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words to explain how to start a drawing, I and my fellow teachers finally worked out a method that helped us to communi- cate how a trained artist does this. We had to carefully introspect what we were doing when starting a drawing and then figure out how to teach the process, which is fundamentally non-verbal, extremely rapid, and “on automatic.” I have called this method, “Choosing a Basic Unit.” This Basic Unit becomes the key that unlocks all of the relationships within a chosen composition: All proportions are found by comparing everything to the Basic Unit.

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”

—Samuel Beckett

“You can never have the use of the inside of a cup without the outside. The inside and the outside go together. They’re one.”

—Alan Watts

Fig. 7-7.

The Basic Unit—A definition

In Chapter Six, I stated that all parts of a composition (negative spaces and positive forms) are locked into a relationship that is bounded by the outside edge of the format. For realistic drawing, the artist is bound to that relationship in which all the parts fit together: The artist is not at liberty to change the proportional relationships. I’m sure you can see that if you change one part, something else necessarily gets changed. In Chapter Six I used a child’s jigsaw puzzle to illustrate the important concept of shared edges. I’ll use the same puzzle to illustrate the Basic Unit (Figure 7-7).

The Basic Unit is a “starting shape” or “starting unit” that you choose from within the scene you are looking at through the Viewfinder (the sailboat on the water). You need to choose a Basic Unit of medium size—neither very small nor very large, relative to the format. In this instance, you could choose the straight edge of the sail. A Basic Unit can be a whole shape (the shape of a window or the shape of a negative space) or it can be just a single edge from point to point (the top edge of a window, for example). The choice depends only on what is easiest to see and easiest to use as your Basic Unit of proportion.

In the jigsaw puzzle, I chose to use the straight edge of the sail as my Basic Unit.

Once chosen, all other proportions are determined relative to your Basic Unit. The Basic Unit is always called “One.” You can lay your pencil down on the puzzle to compare the relationships. For example, you can now ask yourself, “How wide is the boat compared to my Basic Unit, the long edge of the sail?” (One to one and one-third.) “How wide is the sail relative to my Basic Unit?” (One to two-thirds.) “Where is the sea/sky edge from the bottom of the format?” (One to one and one-quarter.) Note that for each proportion, you go back to your Basic Unit to measure it on your pencil and then you make the comparison with another part of the composition. I’m sure you can see the logic of this method and how it will enable you to draw in proportion.

As I teach you how to find and use a Basic Unit, this method of starting may seem a bit tedious and mechanical at first. But it resolves many problems, including problems of starting and of composition as well as problems of proportional relationships. It soon becomes quite automatic. In fact, this is the method most experienced artists use, but they do it so rapidly that someone watching would think that an artist “just starts drawing.”

An anecdote about French artist Henri Matisse illustrates this point and also illustrates the almost subconscious process of finding a Basic Unit. John Elderfield, curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in his wonderful catalog of the Matisse Retrospective Exhibition of 1992, states: “There is a 1946 film of Matisse painting Young Woman in White, Red Background [see Figure 7-8].... When Matisse saw the slow-motion sequence of the film, he felt ‘suddenly naked,’ he said, because he saw how his hand ‘made a strange journey of its own’ in the air before drawing the model’s features. It was not hesitation, he insisted: ‘I was unconsciously establishing the relationship between the subject I was about to draw and the size of my paper.