On scrolls of Japanese paper each 19 feet in length, Barton documented the underbelly of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood before the hippies showed up… A friend and fellow artist recalled that Barton began a portrait with the sitter’s fingernail… … Continue reading
… The mark-making basic to drawing is the starting point of so much else: the development of written language, numbers, musical scores. Drawings are the great teachers; they educate the eye and make us more conscious of seeing. They present … Continue reading
This gallery contains 2 photos.
I’ve little practice handwriting Arabic. Even less am I schooled in the monastic rigors of calligraphy. I do confess to an effort to “draw” Arabic. My models are the characters as they appear in printed texts. I savor their swoops … Continue reading
Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK. Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.” Anna Russell writes that the urgency of … Continue reading
A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading
Jenny Saville speaks in all the quotes here. Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo… I started to do direct studies … Continue reading
Below are excerpts from Françoise Mouly’s interview with artist Christoph Niemann. I became obsessed with drawing trees when I was a teen-ager. I took the same approach as I did when learning to draw the human body—trying to understand the … Continue reading
Two descriptions in this article about Cézanne are helpful for me. One concerns Camille Pissarro’s treatment of edges: Pissarro was the subtlest of the leading Impressionists, devising ways of giving distinctive presence to each part of a painting, by, for … Continue reading
Along comes more NYTimes torqued and taut art talk of the sort that sweeps me up. … Several gorgeous self-portraits made toward the end of his life. Their precision is astonishing… It’s clear that what most interested Ellis about ink … Continue reading
EthicalDative 
The Secret of Drawing Is to Make a Mark
Complexity is what we create; our familiar cussedness comes out and easily defeats us. The harder things in life are the simple ones. Whenever I manage to disregard the rulemonger holding class in my skull-room, the method-nazi intoning, You are … Continue reading →