“Drawing is a way of fostering interest in the world. It is a way of making connections with the things that surround us, and with the forces that shape and animate and move them. It’s a way of taking in the world’s strangeness and power and finding comfort in it. Draw the intense stare of a falcon bird and you will live with its power and quickness and total disregard for you. Draw a spider, and it will cease to be something monstrously secretive and venomous. Draw a rock by the riverbank, and you’ll feel the warmth of the sun that shines down on it and you alike. If you can draw the stone rightly, advised Ruskin the English painter, everything within the reach of art is also within yours. Drawing then is a way to know things, and the more one knows about the world around one, the more one feels at home in it. In this sense, it is not the finished drawing that counts. It is the time spent outside of oneself, of which the drawing is merely a record– the ticket stub in your pocket after the concert, if you will. The sight is a more important thing than the drawing declared Ruskin, and what counts most is the intensity of one’s connection.”

by Peter Seinhart