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By Root 359 0

morning. The result was a predictable yet instructive disaster. The very act of drawing an object, however badly swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities. ‘A window' thus reveals itself to be made up of a succession of ledges holding the glass in place, a system of ridges and indentations (the hotel was in the Georgian style), twelve panes that at a glance seem square but are in fact mildly though importantly rectangular, and white paint that is not really white but rather ash-grey, brown-grey yellow, pinky-mauve or mild green depending on the light and on the relationship between the light and the condition of the underlying wood (in the northwestern edge of the window, for example, a trace of damp gave the paint a pinky tint). Nor, as it turns out, is glass wholly clear, having within it minute imperfections, tiny bubbles of air like those in a frozen fizzy drink; on its surface, moreover, mine was marked with the traces of dried raindrops and the impatient swipes of a window cleaner's cloth.

Drawing brutally shows up our previous blindness to the true appearance of things. Consider the case of trees. In a passage in The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin discussed, with reference to his own illustrations, the difference between the way we usually imagine the branches of trees before we draw them and the way they reveal themselves once we have looked more closely with the help of a pad and pencil: ‘The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches share in one great fountain-like impulse. That is to say, the general type of a tree is not

John Ruskin, Velvet Crab, c. 1870—71

as ia but as ib, in which the boughs all carry their minor divisions right out to the bounding curve. And the type of each separate bough is not 2a but 2b; approximating, that is to say to the structure of a plant of broccoli.'

John Ruskin, Branches, from his Elements of Drawing, 1857

I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one in the Langdale Valley (the result would have shamed an infant) did I begin to appreciate, and remember, their identity.

6.

Another benefit we may derive from drawing is a conscious understanding of the reasons behind our attraction to certain landscapes and buildings. Through drawing, we may find explanations for our tastes and begin to develop an ‘aesthetic', or a capacity to assert judgements about beauty and ugliness. We may determine with greater precision what is missing from a building we don't like and what contributes to the beauty of one we do. We may be able more quickly to analyse a scene that impresses us and to pin down whence its power arises (‘the combination of limestone and evening sun', ‘the way the trees taper down to the river'). We may move from a numb ‘I like this' to a more exacting ‘I like this because …', and then in turn towards a generalisation about the likeable. Even if they are held only in exploratory, tentative ways, laws of beauty come to mind: it is better for light to strike objects from the side than from overhead; grey goes well with green; in order for a street to convey a sense of space, the buildings must be no taller than the street is wide.

And on the basis of this conscious awareness, more solid memories can be founded. Carving our name on Pompey's Pillar begins to seem unnecessary. Drawing allows us, in Ruskin's account, ‘to stay the cloud in its fading, the leaf in its trembling, and the shadows in their changing'.

Summing up what he had attempted to do in four years of teaching and writing manuals on drawing, Ruskin explained that he had been motivated by a desire to ‘direct people's attention accurately to the beauty of God's work in the material universe'. It may be worth quoting here in full a passage in which Ruskin demonstrated exactly what, at a concrete level, this strange-sounding ambition might involve: ‘Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having