Drawing your inner vision
        
        Cherish the images that pop into your head, they are messages from your visual imagination, your deepest well of creativity.  It has promiscuously dropped a seed and given you the hard work of birthing your next painting while it wanders on to savor other delights.  Ignoring these images is denying your own creativity.
        Your imagination inhabits a magical world, but your hand must struggle with the material reality of craft: paper surfaces that are too soft or too slick, pencil leads that cut too deeply or smudge too easily, a brush that once could skim the slick of a baby's cheek is now withered and you can only use it to cement the impasto of brick walls.  Your hand negotiates all these craft contingencies that occur at the moment of creation (I reached for the red paint - I don't know why - but the paper was too smooth for that type of paint and I didn't expect to get that smear, but isn't it wonderful?)  Artistic self discovery, the engine of your life as a painter, occurs when you create a virtuous circle between your imagination and the physical world. There is no more holy act.
        To draw is to leap into the unknown because drawing transforms the imagined into the real.  Your drawing is unknown until you do it, but facing the unknown is exactly what attracts a master such as Lucian Freud:

Any sortie into the unknown is dangerous so it should be no surprise that fear is the natural state of the painter.  This morning I sat at the kitchen table and sketched a winter scene based on a newspaper photograph.  I struggled over the amount of detail to include.  Fear!  Too much would make the painting tight and mechanical and too little would make the painting undisciplined.  I set up a small easel in the carport and prepared my latex paints.  I laid in the sky wash first and immediately stepped back.  Fear!  In what direction did my reckless, impulsive painting of the sky push me?  I had sliced into the unknown to create the sky and the inexorable logic of the image and the color drove me to paint the snowy foreground next.  Fear!  At this point I had made two rash thrusts into the unknown, and now I had to step back and examine the sky and foreground together.  Where was my reckless, impulsive painting taking me?  Stroke, reaction, fear! stroke reaction, fear! 
        Those burdened with self doubt, the seekers after the comforting applause of society, will lament: I can't draw, I can see images in my head, but I can't draw!  Abandoning yourself to your drawing may reveal something embarrassing to yourself and to anyone looking over your shoulder.  The despairing cry: I can't draw is really the defensive complaint: Why can't I draw safely, predictably and in a socially acceptable, or even better, admired  fashion? 
        * Fearful painters want to draw safely.  If you're reading this book, it's already too late for safety.  You must hurry and draw whatever your imagination shows you in an attempt to regain your inspiration.  Ask yourself why Pablo Picasso mused: "I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child." (7)
        * Fearful painters who want to draw predictably deny their creativity because drawing is not predictable.  Forget all your previous drawings and draw your next impulse without remembering who you are.
        * Fearful painters who worry about social acceptance are wasting their time.  If you genuflect to public opinion, then you close the door to self knowledge.  Why struggle to be a painter if you are unwilling to learn about yourself as a painter?   If your ambition is social acceptance this is the wrong book for you.  Close it right here and put it down.  Goodbye!

