Robert Fawcett: No Shortcuts, No Gimmicks

In the foreward to his book, "On the Art of Drawing", Robert Fawcett writes that he hopes he can "wean some away from the long, long search for shortcuts to a period of study".

"I have purposely avoided gimmicks," he writes, "which tend to lead the learning process away from the substance to be learned, and instead seem to be merely a method of painlessly attracting and holding attention."


Further on he writes, "Although content to start in the schoolroom, I have tried to move from there to the studio, to the living room and then to all outdoors. In this way I hope to avoid the tendency towards specialization which so limits the potential of many artists."


"I have never understood why some draw certain subjects superbly yet become frozen before others."

"An English artist who had just sat for his portrait by a colleague was heard later to say "So and So has just painted a portrait of me..."


"... so I suppose I'll have to do a landscape of him." - which sounds very funny at first but less so the more one thinks of it."


"If the present reader finds a drawing of a figure beside one of a landscape, the object will be not to find how different they are but how similar."


* My Robert Fawcett Flickr set.