Month: April 2017

This book is about how I paint and what materials I use. It’s more important that you do it than what materials you do it with. There is very little that I use today that I used 50 years ago, of course things wear out and need to be replaced but I often replace them with different things. The moral of this story is to buy cheap until you know what you want. The best thing I can say about a hammer is that it takes a very long time to wear out.

In this work, Harold Speed approaches this dynamic aspect of drawing and painting from many different points of view. He plays the historical against the scientific, theory against precise artistic definition. He begins with a study of line drawing and mass drawing, the two basic approaches the artist needs to learn. Further sections carry the artistic vision through unity and variety of line and mass, balance, proportion, portrait drawing, the visual memory, materials, and procedures.