The Purist

When I began to draw in earnest in my early adolescence, a lot of what I drew was copied from the pages of "Learn To Draw" books and scenic calendars. I have tattered old sketchbooks with carbon pencil drawings of lions and polar bears, along with images of houses, barns, and sometimes people that I drew from life. And of course battling robots with laser beams shooting out of their mechanical fingers. But before long, I found myself drawing only from my imagination or from the three dimensional world around me. That position was reinforced by art school exercises - blind contour drawing and gesture drawing, particularly working in figure drawing class from a live model. During those formative years, I developed an almost moralistic attitude that anything translated from another two dimensional image lacked integrity and was not art. It was just skillful copying. Never mind that many great artists have done famous works after the work of earlier masters.

This attitude has persisted in me for over forty years. While I do use AutoCAD wireframe plots and magazine photographs when I do architectural interior renderings, I otherwise draw just what's in front of me, and I almost never do anything that requires more than one sitting. There's something for me about the direct experience of the moment, and the spontaneity of my response on paper, that I have always found compelling. And honestly, there's a macho element in there - sort of a "real men only draw from life and never use erasers" kind of thing. But it does have its drawbacks when taken to the extreme. Maybe I need to get more serious about extending the energy of a single sitting into more involved pieces, instead of allowing myself to be limited by this rigid idea I have that studio work will lose that vitality. It's a big and scary challenge that I think I have to come to grips with.This morning, as usual, from life. 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, 2B graphite and watercolor pencil