Drawing: Natural or Learned?

 A dear Blogger, La Table de Nana, (who has a most beautiful, creative, happy, loving blog), asked:

"Did you learn to sketch/draw with movement 

or was this natural for you?"

I replied on the previous post, but have thought more about it:

I do observational drawing by feeling the movement & gesture. It is my natural tendency, but I only found it when I was learning by the methods of Kimon Nicolaides in The Natural Way to Draw, 1st published in 1941!  I was lucky that my high school art teacher used this method because it was great for us minority kinesthetic & right brained learners. I think the book is best used in a class or group because students can pose for one another & someone can call time limits for the quick gesture studies. 

My college drawing teacher also emphasized perceiving your subject by physically feeling it rather than just visually aligning things. 

But a drawing can call for different approaches, in my opinion, so integrating the knowledge of diverse techniques & elements such as formal perspective is valuable. 

Finding a process & a medium that best matches one's own nature, as with anything in life, is important. For me, line, a sort of scribbling, is my favorite art element. If you only gave me one drawing tool to use with paper, it would be a fine ink pen. (But please, don't take away my colors!)

I seek out drawings to which I am intuitively attracted  as a way to discover my own inclinations. The drawings of Vincent Van Gogh have such linear energy, such feeling, such movement, as do the sensitively rendered drawings of Rembrandt.  

 

 (I should not be showing master drawings in the same post as my own sketch, but it is important not to compare one's work, & to just stay centered on what one truly loves to do.)