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LITERACY

Any warning telling you: “Landslide danger¹!”, is way more proficient than a board filled with words —not many to tell you the truth: one…two! And yet, that simple triangle in yellow with an image in black says it at a glance. However, you had to study so by reading a driving regulations binding or be taught at school.

Both a comic and a poem require a higher literacy level (not talking of university degrees). And here it comes, our first catch. Rarely, schools are interested in having their students to learn drawing. Drawing is a magical stuff that happens to talented people. Meeee. Drawing is an ability that can be learnt by anyone, anytime. The real catch is that it requires, as any ability, a lot of practice.

ARE THEY EVER REALLY TAUGHT?

That, that is a blood pact in between comics and poetry. They’re both the kind of ability that is taught like a smear on the canvas. We’re taught in kindergarten to be free and express ourselves with crayons. Later, no one cares to teach how to actually use lines and shadows to draw lines and shadows instead of worrying about displaying a pipe². Worst, the ability to express oneself freely goes suppressed. “Don’t draw on the book!”… Don’t draw on the bench³!

Poetry, we might be (we are) forced to read poetry, to write some with a bit of rhyme, study perhaps rhetoric and other stuff I don’t even remember but… Does anyone care if we even let go of frustration by using poetry or if we happen to write an ode to the first love? Nope. We’re mocked because of it if we ever show the poem to others⁴. 

A STONE AGE METHOD TO ACQUIRE VISUAL LITERACY

How does one become visually literate? One; the stone-age way. By reading comics, crochet diagrams and… origami. Most people are always, to a certain degree, visually literate. Traffic signs and stuff have any driver knowing blue means “informative”, yellow “caution” and red “dangerous” or “forbidden”.

Two, any ambition to be literate in a conscious scholarly way, needs you to go through design, paint or illustration schooling. And when it happens (literacy), you become literate uttering concept stolen from linguistics since visual literacy happens only among freaks…. I mean, artists⁵. For the rest of mortals. Visual language is not reckoned as a language of its own. And yet, it is one of the weird things we humans do that you won’t see animals doing consciously to indicate speed limits, how to create a loop to have a shell crochet or how to knot a knot.

A person can speak the visual language without being able to specify so in the ridiculum vitae simply because many people ignore its existence. Should I write in LinkedIn I speak three languages? Spanish, English and Visual?

And you? Are you visually literate? Enjoy your images in word processors. Or… in whatever it is the program you use to draw your comics. Pasto kalo.   

1. In Spanish that would be four words: ¡Peligro zona de derrumbes! ↩︎
2. Have you ever seen a Magritte painting titled: This is not a pipe? ↩︎
3. Not an advocate of furniture damage… About books. Textbooks ain’t sacred! They should be used! Even if the student finds out the blank spaces just for drawing, it means they, at least, found the blank spots in there. ↩︎
4. Didn’t happen to me but I have listened to horror tales. Or I’ve been accused or not writing what I wrote… ↩︎
5. Graphic designers, illustrators, architects and industrial designers are not artists but, again, misunderstanding is in order. My own mother does. I am a writer, yet I happen to be visually literate thus I know how to create visual stuff too. Words can’t solve all communication problems. ↩︎