Sketchbooks
"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way . . . To see clearly is poetry, philosophy and religion all in one."
John Ruskin
Truda Lane writes :
All my imaginative works are based on a hard study of objective drawing. If I were asked, How do you define a good drawing? I would say, "one that you can set bones from."
Structure is endlessly and eternally fascinating : here lies the source of life, dynamic energy and movement: I am very keen on architecture. When I see somebody else drawing and looking at something, I am excited; not sketching, but drawing.
The subjective has to grow out of the objective or else it has no substance, and if the artist loses sight of this objective beginning the subjective or imaginative work will founder.
What Ruskin calls "a plain way" of drawing I see as economy, clarity and a penetrating observation of all wild natural things, these are my inspiration and without them I could do nothing.
