348 Quotes About Drawing

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.

It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as somethingrelated to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannotseparate technique from expression. There is only expression.

Not at all. You look as though magic has taken hold of you. It must be magic because I don't know how you can draw like that. I can barely manage a stick figure.

All that you need in the way of technique for drawing is bound up in thetechnique of seeing - that is, of understanding, which after all is mainlydependent on feeling. If you attempt to see in the way prescribed by anymechanical system of drawing, old or new, you will lose the understanding ofthe fundamental impulse. Your drawing becomes a meaningless diagramand the time so spent is wasted.

When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.

When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.