Day 0041

I've started listening to the audiobook of Moby-Dick, which I am enjoying immensely. Reminding me of Heart of darkness and vast unknowable nature. A good yarn, and poetical.

I'm working on a drawing by Raphael that sold a couple of years of ago for nearly £30 million. It's his Head of a young apostle. I feel a goodly amount of dread and trepidation in working from it. Such surety, sculptural simplicity and grace is so clumsily mangled by my novice hands. But it also feels good to be confronted by my own shortcomings, it gives me something to strive for. Leonardo said as much:

A painter who has no doubts about his own ability will attain very little. When his work exceeds his judgement, the artist learns nothing. But when his judgement is superior to his work, he will never cease to improve unless his love of money interferes or retards his progress” Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting

I love the way this drawing emerges from lines shaded in one direction with such delicate, deliberate attention, self-consciously proclaiming that, yes, this is a drawing, a work of art and design, a product of contemplation and choice and decision and skill. It reveals to you how the magic trick works, but rather than spoil the show it heightens your appreciation of the mastery needed to pull it off. This is in contrast to the photo-realistic graphite and charcoal drawings that people slavishly copy from photos these days (and I've done it myself plenty of times), which seem to lack this level of self-awareness. They smudge and blend and highlight with erasers in an attempt to perfectly reproduce what the camera has already captured. They try to hide from what they are (a drawing) and try to be something else (a photo), whilst Raphael actively shows off the artifice of his art, inviting you to admire the deliberation with which his drawing is constructed and to understand and enjoy his control and judgement and ability.