Berger on Drawing extracts
Extract from: Drawings and Distance
Extract from: Drawing On Paper
Extract from: Drawn To That Moment
Extract from: Janos Lavin’s Diary
from: Janos Lavin’s Diary.
JUNE 26
It is the most profound activity of all, this one of drawing. And the most demanding. It is when I draw that I regret the weeks, the years perhaps, that I have wasted. If, as in the fairy stories, I could grant a gift to a child who was to become a painter, it would be a long life, so that he might master this activity of drawing. What so few people realize is that the painter, unlike the writer or the architect or the designer, is both creator and executant of his art. He needs two lives. And, above all, to master drawing. Nearly every artist can draw when he has made a discovery. But to draw in order to discover - that is the godlike process, that is to find effect and cause. The power of colour is nothing compared to the power of the line; the line that does not exist in nature but which can expose and demonstrate the tangible more sharply than can sight itself when confronted with the actual object. To draw is to know by hand - to have the proof that Thomas demanded. Out of the artist's mind through the point of a pencil or pen comes proof that the world is solid, material. But the proof is never familiar. Every great drawing - even if it is of a hand or the back of a torso, forms perceived thousands of times before - is like the map of a newly discovered island. Only it is far easier to read a drawing than a map; in front of a drawing it is the five senses that make a surveyor.