#right intent

[milesbutterball]

[pintafema]

The urge to ‘rush ahead’ in art

If you draw any amount, you will know what I mean here: the idea that a good piece of art can spring nearly fully-fledged from your pencil/stylus/instrument of choice. It tempts all artists, and generally the supposed finished piece of art suffers as a result.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it arises from an unhelpful view of drawings. Drawings or studies, as distinct from art (a finished artefact).

What I'm thinking here, is that a roughly executed drawing is not bad, and a cleanly executed drawing is not good. Obviously, we would prefer the latter, all things being equal; but the purpose of drawings is not to be impressive at all; it is industrial -- for the artist to understand what they are drawing, and encode it into a form that they can later use readily.

Therefore, a good drawing or study is one that communicates the facts you observed in a definitive way. It does not have to be clean, just informative. Scientific, but informal.

Aside from the urge to rush ahead, why is this relevant? Time spent making one cleaner study could be spent making three less clean studies, and IME doing more studies of the same thing (turning it over and permuting it mentally) is a better way to understand that thing than doing one very finished and precise study.

As Loomis says "Success lies primarily in capturing the big relationships"; details can be acquired from anywhere, but what makes a subject feel like itself is the big relationships, which are understood by testing and re-testing our understanding of the structure of a thing.

Finally, there is also the element of choice: making many studies naturally will vary the presentation of the same elements. This gives you a stronger basis for intelligently considering each aspect of your subject, whether you want to exaggerate, minimize, or remove it.