Understanding the relationship between perception and drawing is an intuitive process for almost all artists. Still, most artists fall into the trap of assuming that there is some version of “objective reality” (exemplified by the photograph) with which they must compare their efforts. This assumption is usually deadly to the study of drawing. Two hundred years ago nobody had ever seen a photograph. A human being had drawn or painted every image on the face of the earth. In our time, we tend to assume that the degeneration of figurative art was caused by the invention of photography because artists were no longer needed to produce imagery such as portraits, landscapes, or still-life paintings. There may be some truth to this narrative, but the real problem with photography was that it made it more challenging to create representational art. Artists began to feel that they had both the capacity and responsibility to portray their subjects with the detached and mechanical precision of the photograph. They lost sight of the real purpose of figurative art, which was to pursue an idea.
