Topical Guide 862
Mark Dorset
Imagination
Revision
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 39:
I’d been working for nearly three hours before the dark-haired girl began to appear in the drawings. She took me by surprise. Suddenly, there she was, […]
I compared my earlier drawings of the dark-haired girl with the new traces of her in these drawings. […] I worked all night, and by dawn I had come a full step closer to seeing her:
I’m going to chronicle the progression of Peter’s attempts to draw the dark-haired girl as he sees her, or thinks he sees her. Here are his first two attempts:
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.
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 39:
“Andy,” I said, pulling the sheet from the bottom of the stack and handing it to him, “who is this?”
He looked at the drawing. He squinted at it. He took it to the windows and looked at it in the morning light.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you draw these?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a friend of yours?”
“She’s not modeling for you?”
“No,” he said. “What made you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “Just my imagination, I guess.”
Merve Emre, “The Apostle of Love: How Thomas Mann discovered sensual education in The Magic Mountain”:
What does Hans Castorp learn from the looks of love? He learns to look himself, to pay attention: in one extraordinary passage, as he looks at Clavdia Chauchat, he counts, or imagines that he could count, the strands of her hair; measures the handbreadths that separate their faces; classifies her features; describes their proportions and relations to one another in the language of plane and volume. […] Hans Castorp’s medium is his imagination, the most invisible and unalloyed medium there is […]
See also:
Imagination TG 62; Imagination, Improvisation TG 102; Imagination TG 113, TG 713
Revision: rewriting, revising, rethinking, renovating TG 10, TG 421; Writing (and Drawing): Drafting, Writing (and Drawing): Revising TG 421
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