There is a reason why classical musicians practice. If I want the skills of drawing then I too must practice. Copying from the masters is a good practice to practice. One gets intimately to know their works.One gets to know how they solved problems that face all painters, especially those who want to represent the physical world. There is a difference between drawing from life and drawing from the imagination. Drawing from the imagination gives the ability to create worlds of acrobats and leaping tigers, space ships and snow-mobiles, lovers and exploding stars. Practice allows us to make those worlds real and not distract the viewer with clumsy drawing. Practice frees the imagination. When practicing concentrate on the details of the craft, the practicalities of rendering.
One does not think the characters in comic strips like Doonsbury or Charlie Brown to be mishapen even though they are in no way classical looking figures. Their anatomy is good. The three dimensional space they inhabit is good. It is believable. The joints are in the right place and work correctly. In fact these comic strips have it seems to me been one of the last places where the skills of drawing the human figure from one’s own imagination have been preserved.
Though drawing from the imagination is different to drawing from life the representational techniques are similar. I do not say that they are the same because when drawing from the imagination there is something more deliberate about what one chooses to represent and the aspects of the objects depicted that are represented. In both cases one can make use of the representational simplifications of caricature, that which used to be known as getting “the essence” of the object, the person.
It is not necessary to use the great distortions of humorous caricature to use caricature as a means of communicating those “essences”, capturing the character of one’s model. Subtilty will also serve. Look at a Picasso portrait, a Dali, a Matisse. Look at Chagal! They all employ that simplification, that hightening of emphasis on some aspect of the sitter’s character. I would say that this ability to mimic, to parody, to get into the gestural aspects of the way another person looks and behaves is one of the great skills. It is one of the skills that breathes life into our pictures and drawings.
Cold analysis is one thing. it can be beautiful. But that ability to enact another’s way of being, to, as one wields the brush or pencil, become an actor, to mime the gestures, stick out the nose, curl the lip, raise the eyebrow, all these make our pictures alive. And some are better at it than others. And some work harder at developing that skill than others. And some know from the outset of it being a skill to be developed where it takes others a lifetime to find out.
