The Birth of a Successful Painting from Life

One thing must be said before anything else. To go from copying a great quantity of traditional landscape painting to walking out into nature and drawing from life is a difficult passage; everything changes. The materials, of course, are still brush, ink, paper and inkstone, and the subjects are still mountains and water, flowers and grasses, trees and buildings; but the way of painting alters beyond anything you might imagine. It takes a very long training to adjust to it, and to reach the state where heart and hand both flow freely, where the hand answers the heart, is harder still.

I remember very clearly the first work drawn from life in which I reached that state. It happened in March 2010 in Kraków, Poland, beside a café; what I painted was the church where Pope John Paul II is buried. Heart and hand truly did flow together then: whatever I painted was right. The ink ran rich and full, the lines were quick and alive; it would be no exaggeration to say the brush danced like a soaring dragon and a wheeling phoenix, as though a god were helping me: a state of absolute freedom. Airy lightness, innocence, composure, unconcerned ease: all of them were there.

From that day my brush was alive, and so were my paintings. The experience is as fresh to me as if it were yesterday. Thinking it over calmly afterwards, I understood that it rested on the great deal of drawing from life I had done before, and on everything that was present at that moment: the subject in front of me, the church bells ringing, the mild sun and the light breeze, the coffee and the cigarette, the bustling crowd, my own cheerful mood. Everything at that moment was simply right, and so the work came into being of itself.

A successful work drawn from life needs three things. First, the form must be broadly accurate; chase accuracy too far and you lose the freedom of the hand, and there is no need for it. Second, the feeling must be full: the wilder the better. Third, the body must have strength to spare.

Finally, let me sum up what drawing from life is for, and what it does for an artist. First, it is a channel through which the artist gives voice to feeling, or lets it out. Second, it is a method of training the artist to seize and hold the momentary shape of things. Third, it is a piece of physical exercise that brings the artist close to nature, and it is especially good for the neck!