The Learning to See series by Peter Jenny, recently released from Princeton Architectural Press, is a series of art books filled with elegantly simple exercises. These books are pocket-sized, perfectly fitting into your bag.
The exercises, simple and elegant – such as finding patterns in the palm of your hand or drawing what you hear – are designed precisely to make you acutely aware of the world around you, to see patterns, shapes, light and dark. These books are deceptive in their simplicity, because the mere act of drawing what you hear or deconstructing an object into its elemental shapes gives you the space to focus on perception and imagination – to hone your artist’s eye. The author puts it best:
“This little book aims to open your eyes to the incidental, to the suggestions of images in everyday objects, to the beauty in the ordinary.”
