the cassandra pages

One Brushstroke at a Time

 

Saturday street market in Buenavista, CDMX. Oil on linen canvas, 18” x 18”.

I don’t know what you’ve been doing to keep your wits about you, while madness rampages over the globe, but I’ve been painting.

Working on this painting of a Mexico city neighborhood for a few hours every day, over the past two weeks, has not only been absorbing and challenging, but has also plunged me back into the joy of oil painting. I love watercolor, but it comes with frustration and tension. Oil painting, for me, is a sensuous pleasure even when it’s hard. Unlike watercolor, it’s forgiving — you can always wipe things out, repaint, or make corrections, as I did many times in this painting. Here’s the process it went through.

 

This was the original drawing done on location, from a balcony on the top level of the Biblioteca Vasconceles in Mexico City’s Buenavista neighborhood. A garden runs along the side of the library building, which is on higher ground overlooking the city to the east. I took a number of photographs in the same direction as this drawing but taking in more of the city beyond. Those formed the basis for the painting, while the drawing was a touchstone for what attracted me in the first place. It came down to the unusual vista of the trees, especially the contrast between that tall cedar and the deciduous trees on either side; the white tents of the street market peeking through them; and the city buildings beyond, mostly white and grey and shades of pink, with that strong diagonal street running kitty-corner across the scene.

 

Here’s the initial monochrome drawing in thin oil paint on the canvas, indicating the basic values and structure.

 

Working on top of that monochrome drawing, the first color strokes set the basic chromatic palette for the whole picture. I’m using a very limited set of pigments: Ultramarine Blue, Brilliant Green, Viridian, Yellow Ochre, Naples Yellow, Hansa Yellow, Quinacridone Red, Burnt Sienna, Indian Red, and Titanium White. The support is heavyweight raw linen that I stretched myself and double-primed with gesso — a lot of work, but you end up with a wonderfully receptive surface.

 

My goal was to capture the sun-washed, slightly hazy atmosphere of Mexico City’s urban landscape on that day, maintaining a palette of greyed greens and pinks, with touches of yellow and aqua. Almost all of the greens contain some ultramarine blue. All the shadows are based on a combination of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. The sky is ultramarine blue and titanium white, greyed with a slight bit of quinacridone red. Using limited pigments in this way, and mixing colors very carefully rather than using them directly from the tubes, helps maintain color harmony throughout the picture.

 

In the stage above, the cityscape is filled in, the foreground is more defined, and I’m starting to work on the trees.

 

With the trees in this state, the painting felt close to finished. However, I decided to simplify and focus the foreground, taking out the bushes at lower left and lower right, defining the scrubby grasses and rocks and adding some to the left side. I also emphasized the diagonal which runs perpendicular to the receding street in the center of the scene.

 

This was much better. Eventually I deleted the right-hand bush, added a reverse-curve walkway in the shadowed right-hand area, and improved the dappled shade. (It was interesting to note, just now as I write this post, that the foreground diagonal and reverse curve are in my original sketch on the canvas, but had gotten obliterated as I worked.) I’ll leave it in the state below for a few weeks and then decide if I want to change anything else.

 

A few details:

 

 

Making something from scratch — whether it’s a chocolate cake, a poem or a plant you grow from seed — stands in opposition to those whose modus operandi is destruction and chaos, and heals our wounded spirits. This is where we have to start: with ourselves. The efforts to create, and to appreciate created things, bolster our recognition that destruction and its desired effect— paralysis — don’t have to prevail. Even in the worst situations, no one can take away our ability to look for the beauty and complexity of our world, and make something from it, even if it’s just words or a melody or the idea of a drawing that we hold in our head during a time of suffering or fear. I hope a lot of you are participating in demonstrations today. And I hope tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll write some words or play some music, read a good book, walk in a park or natural area or garden, or make a good meal. Let me know how it’s going with you. Sending love.

Mexico City Sketchbook - Part III

On the street and inside spaces

 

 

In this final post of sketchbook pages, I’ll share some of the drawings that didn’t fit into the previous two posts, and then share a few thoughts about where I am at the moment with all that’s going on.

 

In a Coyoacan market.

 

Almond croissant at a favorite cafe.

 

Interior of the second apartment where we stayed.

 

Another cafe breakfast.

