Reflection after teaching a drawing lesson

I have great respect for the ability (which I perceive as innate – but I’m no psychologist) to give meaning to drawings/doodles that we create. But at what point does that capacity to create symbolic meaning break, if we dissect an observed object into shapes, lines and colours that are just graphic conventions, building blocks in the way letters are? Is there a link between the array of meanings attributed to a graphic symbol and the difficulty to overcome constancy (the tendency to persistently draw how we think shapes are, rather than the shapes we actually see)?

Do we disembowel reality and recreate an illusion of it (the drawing) so that we feel we have control over it?

Observational drawing is easy, if we just organise the space in front of us into shapes that we are familiar with…