Day 95: This morning, a watery idyll in Manheim, NY. This is a kind of chaotic scene I wouldn’t have attempted prior to my recent daily drawing practice. I wouldn’t have known where to begin, or how to “make sense” of it all. but I’ve bee letting go of— even preventing myself from— the need to understand what I’m looking at or where things start and end; what the shapes are made of or how they fit together. Just see the shape, texture, value of whatever bit I’m looking at, and do something like it with the pencil. That’s all.

It’s made drawing more fun and is oddly much more effective at getting the visual sense of things because I can’t fake it by imposing logic on the scene.

Blackwing pencil in A6 sketchbook