I once sat through a very long lecture which was introduced by a young woman's proud proclamation that she couldn't draw.
She was a practicing artist with some important public commissions under her belt, and this lack of talent didn't seem to bother her. It really, really bothers me, but this is neither the time nor place to comment on the matter, so I'll continue with my topic: drawing - why does it matter?
As I've said elsewhere, you can photograph a scene and print it on a canvas. Where does drawing come into it? Even if you make studies for a painting, you can use a camera instead of spending hours staring at something and making marks on paper. Why does drawing matter?
Because drawing teaches us to see.
I'm going to write that line again, in bold, because it's that important.
Because drawing teaches us to see.
Still not sure I'm getting through. Let's make it bigger.
Because drawing teaches us to see.
Better.
What separates an artist from the rest of us is not smearing paint around. It's the act of looking, really looking, at what they choose to paint. Great artists change the way we see the world, because they show us how things are. They take the trouble to see.
A camera will look at the subject in front of it for a fraction of a second. A superb machine, recording an image in the blink of an eye. An artist will look for hours, perhaps, feeling their way into the substance of their subject, noting more than any camera could, leaving out what doesn't help, altering and editing, using every means at their disposal to capture something of the life in the subject in front of them. Reality is processed, not through a dead mechanism, but through the sensibility of a live artist. We see through their eyes, and what we see comes alive for us. They teach us how to see.
And that's why drawing matters.
