Drawing from life is about as close as you can get to communion with your subject. Drawing a tree is losing yourself in everything that defines a tree, defines life when it wears bark and bears branches. It matters very little what you actually end up with in your sketchbook, it's what you end up with IN your head that counts.
John Howe
The technique of drawing must be devoted to what really matters: the communication. The main goal is to transmit a text and what the illustrator add as personnal feelings, histories of himself and pieces of life. The reader who already experienced emotions close to that of the illustrator will share these feelings. I have sometimes been rewarded by readers who very precicely saw the things that I had tried to put in my work. Drawing must seek for interest, not for admiration. Because admiration wears quickly.
John Howe
I rather feel that painting is a form of drawing and the painting that I like has a form of drawing to it. I don’t see how it could be disassociated from the nature of drawing.. ..I find in many cases a drawing has been the subject of the painting – that would be a preliminary stage to that particular painting.. ..the painting can develop something that is not at all related to the drawing and have no particular mood about it at all; it’s just a cool kind of reality that has a series of involvements within it; and the pure excitement of those things happening within this form is enough for that particular panting..
Franz Kline
After falling for a very long time, as I surmise after the fact (I was falling so fast that I must have lost track), all I can remember is that I found myself under a tree. I was entangled in three or four rather large branches I had broken in my fall. An apple had squashed against my face and made it all wet with its juice.
Fortunately, as you will soon learn, this place was the Garden of Eden, and the tree I had fallen into was none other than the Tree of Life. You would be quite right to think I would have been killed a thousand times over but for this miraculous good fortune.Cyrano de Bergerac
White as the blossoms which the almond tree,
Above its bald and leafless branches bears.Margaret Junkin Preston
Many of my Hamptstead friends may remember this 'young lady' [an ash tree] at the entrance to the village. Her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing [Study of Trees, pencil on paper, circa 1821] when she was in full health and beauty; on passing some times afterwards, I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters: 'All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.' The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spike nails had been driven far into her side. In another year one half became paralysed, and not long after the other shared the same fate, and this beautiful creature was cut down to a stump, just high enough to hold the board.
John Constable
Howe, John
Howe, Julia Ward
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