 

Tall grasses in the garden of the Vasconceles library in Buenavista.

 

Dappled light and fallen bougainvillea blossoms.

___

Two weeks after returning home, I’m still working on this sketchbook, but thinking about doing some oil paintings of views from Mexican rooftops and balconies. This week I cleaned my studio and freed up my easel to make that possible, so we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, in addition to daily life tasks and keeping in touch with family and friends (I spend more time on this than many people, I think), I’m reading, practicing my flute every day, and also the piano — this is sanity-preservation. I’ve also decided to make a serious effort to learn more Spanish. Language practice is one of the best ways I’ve found to keep my mind sharp, exercise my memory, and feel like I’m accomplishing something every day, even if it’s in very small increments. Duolingo isn’t perhaps the best way to learn a language, but after 1458 unbroken days of lessons, I’ve certainly made progress in Modern Greek, a difficult language to study, even though I still feel like a beginner. A month ago I switched to Spanish. It’s much easier, and knowing French and some Latin definitely helps. We’re hoping to resume the yearly trips we used to take to Mexico City, and I really want to have a better grasp of the language.

Does this mean I’m neglecting the news? Not at all. But these daily routines are helping me find a balance that works for me, and understand what helps and what doesn’t, both on a personal level and on a societal one. I’ll write more about that soon.

How are YOU doing? I’m always glad to hear from you, and I think reaching out and talking together is one of the most important things we can do for each other right now.

A Mexico City Sketchbook - Part II

The Quiet Lives of Objects

 

 

Sculpture by Gabriel Orozco at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City.

Because I was dissatisfied with the first page of my sketchbook (oh, that first blank page! No wonder it stares at us!) I was reluctant to do another landscape right away. On our first full day in the city, we went to the Museo Jumex, a relatively new contemporary art museum in Polanco. We had visited it seven years ago, not long after it had opened, and loved both the building itself and the three floors of related shows. This time, after a good lunch in the small ground-floor restaurant, we spent most of the afternoon looking at a retrospective exhibition of Gabriel Orozco (no relation to the muralist, though his father worked with David Siqueiros). His work is inventive, often humorous, wide-ranging in both subject and media, and original.

 

One of Orozco’s carved river rocks in the foreground, with distressed soccer balls beyond the glass wall.

In one gallery, hundreds of distressed and altered soccer balls filled a corner and were scattered along a corridor, while inside the glass walls where they rested, a giant skeleton of an invented whale-like animal hung from the ceiling, while carved river rocks — echoing the soccer balls nearby — provided grounding.

Orozco’s creations make the viewer question the notion of time and creation — what creature’s skeleton is this, hanging here like a dinosaur in a museum? Who made it? How did these pieces of rounded stone that look so familiar become carved with natural forms? What are they doing here?

 

River rock carved by Gabriel Orozco. Watercolor, 5 1/4 x 8”.

I was very taken with these altered rocks, and that evening, I did a painting of one of them. It was the first detailed, dry brush watercolor I’ve done in a long while, and it led me to make several others over the course of the two weeks. I also did one pencil drawing, of a bottle brush tree flower.

 

These pictures feel appropriate, not just because flowers and fruit are common subjects for me, or because I’m drawn to natural forms. Orozco’s soccer balls and rocks felt like still lives. They made me think about a more expansive definition of “still life”, especially in Mexico where color and form are omnipresent.

But they are also quiet. “Still.” Now, these drawings and paintings punctuate my sketchbook, providing moments of reflection for the viewer between busier scenes.

 

The hyper-realism is a way to remember that goes beyond photography…

 

…and the study that’s necessary to do one of these paintings means that I’ll never look at an citrus peel or a bougainvillea flower the same way again.

 

Or a cut pineapple, for that matter.

 

Looking back, remembering myself making these small paintings, I realize that they were important meditations for me at the time. Our days were busy, and full of intense sensory impressions. Sitting down to make one of these paintings was a way of centering myself and concentrating with focus and intention. And, for me, they were a witness to beauty that, belying their subjects’ fragility, stood as a bulwark against the daily onslaught of news from the north.

A Mexico City Sketchbook - Part I

 

Street scene with bougainvillea, Bahía de Todos Los Santos, Mexico City. Direct watercolor, 5 1/4” x 8”.