                                                                        ###

        Self acceptance is the emotional threshold of original drawing.  Once you step through the doorway of self acceptance, you enter the domain of craft materials and skill mechanics where you may be frustrated at not getting it right or surprised at having no idea that it would turn out this way.  The answer to the question why can't I draw safely, predictably and in a socially acceptable or admired fashion is that original drawing is, by definition "original," which means not safe, not predictable, or perhaps not even socially acceptable. 
        Why is it so difficult to pick up a pencil and immediately draw in a manner that compels your audience to hail you as Michelangelo come again?  There are several reasons why drawing is both mechanically and conceptually difficult.
        Drawings are done by unique people 
        The architecture of your physical being influences your drawing: muscles, nerves, tendons of the hand and so on, as well as the physics of vision in your eye.  Human physicality is unique: fingerprints differ, DNA profiles differ, your hand and my hand differ, both of our hands differ from the hand of Botticelli and neither of our hands are 35 mm cameras.  Making images by hand forces you to recognize your own physicality. 
        As I age, my hand shakes with involuntary tremors. This frightens me because I fear that I will lose my ability to draw, but then I realize that I will simply draw in a new and different manner.  The anticipation of future artistic novelty is delightful.  Imagine how lucky I am to have a progressively shaky hand that will create marvels of drawing that will surprise me.  This is not a self-serving rationalization, because it reminds me of the art school exercise of blind drawing.  I did blind drawing in art classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and my drawings looked like a disorganized tangles of lines.  Blind drawing is done by looking just at the model and not at your sketch board; this disconnects the draftsman's critical vision and demonstrates the link between drawing and physicality.  Without the critical feedback of vision, your drawing is unlikely to resemble anything in this world.  I taped my drawing to my kitchen door and every time I walked past I saw interesting relationships that suggested new paintings.  My landlady, who didn't engage drawings with her imagination, wasn't impressed.  She wanted drawings to look like photographs.
        You can buy a book that illustrates the secrets of drawing like a Disney cartoonist (the first circle is Mickey's head and the second circle is Mickey's nose), but this is substituting somebody else's creativity for your creativity.  Using a digital image editor to edit somebody else's images (click here to download this image!) is substituting their creativity for your creativity.  The fundamental reason you can't draw like Botticelli is that you are not Botticelli.  All you can do is copy Botticelli, an activity that makes you a Botticelli copiest, not Botticelli.  You are not Botticelli, I'm not Botticelli, only Botticelli is Botticelli.  Pause for a moment and consider that each one of us is condemned to be an original.  You have to do your own drawing.  And it's only by doing your drawings that you will discover what your drawings are about.
        In your hand is a craft tool 
        The more sophisticated your knowledge of craft materials, the easier it will be to approximate your vision.  For example, if your vision requires a thin, wet black line, you will probably be frustrated using a bulky chunk of charcoal.  With time and experience your craft knowledge becomes sophisticated enough to permit you to predict results.  I stand before a striking landscape and convene a strategy session with myself about craft methods: The sky will be a single blue wash that I can do with a wide soft brush.  The dark trees in silhouette, however, would look best done in a heavy impasto and this suggests using my palette knife.  A palette knife will mean thick paint applied with vertical strokes, which in turn suggests a solid horizontal placed below the trees of contrasting color and so on.
        Deepening your knowledge of craft materials, however, is usually interpreted to mean buying lots of art gear.  The art marketplace promotes the idea that successful drawing is contingent on using some product they vend.  I once attended a workshop illustrating how to paint with a 49 cent brush; the workshop leader came supplied with boxes of brushes to sell.  Bob Ross, a popular television painting evangelist, has a website advertising "Alizarin Crimson (firm 5 oz) - for landscapes" and "Alizarin Crimson (soft 1.25oz) - for florals" (6).  While it is true that some oil paint is manufactured to be dryer, and therefore firmer than others, a little medium will make it as soft as you like.  I'm willing to bet that Professor Shepy didn't know that Alizarin Crimson is available in two versions:  "landscape" and "floral."  Question: Would I use both tubes of Alizarin Crimson if my subject were a landscape of flowers?  Second question: How about a flower that looked like a landscape?  Final question: Is this the art marketplace vacuuming up the dollars of the naive?  Yes!
        If good drawing depended on accumulating a big pile of art gear, then the richest among us would be the finest draftsmen.  When you get a chance, examine the drawings of the very rich and see if they are substantially better than your own.  Craft bric-a-brac is just that, and reflects the merchant's need for profit.  It's to the advantage of the art marketplace to confuse the beginner by confounding the pencil with what the pencil draws.  Short circuit the whole art supply marketplace by picking up a stick and drawing in the dirt.  Beach sand is good too. 
        The hand draws what the mind sees 
        Everyone has a visual imagination, an assertion confirmed every time someone describes his vivid dream to you.  Cultivating your visual imagination is your daily duty as artist and like any muscle, becomes more powerful with use.  The opposite is also true: if you ignore your visual imagination, it will shrivel. 
        Drawing your vision requires that your hand serve your mind.  Your hand, however, has its own agenda as your physical agent, which is simply to push the pencil along.  Suppose you're drawing an imaginary face and you grip your pencil and stand with your nose two inches from the canvas.  You draw one eye of the imaginary face and architectual logic, not imaginary vision commands you to place the other eye over there some place on the other side of the nose.  You stand back and critically examine your drawing and it doesn't look right.  You return to the two-inch position and fiddle with it, but the redrawing still doesn't look right.  A circle of frustration begins. 
        Here's a test to determine if your hand has escaped your visual imagination: Erase hours of painful pencil scratching and then stand back and your drawing looks better!  This effect occurs because the human mind fills in the missing parts.  Now put your hands in your pockets and don't move!  Contemplate the gestalt effect and weave it into the total vision of the imaginary face.  When you have created a revised vision of the desired image then step forward and pick up your pencil again. 
        I maintain a playful relationship with my visual imagination.  Working on a painting tends to crowd out any new visual ideas, and as I finish a painting I'm visually exhausted.  This might provoke angst - painter's block! - but I dismiss all this negativity by making a bet with myself and marking my calendar two days forward.  The bet is that in two days my visual imagination will have given me at least one, perhaps several visual sparks for my next painting.  Now I can relax and merely wait for the images to flash before me. 
        But you can also provoke your visual imagination directly.  I put a large sheet of drafting paper up on my drawing board and then sit down in my artist's chair about twelve feet away.  My drawing board is an old canvas stretcher that I've used for years and is scarred with pencil, charcoal and paint.  It's also warped and curved, all of which makes it a rich playground for the imagination.  I pour myself a glass of wine, put a Schubert sonata on my CD player and let my visual imagination conjure with the surface marks on my drawing board.  I enter a state of  imaginative viewing that incorporates the marks and shadows of the drawing surface into the image of my mind's eye.  Suddenly a face, a nose, the turn of a lip appears.  At that point, I put my wine down, pick up a pencil and walk to the blank page and place a line.  The process begins anew.
        Perhaps there are some painters who receive whole images, complete in all details, from their imaginations, but my imagination gives me only details such as the tilt of a head, a certain smile, the way a hand is poised.  These details can be very distinct and fill my imaginative eye.  Once my imagination fixes such a detail, however, it works like a 3D editor that can enlarge or reduce images, tilt them left and right, up and down.  Make your visual imagination stronger by doing this exercise:  visualize something, say, a cow standing in a field next to a milk maid who is holding a pail, and then imaginatively walk around them and examine them from all 360 degrees.  The more you provoke such an imaginative image, the more concrete it becomes, and as its specificity increases, the easier it will be to draw.  After a week of playing with the image of the milk maid and the cow, I drew the cow within minutes.  I was merely copying the strong image that my visual imagination had already prepared.    
        Occasionally my visual engine spins out of control and an image obsesses me.   For example, several years ago I was doing floral landscapes when blue birds began to insert themselves into my paintings.  Then more animals appeared.  Suddenly I was beset by the image of three blind mice holding white canes and striding forward towards the picture frame.  I could see them marching forward with their large foreshortened feet.  This image returned to me day after day as I rode my bike to and from the university and I finally had to release this demon image by drawing the three mice.  I went through the front door still dressed in my bike gear, went downstairs and got out a pad of drawing paper and knelt down on the floor and drew it - exorcised it - from my visual imagination. 
        Once I had the mice sketched, then the other elements such as the kitten in the tram, the pig smoking a cigar, the lioness nurse maid were easy natural extensions.  I painted The three blind mice go for a walk and my visual imagination was at last satisfied.  Asking what this image means, or explaining it in words, is futile.  My painting of the three blind mice has no antecedent and no subsequent, it was merely an image that popped into my head.  At best it can be understood as a snapshot of the location in my visual universe at some time several years ago. 

