What Drawing Taught Me About Seeing

People occasionally ask why I spend so much time drawing before I begin a painting.

The honest answer is that I don't really know another way.

Every painting I've ever created began long before the first brush touched a canvas.

It began with looking.

Then looking again.

Then realizing I hadn't really seen it at all.

When I was younger, I assumed drawing was about learning how to reproduce what was in front of me.

• A face

• A hand

• A figure

• An object

Over time, I discovered something far more interesting.

Drawing isn't really about making marks.

It's about paying attention.

Most of us move through life quickly.

We glance. We assume. We categorize.

We decide we understand something after only a few moments of contact.

Drawing refuses to allow that.

A pencil has a way of exposing every assumption.

The longer you study a face, the more complexity appears.

The longer you observe a hand, the more impossible it seems.

The longer you sit with a subject, the more you realize how much you initially missed.

I think that's one reason I was drawn to sketching so early in life.

It rewarded curiosity. Not certainty.

Every drawing was simply an attempt to see a little more clearly than I had the day before.

That process hasn't changed much.

Even now, every painting begins as a sketch.

Sometimes several.

A rough idea becomes a drawing.

The drawing becomes another drawing.

Then another.

Eventually it finds its way onto a canvas, where the process begins all over again.

From the outside, this probably appears inefficient.

Why draw the same thing multiple times?

Why not simply start painting?

The answer is that each version reveals something the previous one couldn't.

Not because I'm getting closer to perfection.

Because I'm getting closer to understanding.

The painting changes.

But so do I.

Every revision is really a conversation.

A question followed by an answer.

An answer followed by another question.

What surprises me most is that this process feels remarkably similar to life.

The things we value most rarely reveal themselves immediately.

People don't... Relationships don't... Meaningful work doesn't.

Even understanding ourselves doesn't.

Most of the important things require repeated attention.

Repeated observation... Repeated return.

Perhaps that's why I've never become frustrated by the endless revisions.

• The mistakes

• The corrections

• The redrawing

They're not evidence that something has gone wrong.

They're evidence that I'm still looking.

And I've come to believe that looking carefully is one of the rarest skills we have.

When collectors encounter a finished painting, they see the result.

What they don't see are the hundreds of small observations that came before it.

• The questions

• The adjustments

• The moments of uncertainty

• The countless times something wasn't quite right

And maybe that's true of people as well.

We see the finished version standing in front of us.

Rarely the years of revision that brought them there.

The older I get, the less interested I become in perfect outcomes.

And the more interested I become in the practice of paying attention.

Because attention, I've learned, is where understanding begins.