The following is from Reflections and Shadows, a book drawn from two interviews with Saul Steinberg conducted in 1974 and 1977 by his friend the writer Aldo Buzzi, who edited them.
Drawing from Life As an architecture student I made an excellent study tour with my school to Ferrara and Rome. It was there that for the first time I did drawings from life. I, who have had no professional artistic training and have learned to draw by drawing, had so far thought mostly of imaginary drawings, things you invent. During that trip, I realized how hard it is to do a drawing from life, and how important to understand the nature, the truth of reality. To understand the truth of the drawing’s subject matter—people, architecture, or landscape—is a complex thing since it isn’t a visible, superficial truth. And it takes a lot of effort, a dedication that sometimes, out of laziness, one strives to avoid (it’s easier to invent). You must manage to establish complicity with whatever you’re drawing, until you gain a deep knowledge of it. You don’t draw well if you’re telling a lie. And conversely, when a drawing from life tells the truth, it automatically turns out to be a good drawing. Another problem in drawing from life is that we’re obliged to find answers to questions that so far haven’t been raised. The work you do in the studio is often an answer to questions that are already familiar. It’s hard to do a portrait. You must first spend a critical moment in which you quickly—if you’re lucky—discard all the commonplaces about the subject of the drawing. More difficult than inventing is giving up accumulated virtues. The things you discovered yesterday are no longer valid. It’s impossible to find anything new without first giving something up.
There’s a moral in this. It’s stinginess that holds us back, especially when we’re not only enamored of what we’ve discovered but also convinced it’s good. There are those who, in working from life, continually use the baggage they picked up yesterday; they work from life without really looking, without working from life.
Why am I so reluctant to draw from life, and why do I look for any excuse not to? It’s hard to tell the truth about anything, or to portray oneself in terms of something else. What I try to do is to say with painting some-thing more than what the eye sees. My paintings are not so much paintings in themselves as parts of a table, objects of a drawing table, the painter’s work table. The pencils and other things I do are there to say that this is not a painting of mine but a painting by someone else, maybe a painting by “that painter” but not by me. In that case, I’m more an orchestra conductor than a painter doing …
Copyright © 2002 by the Saul Steinberg Foundation
