Lovely and vital transgression

 

Ruskin drawing instruction here at the Ashmolean. (discovered this on Alan Jacobs' blog)

Suppose you have to paint the Narcissus of the Alps. First, you must outline its six petals, its central cup, and its bulbed stalk, accurately, in the position you desire. Then you must paint the cup of the yellow which is its yellow, and the stalk of the green which is its green, and the white petals of creamy white, not milky white. Lastly, you must modify these colours so as to make the cup look hollow and the petals bent; but, whatever shade you add must never destroy the impression, which is the first a child would receive from the flower, of its being a yellow, white and green thing, with scarcely any shade in it. And I wish you for some time to aim exclusively at getting the power of seeing every object as a coloured space. Thus for instance, I am sitting, as I write, opposite the fireplace of the old room which I have written much in, and in which, as it chances, after this is finished, I shall write no more. Its worn paper is pale green; the chimney-piece is of white marble; the poker is gray; the grate black; the footstool beside the fender of a deep green. A chair stands in front of it, of brown mahogany, and above that is Turner’s Lake of Geneva, mostly blue. Now these pale green, deep green, white, black, gray, brown and blue spaces, are all just as distinct as the pattern on an inlaid Florentine table. I want you to see everything first so, and represent it so. The shading is quite a subsequent and secondary business. If you never shaded at all, but could outline perfectly, and paint things of their real colours, you would be able to convey a great deal of precious knowledge to any one looking at your drawing; but, with false outline and colour, the finest shading is of no use.

The article goes on and on with this kind of thing.  There's this:

 One kind of practice must have for its object the making you sensitive to symmetry, and precise in mathematical measurement. The other kind of practice, and chief one, is to make you sensitive to the change and grace by which Nature makes all beauty immeasurable. Thus you must learn to draw a circle and ellipse with perfect precision with the free hand; and at the same time must learn that an orange is not to be outlined by a circle, nor an egg by an ellipse, nor any organic form whatever by any mathematical line. In drawing a face, you must be able to map the features so that one eye shall not be higher than the other; but you must not hope to draw the arch of lip or brow with compasses. And while every leaf and flower is governed by a symmetry and ordinance of growth which you must be taught instantly to discern, much more must you be taught that it obeys that ordinance with voluntary grace, and never without lovely and vital transgression.

And this:

To begin, then; you see the Narcissus has six white leaves. Three of these, the undermost, are its calyx, and the three uppermost its corolla. These are two parts of every flower which it is well to ascertain before you begin to draw it; on which subject, please remember this much of elementary botany, and do not be provoked at my digressions; for the first principle of all I wish to enforce in my system here at Oxford is, that you shall never make a drawing, even for exercise, without proposing to learn some definite thing in doing so; nay, I will even go so far as to say that the drawing will never be made rightly, unless the making it is subordinate to the gaining the piece of knowledge it is to represent and keep. Observe, then, that the calyx and corolla are not two parts of the flower, but the corolla is the flower, and the calyx its packing case: in the bud the flower is folded up and packed close within the calyx, often with most ingenious pinching and wrinkling for room; (pull a poppy bud in two, and unfold the poppy, the first you can find this year among the corn), and therefore the calyx has altogether less life in it than the corolla, and is as a leathern or wooden thing in comparison: also it stops growing, or nearly so, when the corolla begins; and sometimes drops off at once, as in the poppy aforesaid, or fades wretchedly, as in the buttercup, or stays on, stupid and bewildered, long after the flower is dead, as in the rose. But the main point for you to note is that, as a calyx has at first to shut close over the flower; its leaves are nearly sure to be sharp pointed, that they may come together and fit close at top, while a corolla leaf is as characteristically flat at the end, that is to say, heart shape, with the broad end outwards, because it usually is the fourth or fifth part of a cup, cut down from the edge to the middle.