Sixteen years ago, I asked a painter friend why his work was so much better than mine, when I was a very accomplished draughtsman. It was a reasonable question. My book The Art of Figure Drawing had been in print for a year, and was about to be translated into four languages. I was teaching figure drawing and human anatomy at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. I drew pretty well. Why couldn't I paint?

I wasn’t just asking about myself but about nearly every other painter in Cincinnati, and there are quite a few of them. I threw out some names, many of whom were people I admired and respected, but there were clearly two groups of painters in Cincinnati: my friend, and everybody else. The difference wasn’t subtle. What was it about my friend that set his work so far apart from that of the rest of us?

My friend, a genuinely humble guy, did not relish answering the question. When I’d asked him out for coffee, he knew and dreaded what I was going to ask, and now I’d asked. He went silent for a while, and then said…

“You don’t perceive shape accurately.”

A long pause, and he let me drink it in.

For those of you who don’t see the hugeness of his statement, let me translate it into simple English:

“You can’t draw.”

I was 48 years old at the time. I’d studied with some of the best painters in the country. I’d studied drawing and human anatomy with the most revered drawing teacher in America. This was a rather bitter pill to swallow.

Another classically trained friend once told me something similar: “Whenever I hear someone say that he can draw well, but he can’t paint, I know that the person can’t draw.”

There is no fundamental difference between painting and drawing; the rules which apply to one apply to the other. The only difference is that whereas slipshod drawing may not be noticed in a pen-and-ink or charcoal sketch, it absolutely screams at you in a painting.

At the coffee shop, my friend offered three suggestions to acquire the drawing skills I lacked: do charcoal drawings of plaster casts; do memory drawing exercises; and paint outdoors a lot. I’m embarrassed to tell you of these three, because although I’ve spent thousands of hours painting outdoors, and have taken two classes in cast drawing, I’ve never consistently followed through on memory drawing. Maybe I will do it now. But if I haven’t done everything that my friend suggested to me, I’ve done a lot of it, and I’ve no longer counted myself a trained draughtsman. I measure everything. I question everything. I rub everything out until I know it’s right. I seek to record the shapes nature presents me with. They can’t be improved upon. I assume nothing.

Which brings me to a marina picture I began a week ago:

Not the most beautiful motif, but sometimes you have to kick yourself into motion and use the best thing you can find. I stood above an embankment leading to the shore of the Ohio river, looking down at the road a truck with a front-mounted trailer uses to drop boats in the water, and retrieve them.

Those two poles are placed too close to the center of the canvas. The figure crouching next to them needed serious help. But there was a far more obvious error here, one which I didn’t notice until I snapped a photo of the motif.

Anybody see a problem here? Not a lofty compositional problem. Not the lack of the guard rails along the gangplank. Not even a value problem, although there certainly were many of these at this early stage. No, this is a plain old drawing problem, and an obvious one.

Any of you see it? Don’t be shy. Send me a note before reading further.

* * * *

Drawing problems tend to be obvious. What’s the biggest mass in the picture? What’s the smallest? What lies above what? What is on the same level as what? It may seem picayune, but it’s in forcing oneself to reckon with such questions that one begins to trudge the path toward competent painting.

C’mon, any takers? Okay…

See the outline of the road leading to the river’s edge? It slants slightly downward, not upward.

And here’s my Day One, with that same line slanting upward, not downward. Please note that although I check stuff like this over and over again before applying color, I completely missed this one until I looked at the photo I’d taken of the scene.

Genius, it’s been said, is the capacity to take infinite pains. What the hell difference does it make anyway, which direction a line points? The lay-in looked just fine. Or anyway, its problems were a matter of a composiion which wasn’t terribly pleasing to the eye. Who cares about the direction of a roadway?

So I gave the picture another day, ignoring the wrongly aimed line. I substituted a better figure. I began to give the dappled water a better treatment. But I didn’t fix the roadway, although four times, I held a brush at arm’s length and aligned it with the outline of the road. Four times I did it, and four times that road sloped downward, not upward. I saw the roadway’s direction, but I simply couldn’t believe my eyes.

One might ask why not, and to me the answer is obvious. In my search for a paintable scene, I’d walked down that roadway several times, and had to trudge back up again each time. It isn’t easy. That road’s downward slope may have been what I saw, but it wasn’t what my tired legs felt, or what I remembered. The roadway slopes upward, and severely so. The effort it took to walk up the roadway blinded me to its actual thrust.

Yesterday I went back, and fixed the offending line. I may give the picture another day. The light’s right. I’m not sure if I want to invest more time in it; the composition doesn’t thrill me. I did make a couple of changes to try and rescue it. One was to change the placement and shape of the tree limb on the river bank. Originally it lay in such a way as to parallel the direction of the dock. I moved it and gave it a comma shape, in an attempt to avoid an ugly repetition. The figure of the man was edited a bit, but it needs more adjustment. If there’s any potential at all for this to become a good picture, stuff like that must be reckoned with.

But getting back to our discussion, one might well ask why it is so important to take the shapes nature doles out. There are several reasons.

One is that nature’s shapes are invariably more beautiful than anything you or I could cook up out of our imaginations. A few years back I was looking at a large canvas in Charleston, SC by a long-dead painter who is hugely venerated by the city’s art lovers. A mediocre draughtsman at best, the painter showed his essential laziness in the way he painted a figure’s shadow. You can almost read the guy’s mind. “It’s only a shadow, I’ll just scribble something and no one will know the difference.” But his refusing to take the time to study out and record what nature offered him doomed the picture from any serious consideration. You can move stuff around if you need to, but nature’s shapes don’t need our editing. That would be like, to paraphrase the playwright and critic Sean O’Casey in his annihilation of Noel Coward’s Design For Living, shining a feeble little light to help us see the sun.

But another reason is that each shape in a scene functions as a checkpoint for every other shape. If you ignore one shape, it will that much harder to correctly perceive the others. If you habitually ignore shapes, good drawing becomes impossible.

Such considerations are the part and parcel of classical training, something of which I only began to avail myself rather late in life, and after having presented myself as an authority on drawing. They are the sine qua non of naturalistic painting. These are the considerations which compel a student to spend months in front of plaster casts before ever attempting the figure, or oil painting.

Do such considerations guarantee that the classically trained painter is going to produce significant work? Not by a long shot. Looking at the work of graduates of the ateliers, one finds a great deal of mediocrity, broken up occasionally by bright stars, people who’ve taken hold of the tools which such training offers, and used them to make serious pictures. No, four years spent in an atelier does not guarantee good painting. But ignoring the sort of training which these ateliers provide absolutely does guarantee that you’ll end up like I ended up sixteen years ago, bewailing my ill-fortune into the ears of someone who, many years earlier, had chosen not to ignore it.