historical, biographical and contextual information of the artists. With the same song, whether you know the background story of the song or not can really make it different for you to appreciate it. Here the artworks become index and the process of analyzing its formal characters. The skills may deteriorated without enough practice, but the cognitive skills will remain.

For some reason I don't know yet, I didn't her writing so much, but the above words say out what I am thinking.......

By recognition of visual skills as one of the basic cognitive skills, Kathryn questions why there is no corresponding emphasis in the public school curriculum. As for HCI design, both the users and the designers' visual skills are important. It seems visual knowledge got high status in the past, but today is at low status.