Topical Guide 573
Mark Dorset
Drawing: Revision
Plans and Schemes
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 4:
I BEGAN THE PLANS for the lighthouse with that hopeful vigor we feel at the start of any project, when possibility is the driving force, the likelihood of success is at its highest, the project—in the mind—is perfect, pure, elegant, magnificent, clean, and right, and we seem to see, as if at the end of a tunnel, a shining day in the future when we will finish it and sign it.
In the course of a few evenings, I produced dozens of sets of plans. The first day’s drawings were of a rather simple tower, something a crew of kids my age might manage to build. The second day’s plans assumed the first day’s and took the project to the edge of the limit of the capabilities of a crew of kids. Everything after that was impossible, but I couldn’t stop. With each succeeding day, the tower grew and became more detailed. It wasn’t just taller—it expanded in every direction. Each version had more rooms, more nooks, more crannies than the last, and before one drawing was even finished I’d thought of things I wanted to add to the next.
Ann Dumas, “Degas and His Collection” in The Private Collection of Edgar Degas,The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997
From his earliest student days, Degas had used tracing paper to transfer an image from a printed source to his own notebooks. Later, in the 1890s, he began to use tracing paper extensively to draw and redraw his own images. “Make a drawing, begin it again, trace it; begin it again and trace it again,” he would say, as if by repeatedly drawing lines he could finally seize the very essence of a form.
Paul Lafond, Degas, 1918, Volume 1:
Aux quelques rares jeunes peintres auxquels il voulait bien donner des avis, il répétait sans cesse: “Faites un dessin, recommencez-le, calquez-le; recommencez-le, et calquez-le encore.”
Artist, Work, and Audience
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 4:
He took one look at my drawing and seized it at once. He was impressed.
“This is great!” he said. “This is really great.”
I’ve never been good at accepting praise. I blush and stammer and look at my feet, just as I did then.
“A watchtower,” he said. “Just like those prison movies. Great.”
“Um—”
“With a searchlight turning on top and everything.”
“You—ah—don’t think it looks more like a lighthouse?” I asked.
“No!” he said. “Not at all! No, no, don’t worry about that. A watchtower, definitely.”
Larry Rivers, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers
“Originality has to be hammered home,” [Bob Rauschenberg] said. “The way you did it, Larry, it was like a passing idea.”
It probably was. An ABC television producer once made a drawing of a horse for me and said, “You and I know this is a horse. But here is what is necessary to get it over to a large audience.” Above the drawing he wrote, ‘This is a horse,’ and made an arrow from the words to the horse.”
See also:
Writing: Drafting TG 421; Revision: rewriting, revising, rethinking, renovating TG 10, TG 421; Writing (and Drawing): Drafting, Writing (and Drawing): Revising TG 421
Plans and Schemes TG 44
Artist, Work, and Audience TG 393
The Babbington Review, Number 2: “Class Stratification in Bumblebee Hives”
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