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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #drawing
After a time,my hand had become as skilled as my eyes.So if I was drawing a very fine tree , it folt as if my hand was moving without me directly it.As I wathced the pencil race across the page,I would look on it in amazement ,as if the drawing were the proof of another presence , as if someone else had taken up residence in my body.As I marvelled at his work aspiring to beome his equal , another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches , the placement of mountains , the composition as a whole , reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper.My mind was at the tip of my pen , acting before I could think ; at the same time it could survey what I had already done.This second line of perception , this ability to analyse my progress , was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and freedom.To step outside myslef , to know the second pesron who had taken up residence inside me , was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper.like a boy sledding in the snow. pg.135 ↗
When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ↗