TECHNICAL DECISIONS AND SOLVING PROBLEMS

Our trip to Mexico City was planned for 15 days, essentially, with the first and last taken up with travel. I’d hoped to do about one sketch a day - so 12 or 13 - but managed to complete 18 pages. I’m hoping to be able to do some more from photographic references or objects over the weeks to come, while my eyes still retain the light and color memory of being there.

It’s actually hard to keep a daily sketchbook with the way we travel. We were on the go so much when out of our lodging that I never brought my watercolors with me, since I knew I wouldn’t have the time it takes to do a color sketch. Although I prefer direct watercolor sketches (like the one at the top of this post) to anything else, I decided to take a couple of fountain pens and the sketchbook with me in my purse when we went out, and to do watercolor work — either direct watercolor paintings or watercolor added to ink drawings — when we were back in the apartment.

In both of the places where we stayed, I ended up setting up a little space to work, and paying attention to the sketchbook for some time each morning and evening. The second apartment, in Coyoacan, actually had a drafting table and excellent light fixture, so I was very happy about that!

 

Working on the kitchen counter in our first apartment.

I hadn’t expected to do detailed watercolors of objects, but it just kind of happened because of working at home. I gathered some blooms and pods when walking around, and also used fruits that we had purchased to eat. This became a thread that weaves throughout the sketchbook, as well as a meditation for me as I worked on them. I’ll devote a post to those pieces later on.

 

The very first sketch, done in ink on location in the Chapultepec woods, displeased me when I added the color:

 

Chapultepec woods.

I tend to prefer landscape scenes drawn in ink or pencil alone, or done in watercolor only, because they look to me more like art and less like illustrations. It depends what you’re trying to do. Nevertheless, as it turned out, I did use ink-plus-watercolor, or ink-plus-light washes, for quite a few of the pages. I made sure to take photos of the ink drawings alone before adding color, to keep a record of both.

 

In this pair of before-and-after drawings, the washes in olive green and light blue-grey, below, are really helpful in bringing out the depth and definition of the scene depicted.

 

Saturday street market and neighborhood seen from the Vasconceles library, Buenavista.

A problem arose halfway through our trip - my favorite fountain pen ran out of ink. I had brought more ink (in a repurposed eye drop bottle). The pen uses a cartridge that I refill with a dental syringe with a thick tip, but I hadn’t wanted to fly with that, thinking it might be flagged. First I went to an art supply store, but the best they could do were some pipettes. When I tried using them to refill the cartridge, the holes were too big and the ink flowed way too fast — I narrowly avoided making a huge mess. A few days later I went to a pharmacy and asked (with the help of Google Translate) for a syringe the size I needed. It was no problem to purchase, so I was able to get my pen back in order.

 

An ink drawing in the cactus garden of the Viveros arboretum in Coyoacan, using my fude-nib pen.

In the meantime, though, I had been using my Sailor fude-nib pen, which creates a variable line depending on the angle and pressure. It was filled with the same olive green-grey ink (Noodler’s “El Lawrence”) as my preferred fountain pen, and I decided to use it rather than my back-up fountain pen, a Moonman filled with blue ink, because at that point the sketchbook had a coherence, I felt, because of the same color ink being used throughout.

 

View southwest from a Coyoacan rooftop

However, one of my favorite drawings (above) was done during that interim period with that blue ink pen, which has a very fine nib. I had gone up on the rooftop one morning to hang up some laundry to dry, and was struck by the landscape I saw. The fude-nib pen was simply too thick to do justice to the drawing I imagined, so I used the blue ink pen with its fine nib. Its problem, in addition to the ink color, is that it tends to leak during flights. I didn’t realize the seal had leaked until I was nearly done with this sketch, and suddenly a large blob fell on the trees in the upper left! Nothing to do but accept it as part of the accidental nature of life and art! This sketch, which didn’t take too long to create, showed me that I’ve progressed in my ability to simplify and draw complex urban perspectives.

As you can maybe infer from what’s written and illustrated here, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want a travel sketchbook to be, and how to give it coherence as a document or record of a place or a period in time. I didn’t impose a single vision on this one, but tried various techniques and styles (and you’ll see more subsequently). I was happy that my work feels solid enough now that I can experiment and think in this way, rather than just being gratified to get something down on paper and not ruin too many pages. I wanted to allow spontaneity to show me things too. If I’d been rigid and refused to use my blue pen that day, for instance, that sketch wouldn’t have happened, and I’d be sorry. A sketchbook, after all, isn’t meant to be a book of finished, perfected drawings, but faster impressions of distinct moments in time that contain, one hopes, traces of the artist’s hand as well as their choices of what to stop and draw, and their feelings as they do so.

