“I approach drawing solely for structure.”
David Bomberg "The Bomberg Papers", ed. Patrick Swift, X: A Quarterly Review, Vol 1, No 3, June 1960
Context: Speaking generally Art endevours to reveal what is true and needs to be free. All things said regarding Art are subject to contradiction. An artist whose integrity sustains his strength to make no compromise with expediency is never degraded. His life work will resemble the integrating character of the primaries in the Spectrum. At the beginning, of the middle period, and at the end… I approach drawing solely for structure. I am perhaps the most unpopular artist in England – and only because I am draughtsman first and painter second. Drawing demands a theory of approach, until good drawing becomes habit – it denies all rules. It requires high discipline… Drawing demands freedom, freedom demands liberty to expand in space – this is progress. By the extension of democracy – good draughtsmanship is – Democracy’s visual sign. To draw with integrity replaces bad habits with good, youth preserved from corruption. The hand works at high tension and organises as it simplifies, reducing to barest essentials, stripping all irrelevant matter obstructing the rapidly forming organisation which reveals the design. This is drawing.
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David Bomberg7
painter 1890–1957Related quotes
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker
Quote of Turner's remark, c. 1799 to his colleague Joseph Farington; as cited in the essay 'Draughtsman and Watercolourist', by David Blayney Brown http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/essays-g2010028 on Tate.org <br class="br">Turner claimed then to have broken free of conventional methods <br class="br">1795 - 1820
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Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
On Mind and Thought (1993), p. 34
Posthumous publications
Context: It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight. It is only when the mind is not operating mechanically in the structure of thought that you have an insight. Having had an insight, thought draws a conclusion from that insight. And then thought acts and thought is mechanical. So I have to find out whether having an insight into myself, which means into the world, and not drawing a conclusion from it is possible. If I draw a conclusion, I act on an idea, on an image, on a symbol, which is the structure of thought, and so I am constantly preventing myself from having insight, from understanding things as they are.
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Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.320
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Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director
Section 5: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Society and Economics
Ruskin Today (1964)
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