The Art of Drawing

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Summary: Chaet's "Drawing" is a Masterwork
Review: Bernard Chaet's book, "The Art of Drawing", is a small classic that explains what makes a drawing great.Chaet is a well known art professor from Yale who searches the history of Fine Art as well as his own archives to give examples of the finest drawing skills from master artists and former students who went on to become recognized as some of the best in America. Michael Mazer, who just finished illustrating the latest translation of Dante's "Inferno" by Pinskey, is one of Chaet's former pupils who's early exercises appear in "The Art of Drawing". Chaet emphasises time honored exercises that art students have been struggling with for the best part of a century such as drawing: shoes, paper bags, and a semester's worth of bug (!) drawings. Even humdrum assignments can become inspired artwork, and Chaet presents outstanding sketches to show that given the right grasp of page design, any subject can become a riveting image. This book is really about all of the design choices an artist has to make before he takes up the humble pencil and tries to produce a first class drawing. The inclusion of daVinci, Rembrandt, Pontormo and the like underscores the multiplicity of approaches that can be used in this most freeing and demanding of expressive forms. As an artist or an art appreciator any reader would benefit from this little book. It is a classic and a gem among art publications, not for the slick beauty of its presentation, but for its incisiveness in explaining what makes a drawing great. Someone once proclaimed that,"Drawing is the homely Queen of Art" and Chaet's "The Art of Drawing" is the plain Jane definative guide to what makes a picture good. "The Art of Drawing" belongs in every sophisticated art book collector's library