 

 

 

Anticipation

 

 

 

Mexico City interior, sketched in 2018.

On Monday evening, we’re hoping to board an Air Canada jet and fly to Mexico City. Watching the snow fall all day, and listening to the strong winds howling outside my window, I’m glad our flight isn’t scheduled for tonight, because I’m not sure it would take off. There’s more snow coming over the weekend. Fingers crossed.

 

Same room, different angle. On the couch is a sweater-in-progress that I was knitting — and now wear all the time. I packed that same little ink bottle and sea sponge today.

For six or seven years, we went to Mexico City for a couple of weeks nearly every winter. Our last trip was in 2018. We had planned to go there in early March 2020: ill-fated timing. Here’s the beginning of a blog entry back then:

Monday, March 8, 2020

We were supposed to be waking up this morning in the warmth and color of Mexico City, but instead, I'm looking out the window at wan sunshine on melting ice, and the grey snow that lines the streets of Montreal. Like many other people, we reluctantly cancelled our travel plans at the last minute -- in fact, half an hour before we were going to call the taxi to the airport -- and have been trying to re-set our heads as well as our clocks, and adjust to an unpredictable and uncharted short-term future.

In the next paragraphs I write about what we’ll be doing “for the next weeks.” My choices of words brought home the optimism many of us felt — that the period of caution would be over in a matter of weeks or a few months. I wonder what we all would have done if we’d been told the pandemic would last for years, disrupt all of our lives, and cause the deaths of so many millions of people. Good thing we didn’t know. And I wonder what I’ll feel, looking back at this post five years from now, written at the beginning of another unpredictable and scary period of time.

 

A watercolor of a red bottle-brush tree flower, Mexico City, 2017.

Tonight, after a day where the view from my window resembled Siberia, I’m trying to concentrate on sunshine and the colors of painted stucco, bougainvillea, and jacaranda trees. I spent time this afternoon getting my art supplies in order, cleaning my small watercolor palette box, making a swatch strip to make sure those were the colors I wanted to take, cleaning and refilling fountain pens, choosing a small group of mechanical pencils and travel brushes, and packing it as efficiently as possible.

I’m anxious to see how my sketching has improved since I was last in Mexico City. There’s so much detail and complexity in every view — this used to be a big problem for me but I hope I’ve gotten better. The biggest obstacle I anticipate is not having enough hours for it, since we always go with the intention to take plenty of time for photography and drawing, but end up doing far more moving around each day than we planned. For the first part of the trip, we’ll be staying in Mexico City itself, and then we’ll move to the quieter southern area of Coyoacan.

I look forward to sending you some pictures of beauty from our North American neighbor in the south. I also hope that it will be a restorative and strengthening period of time, and that I return with renewed hope in humanity and more ideas for what I can do to help.

 

Colonia Roma, looking west.

All the Beloveds

Yesterday was All Saints' Day, and, in Mexico, the Day of the Dead. A few days before, we made our annual ofrenda in our home, and each evening, we've lit the candles, eaten our dinner, and sat with our dear departed ones. I'm surprised how comforting and welcome this ritual has become, connecting us both to our friends and family, and to Mexico, which we miss very much too. The tradition is to put little offerings of favorite foods or drinks or pastimes in front of the photos of each person to encourage them to return to be with the living for the evening, so the whole thing ends up becoming poignant, quirky, and personal. I didn't have marigolds, which are a traditional part of everyone's altar in Mexico: the color and pungent scent are supposed to help guide the dead on their journey. But we did have orange zinnias, sunflowers, dahlias, cacti and herbs,copal incense, Mexican pottery and textiles, and small reminders of each person.

And because my sketchbooks are becoming a visual diary of my life that feel more and more significant to me, I decided to do a drawing of the central section of the ofrenda too. What a complicated and busy sketch it turned out to be! I liked the black-and-white drawing, but the color made it all make more sense, and the process of doing it was one more way of connecting to the people and the tableau we had made.

