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These two images, your (imagined) drawing on the paper and the image on the plastic Picture Plane will be (approximately) the same. If perfectly drawn—very hard to do!—they will be identical. At its most basic level, that is what drawing is. To reiterate, basic realistic drawing is copying what is seen on the picture-plane.

Fig. 6-8.

Fig. 6-9.

Fig. 6-10.

“Dear Theo,

In my last letter you will have found a little sketch of that perspective frame I mentioned. I just came back from the blacksmith, who made iron points for the sticks and iron corners for the frame. It consists of two long stakes; the frame can be attached to them either way with strong wooden pegs.

“So on the shore or in the meadows or in the fields one can look through it like a window [the artist’s emphasis]. The vertical lines and the horizontal line of the frame and the diagonal lines and the intersection, or else the division in squares, certainly give a few pointers which help one make a solid drawing and which indicate the main lines and proportion . . . of why and how the perspective causes an apparent change of direction in the lines and change of size in the planes and in the whole mass.

“Long and continuous practice with it enables one to draw quick as lightning—and once the drawing is done firmly, to paint quick as lightning, too.”

From Letter 223, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Greenwich, Conn.: The New York Graphic Society, 1954, p. 432-33.

“If that is so,” you may object, “why not just take a photograph?” I believe one answer is that the purpose of realistic drawing is not simply to record data, but rather to record your unique perception—how you personally see something—and, moreover, how you understand the thing you are drawing. By slowing down and closely observing something, personal expression and comprehension occur in ways that cannot occur simply by taking a snapshot. (I am referring, of course, to casual photography, not the work of artist-photographers.)

Also, your style of line, choices for emphasis, and subconscious mental processes—your personality, so to speak—enters the drawing. In this way, again paradoxically, your careful observation and depiction of your subject give the viewer both the image of your subject and an insight into you. In the best sense, you have expressed yourself.

Use of the picture-plane has a long tradition in the history of art. The great Renaissance artist Leone Battista Alberti discovered that he could draw in perspective the cityscape beyond his window by drawing directly on the glass pane the view he saw behind the pane. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s writing on the subject, German artist Albrecht Dürer developed the picture-plane concept further, building actual picture-plane devices. Dürer’s writings and drawings inspired Vincent Van Gogh to construct his own “perspective device,” as he called it, when he was laboriously teaching himself to draw (see Figure 6-11). Later on, after Van Gogh had mastered basic drawing, he discarded his device, just as you will.

Note that Van Gogh’s device must have weighed twenty pounds or more. I can picture him in my mind’s eye laboriously dismantling the parts, tying them up, carrying the bundle—along with his painting materials—on his long walk to the seashore, unbundling and setting the device up, and then repeating the whole sequence to get home at night. This gives us some insight into how resolutely Van Gogh labored to improve his drawing skills (see Figure 6-12).

Fig. 6-11. Vincent Van Gogh’s perspective device.

Fig. 6-12. The artist using his device at the seashore.

From The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Greenwich: The New York Graphic Society, 1954. The drawings are reproduced by permission of The New York Graphic Society.

Another renowned artist, the 16th-century Dutch master Hans Holbein, who had no need for help with his drawing, also used an actual Picture Plane. Art historians