Crucially, the drawings in that NY Times piece were done from memory, not observation. It's a different problem. "draw what you see, not what you know" is the s

Crucially, the drawings in that NY Times piece were done from memory, not observation. It's a different problem. "draw what you see, not what you know" is the standard instruction given to beginning artists, and the idea that this is the way to draw us well-established, for example in the philosopher Thomas Reid: 'I was recently much struck by a passage from the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, who speaks of the general habit of the human mind to move extremely rapidly, from the reception of stimuli in the eye, to mental interpretations of those stimuli in terms of known objects in the world. "The mind has acquired a confirmed and inveterate habit of inattention to [the luminous stimuli]; for they no sooner appear than quick as lightning the thing signified succeeds, and engrosses all our regard..." The only profession in life in which it is necessary, by training the eye and mind, to break this process apart - to separate seeing from recognising - Reid says, is painting. "The painter hath occasion for an abstraction, with regard to visible objects... and this is indeed the most difficult part of his art. For it is evident, that if he could fix in his imagination the visible appearance of objects, without confounding it with the things signified by that appearance, it would be as easy for him to paint from the life, and to give every figure its proper shading and relief, and its perspective proportions, as it is to paint from a copy." ' (Philip Steadman) Or Paul Valery: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Practically a cliche.