Christian McEwen

Stanley Kunitz once heard someone say that he'd rather look at a painting of the sky than at the sky itself -- a remark Kunitz found preposterous. Nonetheless, some kind of "art apprenticeship" can be immensely helpful for anyone who is interested in a more attentive looking. Reading artists' letters and journals, studying their work (whether in books or galleries or museums), learning a little of their lives and daily diligence, are all rich and inspiring practices, especially if one also tries, however clumsily, to draw or doodle, paint or sculpt oneself.

The art critic John Ruskin grew up in a strict Victorian household, with neither friends nor siblings. His mother took excellent, even excessive, care of him. But the rule was that he had to find his own amusement. As a small child, he had only a bunch of keys to play with. Later, he was provided with a cart and ball, and two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. But that was all. On one occasion, a well-meaning aunt presented him with a magnificent Punch and Judy, decked out in scarlet and gold. But he was not allowed to keep them. One damp days, he spent much of his time tracing the squares and comparing the colors in his carpet, or examining the knots in his wooden floorboards. When it was fine, he was sent out into the garden, where he devoted himself to "close watching" of the ways of plants.


"I had not the smallest taste for growing them, or taking care of them, any more than taking care of the birds, or the trees, or the sky, or the sea. My whole time was spent staring at them, or into them."

It was, he said, a "very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life."

In the nineteenth century, every educated person drew as a matter of course, and Ruskin was no exception. he drew intricate landscapes; he drew trees and clouds. By the time he was twelve, his parents had hired a drawing-master for him. Not long after, they took him on his first trip to Europe. Ruskin drew as the carriage went along, and "worked up" his drawings in the evening. The trip was, from today's perspective, marevelously tranquil and unhurried.

"Between nine and three, - reckoning seven miles an hour, including stoppages, for minimum pace, -- we had done our forty or fifty miles of journey, sate [sic] down to dinner at four, -- and I had two hours of delicious exploring by myself in the evening; ordered in punctually at seven to tea, and finishing my sketches till half-past nine, - bedtime."

Some seven years later, at Fontainebleau, Ruskin found himself lying on a sandy bank, with nothing in sight but a little aspen tree. He had been awake with a fever all night, and felt too ill to travel the next day. But he put his sketchbook in his pocket, and tottered out, lying down by the roadside to see if he could sleep. It was then he saw the branches of the aspen against the clear blue of the sky.

"Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away; the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, -- without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they 'composed' themselves, by finer laws than any known to man. At last the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere."

Ruskin drew off and on for the rest of hi life: landscapes, architectural studies, sketches of trees and birds and flowers. These sketches are well worth looking at even now. I think, for example, of his "Study of a Velvet Crab" (all opalescent shell and snapping claws), or his series of "dawn studies" -painted in rich blues and oranges on blue and blue-gray paper. They were intended for his students, to inspire them to make such studies for themselves. But unlike most people, Ruskin valued the seeing more than the doing. "The sight is more important than the drawing," he said. "I would rather teach drawing than my pupils may love nature, than teach them looking at nature that they may learn to draw." And again, "The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands of people can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion -- all in one."