The Things I Choose Not To Draw
There is a strange discipline involved in drawing a zebra. The animal appears to offer the artist everything. Every stripe seems to demand attention. Every change in tone appears to need recording. The surface of the body is filled with subtle variations of texture, light and shadow. And when the subject is Hartmann's mountain zebra, there is an almost irresistible temptation to try to capture it all. For a long time, I thought that was what drawing was about. Looking carefully. Recording accurately. Leaving nothing out. But years of observing these animals have gradually taught me something rather different. Sometimes the most important part of a drawing is what I choose not to put into it. The more time I spent with the zebras, the less interested I became in simply reproducing their stripes. The pattern that makes a zebra immediately recognisable can also become a distraction. It is possible to draw every stripe perfectly and still fail to capture the animal standing ...