I know I've been scarce around here. We're working on cleaning, reorganizing and downsizing both our home and our studio. We're keeping the studio for one more year, but it's been emptied of more than half of its contents. And I admit to struggling to keep my mood up, as the days have grown shorter and colder, the pandemic continues, and I've had very little time for writing, music, or art, let alone meditation: the things that center and ground me. Now that we've reached November and life has moved mostly indoors, I actually feel better in the coziness and warmth of home, and seeing that there's some light at the end of both personal and global tunnels. We're gradually beginning to be more social, to take public transportation and do a bit more out in the city, and starting to think about traveling somewhere else again. I'm hoping to be able to write more here, too, soon.

 

 

Hermit Diary 41. Searching the Landscape

I can't leave Montreal, at least until the end of the month, because a new lockdown was imposed on October 1, so there is no question of driving out into the country to see the fall foliage, visiting a natural area, or going apple picking, let alone visiting Vermont or the Adirondacks. I'm fortunate to be able to see trees and fall color from my window, and to have begonias, geraniums, nasturtiums and sweet peas blooming on our terrace, but I still have a persistent sense of being trapped -- as so many of us do.

It helps to turn to images of places I love. A couple of weeks ago I re-explored a garden we visited at the Ex Convento del Carmen (former Carmelite convent) in the Mexico City suburb of San Angel, and made a few drawings and watercolor sketches. The first drawing is below, and that's a watercolor of the same basic view at the top of this page.

From a different position, 90 degrees to the left, this is a massive stone seat with the convent walls behind:

One afternoon at the studio, I was looking through last year's Instagram posts and came across a  watercolor of Delphi that I'd forgotten, and it struck me as much better than I remembered. I searched and searched through my sketchbooks until I finally found it in a drawer in the flat file -- I hadn't remembered that it was painted on a scrap of extra-heavyweight Arches watercolor paper -- my favorite surface to use -- and that's perhaps why it came out well. I'm always surprised how certain materials seem to inspire a better effort, while using others that may be just as good but somehow don't feel quite right to me personally always seems to end up with a lesser result. Originally I had cropped it much tighter; I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, I cut a matte, put a frame on it and brought it home so I can remember that extraordinary day, everyday.

Yesterday I started on another subject, a hillside in Greece with blue agaves and cacti, and if it ever stops raining, I'll walk back up to the studio and finish that one, or work on the same idea in another medium.

As you can probably see, these watercolors are getting looser, less realistic, and more expressive -- but often I still do a fairly realistic black-and-white drawing first to work out the shapes and compositional relationships -- plus, I just like to draw. There are few activities that feel more absorbing, and even though I've done it all my life, it always feels like magic to start with a blank sheet of paper and end up with a representation of something observed and a record of that particular time and place and state of mind.

Drawing, more than any other art activity, also connects me to all the artists who've filled sketchbooks and made drawings. I feel my eyes travel from the object to the paper and back again, without much conscious thinking, as my hand somehow -- I don't pretend to understand it -- translates that seeing into lines and forms. Even when the drawing doesn't come out particularly well, it still seems like a little quiet miracle that human beings try to do this, and have always done it: "I sat here, I was still, I looked, I used my hands and eyes and made this." Maybe there's some hope for us after all.

The Best Thing I've Read about "Roma"

"Roma" exposes Mexico's darkest secret,

by Marcela Garcia in the Boston Globe

 

Such an excellent essay by Marcel Garcia. A number of people I've talked to may have liked this movie, but when we've talked about it in more depth, it's like we've seen two different films. That's always possible with a book or film, of course, but in this case, and at this particular time in history, I've found the dissonance quite disturbing.

 

It always bothers me that so many people think they already know all there is to know (or all they want to know) about the complex cultures south of the American border, when they actually know very little. I'm probably hyper-sensitive because I too was quite ignorant before I started going to Mexico and learning about it myself; I wasn't even sure I wanted to go, except that I knew there was a tradition of art that I wanted to see firsthand. Now I wonder how I could have been so limited. Where does this ignorance come from? Is it because we are inundated with media "information" and mass culture through Hollywood films and TV, and equate that with real knowledge? Is it because most people don't travel to Latin America beyond the resort beaches? Is it because so few of us form real friendships with people from different cultures, religions and ethnicities than ourselves, where we are willing to actually listen to and learn from the truth of their lived experience?  Perhaps most people simply don't want to be stretched in this direction because it also requires looking at oneself.

