David and Genevieve in Paris. 2. One Glimpses, One Obsesses

An artist sketches. Color, composition, polemics come later. First comes the drawing. Every artist knows where art begins and praises the pure act of drawing. Tintoretto: “Beautiful colors can be bought in any shop but good drawing can only be purchased with the artist’s flesh after years of patient study and sleepless nights.” Dali: “Drawing is the honesty of art because there is no possibility of cheating.”

The artist in Paris sits and sketches because that is the honest thing to do, because it builds his muscles, because it leads him to his compositions, because it is his joy and his passion. No matter if his love is iron sculpture, totem poles, surrealistic ceramics, or the palest watercolors: he pulls out his pad and draws one line after another. So a drawing emerges, that precious thing Gauguin called “the artist’s secret.”

Genevieve is a little nervous about sketching in public. She calls this her “shyness” and suspects that it will have negative consequences on her life as a painter. Aware of her lack of boldness, she worries that she will paint second-hand art out of an inability to speak up and speak out. She envies artists who are unafraid in front of a canvas and who seem not to care what anyone will think. She wants to get there: she wants to get to that place of alchemical boldness, exactly as much as she wanted to come to Pairs. For now, though, she sketches in hiding, off to the side, too shy to make her presence felt. Everything she sketches feels like a glimpse.


David is a bundle of intensity. He is so wired and wound up that he gets rashes from obsessing about the look of this, the meaning of that. He can hardly sleep, so much is on his mind. Therefore you can find him sketching in the dark, like Van Gogh, who would tape a candle to his forehead so as to be able to sketch and paint at night. David is all in a frenzy, though sometimes that frenzy looks like absolute stillness, as he stands, stares at something—even on a pitch black night—and sketches.


Genevieve has gone to bed early, just a little sad. David has been up all night, obsessing. They will not meet today.

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“Drawing is a kind of hypnotism”--Pablo Picasso
“Drawing is the basis of art”—Arshile Gorky