The elements of drawing - J. Ruskin

One nice remark in this book is at the beginning - I did not mark the page so I cannot find it now that I am writing these notes -, it’s about the way color is and the way it is perceived.

I read somewhere that a common complaint of people who are born blind and become then able to see in their adult life - thanks to advances in medicine and surgery - is that they do not get why things become smaller when they are further away. It is a surprisingly good remark, since there isn’t really a reason, it’s just the way distance is encoded by vision. Take the same tree, put it at different distances and its (perceived) height will vary. The remark the author makes regarding colors is similar - an adult without previous experience would probably be surprised by, say, a blade of grass changing colour based on whether light shines more or less strongly on it. The important point is that we learn how all these codings of visual information even before we speak, so that we take it for granted. If I now see a tree and want to draw it, the spontaneous thing I do is drawing the already decoded version - the problem with distance becomes apparent only if I try to draw things that are at different distances, and was solved by discovering (?) the laws of perspective -, the problem with color becomes immediately evident: I see the tree being of a thousand different colors, but I know that the trunk is brown(ish) and the leaves green(ish), so I just put down the colors like that. When I look at the drawing, anyway, the drawing itself gets decoded, and the decoded version of the drawing of the tree does not correspond to the decoded version of the tree; the coded version of the drawing of the tree would arguably corresponds to the decoded version of the tree. In order to make the decoded version of the drawing of the tree (which is what we actually perceive) equal to the decoded version of the tree - i.e. if we want to have a realistic drawing - we need to take out the coding - the built-in interpretation - from the perception of the tree, see it “as it is”, and draw it like that. Then when we look at the drawing we code this decoded copy and we end up perceiving the same thing.

(I am not going to reread this paragraph)

This is to say that one should try to first look at things the way they are, and draw them like that, and that’s already the biggest hurdle. To see the world as if one were seeing it for the first time. In this sense, drawing becomes a very deep sensorial experience.

I think it is very important to understand this and this is also my biggest takeaway from this book. But there probably is no other takeaway really. It is important because it is important to be conscious about things happening automatically in one’s head.

I liked this quote:

L’essenziale non è già che ogni linea sia esattamente quella che ci proponiamo o auguriamo, ma che la linea che ci proponevamo o auguravamo di disegnare sia giusta. Se ogni volta vediamo nel modo giusto e ci proponiamo la cosa giusta, faremo progressi anche se la mano ha qualche incertezza. Ma se ci proponiamo un fine sbagliato, o non ci proponiamo nulla, non conta quanto sia ferma la mano.