Chesterton’s Daisies: The Ordo Amoris and the Discipline of Drawing
The practice of drawing is as old as humanity, and as universal as it is old. Evidence of our innate instinct to draw ranges from the caves of Altamira to the refrigerator art of families with young children. But somewhere along the way, most of us quit drawing; as we become adults, awareness of the gap between visual experience and our own representational skill translates into self-deprecation (“I can’t draw a stick figure”) and loss of desire to try (“I’m just not creative”). Even for artists, there is a temptation to view representational drawing as a tedious, albeit indispensable element of technical training. In this piece, I would like to propose an alternative vision of drawing.
