The Elements of Drawing

2 ideas

1. The innocence of the eye

   Skilled seeing means recovering a childlike perception of flat patches of colour without knowing what they signify, the way a blind man suddenly given sight would see them. Knowledge of what an object is (that grass is green, that a shadowed page is white) overrides the actual sensation reaching the eye, so the draughtsman must deliberately suspend recognition to record what is really there.

2. Objects as masses, not outlines

   Nature presents no lines, only areas of differing colour and light meeting one another, so an outline is a convention the mind adds rather than something seen. Drawing a leaf or a stone as a shaped patch of tone, where edges emerge from contrast, records the object more truthfully than tracing a contour around its known shape.

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