 

I've now been to Mexico City for six extended periods of time, and have relationships with a number of Latin American friends. Yet with every visit and conversation, as with people from every culture different from mine, I realize how little I knew, and still know. Of course I've become uncomfortably aware of my own privilege, and ability to travel and come back to my far easier North American life. But it's a lot more than that. I want to be as open as possible when I see a film or read a book or talk to someone, as well as when I'm traveling, so that I am able to learn. I don't want to live in a North American bubble and take it with me everywhere I go. We all do that to some extent, but dropping it consciously seems to be more than most people want to do.

 

I also know firsthand how uncomfortable this process can be. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, partly because I married outside my culture, but also because of a longstanding desire for knowledge of otherness and for being stretched. I know everyone doesn't share this, or feel that the reward of growing wiser is worth the pain of feeling uncomfortable, hurt, misunderstood, or being in the minority, where we suddenly have to listen and accept different ways, and not be in a position of control or power. I get it. Most of us prefer to stay in our own tribe, however narrowly or broadly we define that. The world is moving in a different direction, though, and we can either accept that, understand our own privilege, and change -- or fight against it, which I see so-called liberals doing just as much as conservatives, when it involves actually confronting one's own stereotypes and sense of entitlement or superiority. It's one thing to oppose building a wall, or separating families, and entirely another to actually learn what is beyond that border, or who those families are, or our own complicity in the systems that have made them want to leave -- perhaps for a life of domestic servitude in America.

 

Roma confronts racism in Mexican culture, but it also asks us to look within. So I was grateful for Garcia's insights and explanations about her own culture, and the lens through which North America has viewed both Mexico and this particular film. I'm grateful she took the time to write this piece.

Drawing a Mexico City Interior

Because we liked the apartment where we were staying so much, I drew the interior more than I had expected to. The furniture, in heavy wood, glass, and leather, was so different from our northern interiors, as were the bright Mexican colors and bold shapes of the plants, vases, lamps and other objects. My eye is always energized by seeing something different, and my spirit too.

And when I'm seeing inspiring art every day, it makes me want to draw. Mexican art often encourages simplicity and the search for form, I find. Even the two-dimensional art feels quite "plastic", and I sense that sculpture, painting, and nature all inform each other, leading to bold, monumental shapes and a minimum of fussiness or elaboration for its own sake. For example, this detail from a fabulous, huge mosaic titled Rio Juchitan (1953-56) by Diego Rivera and assistants in his workshop, now at the Soumaya Museum:

Back at home, here's some fruit in a pedestal bowl:

The food we were buying at the market was inspiring in itself - we always had a bowl of mangoes, bananas, tomatoes and avocados on the counter. And our residency was also changing the space a little too, as we bought flowers and some embroidered textiles and ceramics, and settled into the places where we liked working. J. often worked at the dining table, while I sat on the couch with my knitting, computer, and drawing.

As I filled the pages of my own sketchbook, I was touched by this book in the anthropology museum - written and illustrated by some kindred spirit at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Most of all, I think drawing at the apartment provided a quiet time after the noise, busyness, overcrowded intensity of the metropolis: a way to re-center and come back to myself.

Patience

Rough surf at Block Island. Fountain pen, grey ink, 8.5" x 5.5" on beige toned paper. First stage.

I was curious whether it would be possible to render such a complicated scene in pen and ink, without washes or color. It's difficult! This was the first state of the drawing. Later I added some white and brown colored pencil to increase the tonal range, and take advantage of the toned paper used for the drawing; I think I like it better as a drawing without, but the white makes it easier to "read" the scene. I'm not sure if the Block Island scene will end up as a painting or print or series of drawings, but I'm glad I did this study.

Rough surf at Block Island. Fountain pen, grey ink, colored pencil. 8.5" x 5.5" on beige toned paper. Second stage.

