Drawing Quotes

“To spend time observing, without drawing, thinking, without drawing, or feeling, without drawing, is the misfortune of nonartists.”

“Some days drawing is a real struggle. Hopefully, using the exercises in this book, it will become easier and more and more relaxing. Until that happens you may have to just accept the difficulty and battle through it - that too is a useful process. Build up your determination to succeed!”

“What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?”

“Daniel's desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world.”

“Cal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal and sets them down on a drafting table.'Let's draw.'I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of 64 Crayola crayons, unabashedly showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don't do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words, but when I see Cal's pad and charcoal, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that it's not the same. I use my words, my artist's charcoal to describe what I'm thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb or brush the paper with the back of his hands. He listens and nods and doesn't interrupt. And when I'm done speaking he looks at the drawing, and his eyes get really big. Slowly, he turns his pad around for me to see. My heart stops and then starts. 'Yes,' I say. It's perfect. Alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn't have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There's a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come. I am alive.”

“Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.”

“Time will do his own drawing upon us but we will do our own drawing upon time as well!”

“I noticed that the [drawing] teacher didn't tell people much... Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques - so many mathematical methods - that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy." because *some* artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.”

“Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer.”

“It is ten per cent how you draw, and ninety per cent what you draw.”