“From Alan, I learned to take a more instinctive and intuitive approach to pencil work. I used to let my mind get far too far ahead of my pencil, which can be productive, but removes the serendipitous switch of direction when the pencil and hand discover an idea the mind’s eye had missed.”
On Alan Lee
In the Artist's Studio interview (2010)
Context: From Alan, I learned to take a more instinctive and intuitive approach to pencil work. I used to let my mind get far too far ahead of my pencil, which can be productive, but removes the serendipitous switch of direction when the pencil and hand discover an idea the mind’s eye had missed. Drawing at the right speed is a sort of graphic contrapposto providing what I’d be tempted to call an “intuitional resilience” unobtainable with more energetic methods. I very much enjoyed working with him, a situation of symbiosis between enthusiasm and despair, the former because his work is just so good, the latter because his work is just so good. He is hard to keep up with, but then I believe he says the same of me. He is a dear friend and a wonderful artist.
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John Howe (illustrator) 8
Canadian illustrator 1957Related quotes
Letter #158 to Theo (24 September 1880) http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let158/letter.html <!-- This letter has slightly different translations everywhere, but this seems to be the more often quoted translation -->
Variant translation http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/8/136.htm: "I felt my energy revive and I said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall set to work again with my pencil, which I had cast aside in my deep dejection, and I shall draw again, and from that moment I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me"
1880s, 1880
Context: I felt my energy revive, and said to myself, In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me.
“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”
Source: Book of Longing
“When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or - bang! - nothing more happens.”
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 61/62 - in a letter to his friend Etienne Devismes, Late Summer of 1881
“When I erase a word with a pencil, where does it go?”
“I have always been a pencil.”
Quoted in: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Riva Castleman, Wolfgang Wittrock (1985) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: images of the 1890's . p. 44
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