   
        Drawing is complex 
        Drawing exists in the visual domain where human beings have highly evolved interpretative abilities. We are very clever at reading a face in poor lighting conditions and distinguishing one person from another.  You are introduced to identical twins, for example, and at first glance find it impossible to distinguish one from another.  But within several days you never mistake them.  Computer scientists encounter these innate visual abilities when they build face-recognition systems.  Computer algorithms can assess dark and light values in an image bit map and thereby reduce a photograph of a face to a line drawing.  This produces a likeness, just as your pencil outline produces a likeness, but empirical tests show that recognition rates jump when the outlines are enriched with hints of facial mass (1).   Years ago our drawing instructor at the Art Institute of Vancouver told us to draw into the figure, and using a line to hint at enclosed mass was what he meant.  Examine a Disney drawing very carefully and you'll see that it is much more than a merely outline drawing.  The mass of a Disney figure is suggested not only by the thickness or thinness of the lines, but by subtle curves at the ends of the lines.  Drawing is complex because you must develop not only simple boundary lines, but boundary lines that hint at the mass they enclose.
        When you draw you simultaneously deal with issues of perspective, foreshortening and modeling.  I cautiously inch forward through this visual mine field by using approximation; that is, placing many lines, evaluating them from across the room and then successively erasing the many and leaving the few "true" lines.  Beginners often burden themselves with the unreasonable expectation that every line they place must be perfect, and when their lines are not perfect, they become frustrated.   Lucian Freud abandons lots of paintings:

        Draw with a pencil in one hand and an eraser in the other.  Since my visual imagination gives me just a few vivid details such as the angle of a lip or curve of a nose, I draw what I see, and then retire to sit, examine and contemplate.  In moments, my imagination makes another leap, working with gestalt inner vision to suggest a link from the existing pencil line to the next detail.  Inch by inch you work to a complete, original drawing.
        Of course, the art marketplace will be glad to sell you a mechanical device to finesse these difficulties.  David Hockney suggests that some of the old masters used optic devices (3) and Norman Rockwell, famous for his life-like results, used a optical device called a balopticon to cast an image to trace.  Rockwell was a little defensive about his reliance on an optical device (5)


If you covet the near photographic qualities that Rockwell achieved, you too can buy your own opaque image projector to cast an image for you to trace.  Someone left this comment on a website that sells opaque projectors:

I've started drawing portraits and caricatures from photographs, and though I don't have too many problems with features and shading, for some reason, getting those first head dimensions right is difficult. But if I use ... projector and get that head and hairline shape, right, the rest of the picture is easy. As I become a better artist, I may not need it any longer---but I sure am glad I have it, now!

If you are willing to spend the time, money painting pornography - You're a 50 year old man and I can't make you change - that is for you to do.  But I can as your father suggest you find out if your paintings have any artistic and/or financial value.  You are not in a financial position with two children to educate to waste money and time for your own gratification; art that you can't display and need to hide away in some dark corner...In summary, why oh why do you spend so much time and money on an activity that has no value except for your gratification; and certainly is not cost effective.