e times when the camera can be of use to artists,
but only to those who are thoroughly competent to do without it--to
those who can look, as it were, through the photograph and draw from it
with the same freedom and spontaneity with which they would draw from
nature, thus avoiding its dead mechanical accuracy, which is a very
difficult thing to do. But the camera is a convenience to be avoided by
the student.

Now, although it has been necessary to insist strongly on the difference
between phenomena mechanically recorded and the records of a living
individual consciousness, I should be very sorry if anything said
should lead students to assume that a loose and careless manner of study
was in any way advocated. The training of his eye and hand to the most
painstaking accuracy of observation and record must be the student's aim
for many years. The variations on mechanical accuracy in the work of a
fine draughtsman need not be, and seldom are, conscious variations.
Mechanical accuracy is a much easier thing to accomplish than accuracy
to the subtle perceptions of the artist. And he who cannot draw with
great precision the ordinary cold aspect of things cannot hope to catch
the fleeting aspect of his finer vision.

Those artists who can only draw in some weird fashion remote from nature
may produce work of some interest; but they are too much at the mercy of
a natural trick of hand to hope to be more than interesting curiosities
in art.

The object of your training in drawing should be to develop to the
uttermost the observation of form and all that it signifies, and your
powers of accurately portraying this on paper.

#Unflinching honesty# must be observed in all your studies. It is only
then that the "you" in you will eventually find expression in your work.
And it is this personal quality, this recording of the impressions of
life as felt by a conscious individual that is the very essence of
distinction in art.

The "seeking after originality" so much advocated would be better put
"seeking for sincerity." Seeking for originality usually resolves itself
into running after any peculiarity in manner that the changing fashions
of a restless age may throw up. One of the most original men who ever
lived did not trouble to invent the plots of more than three or four of
his plays, but was content to take the hackneyed work of his time as the
vehicle through which to pour the rich treasures of his vision of life.
And wrote: