I just finished reading Robert Fawcett’s “On the art of drawing”.
It was alright.
Fawcett himself was an en exceptional draughtsman and a respected illustrator in his time, overcoming the obstacle of his colour-blindness with his incredible eye for pattern, tone and composition.
That said, his writing did not provide the insight into his creative genius that I was hoping for.
Robert Fawcett is a great illustrator, but this is not a great book. His passion for the subject is clear, but I was hoping for more insight than I got, especially considering the length of the book.
One particular quote stood out to me:
“All this is perhaps a more complicated way of saying that drawing comes about by drawing, not by theory, not by shortcuts, and certainly not by eccentric experiment- but simply by drawing. Why students of the subject ever find comfort in reading about what is really a higher form of communication I will never know. That there is little comfort in writing about it, I do know”
Odd then, that he found the need to fill so many pages.