It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
Daydreaming with pencil and paper is a respectable form of meditation.
I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
At that [childhood] time, of course, if you were involved in art, it was going to be drawing and painting, because that's the only thing that was taught in the schools.
Of all the creative acts performed by the artist, the most directly legible is drawing. . . it is the act that is most directly and spontaneously governed by his nervous and muscular system.
Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth of the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature.
Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can't explain why if you ask me.
When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly 'til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.
For me, drawing is the greatest joy. Animation is never as good as when I'm sitting at that desk drawing. Even when it's up on the screen, it's never as wonderful as those moments when it's drawn, to me.
Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.
They (his Street scene paintings and drawings) originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.
For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion.
I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.
It's probably hard for anyone looking at my landscapes today to realize that I was once regarded as a rebel, a dangerous influence; that I've been told I was on the verge of insanity, that my painting was nothing but meaningless daubs. Lawren Harris, the man most responsible for drawing the Group of Seven together, was accused of something perilously close to treason - his paintings, said his severest critics, were discouraging immigration.
What can make your work interesting is as much who you are, as how you draw.
It's as if I were collaborating with myself, revealing my relationship to the material. My hand would make the drawing. Then my mouth would transmit it.
I don't look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.
I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.
Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.