“Be clear in your mind why learning to draw well is important. Drawing enables you to see in that special, epiphanous way that artists see, no matter what style you use to express your special insight.”

In early childhood, children develop a set of symbols that ‘stand for’ things they see in the world around them… Children are happy with symbolic drawing until about the age of eight or nine… when children develop a passion for realism.

We’ve got a name for sushi in Georgia… bait

Clearly the work of a master teacher who has deep knowledge of his subject and enormous empathy for his students and his readers.

Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new modes of expression; thus it brings into existence something new to the individual and to the culture.

Your goal in drawing should be to encounter the reality of experience… to see ever more clearly, ever more deeply.

As parents, we can do a great deal to further this goal by helping our children develop alternative ways of knowing the world verbally/analytically and visually/spatially.

Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.