'Draw What You See...'

When I was in junior high school, my older brother Dan gave me a piece of advice that hit me like a thunderbolt: “Draw what you see, not what you think you see.”

I had been drawing the symbols for the eyes and nose and not really paying attention to the way they actually appeared. This began a sort of obsession for me. I wanted to draw things as accurately as I could, trying to make my eyes work like a camera.

When I was 13 years old, I set up this arrangement——a rocking chair, a broken umbrella, and a couple of boots——and drew it all with a Rapidograph pen from observation. I wanted to enter it in a student art show along with some other drawings for $10 each, which seemed like a lot of money to me. But my bro convinced me to hold off selling it because I might want to have it someday as a milestone of my progress. Thanks, Dan.