The real challenge -- and absorbing pleasure -- is to start with a blank page and, an hour or two later, see a depiction of the scene. That's the magic of drawing; it's what attracted me as a child and why I've kept drawing all my life. You're creating something from nothing, only through the work of your eye and your hand. Drawing can be so many things, done in so many styles. Sometimes I like to make a careful detailed study in order to help myself see what's actually there, where the structure and form lie, and so I can later make decisions about what to emphasize or leave out. But there is also genuine pleasure in the act of drawing itself - watching the tool move across the paper, seeing the marks emerge under your hand, feeling the tooth of the paper or its smoothness, watching shapes and forms develop, the unconscious process of making decisions as you work. It makes me angry when I think how many teachers and critics have disparaged students' abilities and their innate love of drawing, often discouraging them forever, and both forced students into particular styles or taken talented students apart for drawing in their own way. (My friend, the illustrator Priya Sebastien has recently written about this in her own life.) Drawing should be about joy and discovery, concentration and pleasure. It should be personal. It's so elemental, too, so fundamentally human - as the earliest cave paintings show us. How can anyone be so arrogant as to say, "this is the right way to draw, this is wrong?" And what harm they do!

Jose Maria Velasco, View of Chiquihuite Hill, watercolor on paper.

I've been inspired recently by looking closely at the work of Jose Maria Velasco (1840-1912) the legendary 19th. C. Mexican landscape painter. His drawings, watercolors and paintings are all marked by careful observation, immaculate draftsmanship, and patience -- while never losing sight of the whole, and as I stood in the gallery, moving closer and further away, what struck me the most was the extraordinary patience it must have taken for him to get it right: not just the details in the drawing, but the tonality, the exact precision of the colors he mixed. Each time I go to Mexico City I visit the National Gallery in order to see these paintings again: they remain fresh, alive, vibrant, and beautiful - even though they are very much in the academic tradition.

Jose Maria Velasco, Mexican landscape and detail, oil.

So many of us have lost that ability to be patient, either with our eyes or with our tools, perhaps because of the premium that has been placed on spontaneity and originality in modern art, and on speed and output in modern life in general. What we forget is that even the great innovators, like Picasso, were also great draftsmen, and they didn't acquire the skill to innovate, play, invent, and adapt without learning to see, and to draw extremely well. Patient, careful observation is the foundation of the most memorable art, from the great masters to Lucien Freud. You have to see first, and drawing is a way to see fully. To do that, you have to settle down for a while, a good long while, and put in the time. Then you can let it go into abstraction, allow your emotional response to dominate -- whatever is right for you at that time, with that subject. But if you don't know what an eye, or a fish, or a particular rock looks like to begin with, how are you ever going to capture its essence, let alone distort it at will?

Jose Maria Velasco, Rocks, oil study.

I say this because patience has always been a problem for me, in art, in practicing the piano, in slowing down enough to read carefully. I absolutely refused to play scales or etudes on the piano or flute, and my technique has always been weak as a result. In other areas, calligraphy for instance, I was willing to write pages and pages of examples. Some of the problem is just my impatient nature, my tendency to get bored, and an innate ability to "get by" on less-than-full attention. Some of it is the preference for expressive brushwork or an energetic line -- or sight-reading a new piece of music. Some of it is restlessness: the internal desire to move on to the next thing when the first one isn't finished. At the same time, I'm capable of being very attentive and patient when I remember to be, or when I insist on it for myself. I'm always glad when I give myself an exercise in slowing down, because I always learn something valuable and notice things I'd otherwise miss. Drawing is the back-to-basics practice that is the foundation for everything else. My friends who are professional orchestra players still practice every day; I need to draw every day too.

Vincent Van Gogh, A Fishing Boat at Sea, pen and ink, 1888.

The sketchbooks of great draftsmen are always inspiring - I think of Turner, Whistler, Van Gogh, Sargent, Winslow Homer. Because they were working more quickly than in the studio, their drawings often contain an energy, embodied in the line or the brushstroke, that is as palpable as the wind. Yet, they had the skill, honed by years of practice, to use every minute well, through patient concentration, and I don't think they saw their studies as "lesser" works. Sargent, who made his living from society portraits, once said that his true legacy would be his watercolors, and that is proving to be the case. Van Gogh's drawings of landscapes, trees, and gardens are every bit as moving to me as his paintings. And when I stand in a museum in front of one of these drawings or watercolor studies, I also feel myself, and my connection with all the other artists who have also faced a scene and the next blank page.

J.M. Turner, Storm at Sea, watercolor without pencil underdrawing.