The Practice and Science of Drawing

"Many people are born with a spark, and an aptitude for drawing, but are not able to do develop their potential because they don’t have the tools. Some have said that talent is nothing more than the ‘love of a thing’, and this love gives us the patience to work through all the steps necessary for achievement. Speed’s book is an insightful guide to drawing written by an expert draftsman. He pulls back the curtain on what goes into a drawing and provides an overview. The book is a hundred years old, yet is as true and useful now as when it was first released. An underlying theme through all the books we’re discussing is that art is a skill that can be taught and mastery achieved by cultivating your skills. Even if you are born a genius, your gifts must be developed through practice. Thankfully there are books like The Practice and Science of Drawing to point the way. Today, drawing and painting are intertwined with photography, so many readers may not realise that there are prior forms of representation in drawing and painting that do not conform to photographic models. Speed comes from a pre-photographic tradition of drawing. It was arguably a more intellectual time than the present, and he speaks much about the ideas of emphasis—selection and design—and composition. Speed had this notion which he called ‘dither’, a subtle balance between pure observation and artistic design, in which perfection or mechanical accuracy does not necessarily result in the greatest art. There is much more to an artistically engaging work than accurate representation. Speed’s book gets to the essence of drawing, dealing with the why as well as the how . This is not a step-by-step book, but the moment you are ready to dedicate yourself to art with intention, this book can become an important touchstone. Concern with originality, self-expression, and how to balance it with skill is a debate that started with 18th-century Romanticism and continues to our day. We are seeing this in other fields as well, for example now with music, the prevalence of mixing and sampling, which raises questions of originality. The remix and the mash-up are prime examples of drawing upon historic references for inspiration, cultural references that make new art for our times. Visual art is similar. We are starting to see that reclaiming historic elements does not rob us of originality, but instead opens up greater options. Forced originality as the highest good in the arts, divorced from skill and knowledge, is no longer so interesting to us. True self-expression and authenticity are. “The past is a source of inspiration and fellowship, allowing our solitary lives and artistic body of work to be seen in a larger context, and we are propelled forward in its current. ” There is a good reason to look back, even for people who don’t care about history. Art, like mathematics, was developed over generations. We only have one short life to learn the skills and make a body of work. Who has the time to re-solve problems that have already been figured out eons ago? It’s useful to gain knowledge, even if we ultimately end up not using it so we can assess its value. As we learn about our cultural inheritance, our individual lives become part of a larger story. The past is a source of inspiration and fellowship, allowing our solitary lives and artistic body of work to be seen in a larger context, and we are propelled forward in its current. Without a past, we do not have a future."