Day 0037

Whilst thumbing through a book of master drawings I saw this study of the three graces by Raphael. I've been working slowly to make a careful copy today. It's a full-time job keeping the chalk sharp enough to try to match his line quality, and I suspect he had a studio hand sharpening his chalks for him every day.

Making a study of another work reminds you that art is the result of a process that takes time. You instantly apprehend the final result, but the artist laboured over it for many hours, constantly making decisions and adaptations that are imperceptible in the finished piece.

I have stopped before finishing so that I know where to start tomorrow. There is a lot of energy taken up in just selecting a work to begin. It's like Hemingway says of writing:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck ... That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.Ernest Hemingway, Monologue to a Maestro: A High Seas Letter

Actually, reading through Hemingway's advice to aspiring writers, I think a lot of it is applicable to aspiring artists too. Below he is talking about the value of knowing what has come before so you can beat it. Know what has been done, know what is good, and compete where you can do something new and good.

Listen. There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasnʼt been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with dead men. Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead they will not exist. The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attainingErnest Hemingway, Monologue to a Maestro: A High Seas Letter

The full article is short and worth reading. There is a PDF.