For Christmas I was given Bell, Balchin & Tobin (eds for the Royal Drawing School), Ways of Drawing – Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, (2019). Thames and Hudson, London. This is just a fantastic book, so many ideas, takes and styles, and loads of great advice. This little extract was perfect inspiration for life drawing – it’s from an essay by Ishbel Myerscough called “Focusing on the Individual”:
“I try to encourage the alchemy of concentration. Drawing is like magic. If we allow ourselves to detach from the world around us and form a perfect bubble between ourselves and the object, to shake off feelings of expectation or embarrassment or indeed our own hope for brilliance; if we stay calm, treat the viewed in an almost abstract fashion, focus on the essential; if, at first deliberately and then unconsciously, almost meditatively, we remove the fact that we are looking at a nose or an eye, or even a head or a person; if we watch the way that the line of the inner eyelid lifts at the corner, the improbability of the shape of the shadow under the nose – if we concentrate that hard, not making judgments while we are doing so but forging ahead until the trance is broken, when there will be an opportunity to stand back and assess – if all that is truly achieved, then magic is made. Whether or not the observation is right, in proportion or even has a likeness, an intensity has been achieved, a point of fascination. And that is what a drawing really needs.”
Brilliant advice.
Sue J's blog 