Rounder Than The O, parts 1948 - 1951

 

1948. I must admit that when the artist who was restoring the mural at the library told me that an artist had to draw a circle with his entire body I was at a loss to understand exactly what he meant. He was standing high up on the scaffold where he had been working at the mural, and he could see from my expression that I did not exactly understand what he was talking about.

1949. "The reason this is not clear to you is because you are trying to think of drawing as it is done on a little sheet of paper, sitting at a writing desk in school when you were in the eighth grade, which is probably one of the last times you tried to draw anything with a pencil on paper." The mural painter said.

1950. " But Giotto was a mural painter, just as I am a mural restorer, and the observation that an artist must draw using the entire body refers to the drawing of life sized figures, and not to the drawing of airplanes, or the faces of horses on 8 x 10 inch blue lined pad paper." He said all of this pointing with the end of his paint brush to the life sized figure the face of which he was restoring as a part of his work on the library murals.

1951. To draw the line that runs down the body from the hip to the foot, and have it look correct when drawing life sized, one must draw that line holding one's pen in a hand that is still, in an arm that is fixed, and with a motion controlled by just those parts of the body one is attempting to draw. For to draw with just the hand or the fingers produced what we artists always call, "chicken scratching;" marks  which after they are put down must be scratched out again.