Routines and Practices

Extended discussion of various things for a beginner to aim at and practice and of importance of daily regularity in doing so.

In Response to
Ilya
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Promised pages:
Analysis Paralysis and Some Ideas for Ilya
Read, fill up your tank. Leave the gas station. Drive 'til the tank is empty. Read again until you feel the tank is running over. Don't let it get too full and you begin doubting yourself. Then drive again. Remember it's a marathon, a cross country race. In self-education this self=awareness is huge. We think we can learn it and just go practice it but we can't. We are bound to a trial and error evolution. We need – and are open to - insight at our gradually clearer points of ineffectiveness. We have set a course and mustn't wander from it even though where we are trying to get will become clearer and better paths will show themselves. Books are like maps or even clues in a scavenger hunt. People around you today with shallow knowledge, your neighbors who haven't been where you are trying to go, are of minimal value. Even the greats are only approximating, approaching, the ideal but you will need to consult them. You will learn who not to listen to.
You will learn that nature is the 'source' from which all our knowledge proceeds. Work with it, keep close to it, draw and paint from the source. Consultation with the masters who see it provides insights about how to see and about what you must see but nature itself is the thing: drink with love from that source and gradually the masters are no longer the thing. Just a reference point.
` Drawing anything you see before you as an object is fine and so is setting up an object, well silhouetted and clear as in cast drawing. Use at different times pencil, chalks, charcoals trying to get familiar with what they are best used for. For this draw using long lines with a goal of articulating the beauty of the silhouette and then the graduation of the values to produce the sense of form. Draw to simply get more glib at getting your proportions to ring true, at understanding and achieving the general movement, thrust, gesture of the thing.