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: 

     “What custom wills in all things do you do it.”

Individual style will come to you naturally as you become more conscious of what it is you wish to express.  There are two kinds of insincerity in style, the employment of a ready-made conventional manner that is not understood and that does not fit the matter; and the running after and laboriously seeking an original manner when no original matter exists.  Good style depends on a clear idea of what it is you wish to do; it is the shortest means to the end aimed at, the most apt manner of conveying that personal “something” that is in all good work.  “The style is the man,” as Flaubert says.  The splendour and value of your style will depend on the splendour and value of the mental vision inspired in you, that you seek to convey; on the quality of the man, in other words.  And this is not a matter where direct teaching can help you, but rests between your own consciousness and those higher powers that move it.

APPENDIX

If you add a line of 5 inches to one of 8 inches you produce one 13 inches long, and if you proceed by always adding the last two you arrive at a series of lengths, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 inches, &c.  Mr. William Schooling tells me that any two of these lines adjoining one another are practically in the same proportion to each other; that is to say, one 8 inches is 1.600 times the size of one 5 inches, and the 13-inch line is 1.625 the size of the 8-inch, and the 21-inch line being 1.615 times the 13-inch line, and so on.  With the mathematician’s love of accuracy, Mr. Schooling has worked out the exact proportion that should exist between a series of quantities for them to be in the same proportion to their neighbours, and in which any two added together would produce the next.  There is only one proportion that will do this, and although very formidable, stated exactly, for practical purposes, it is that between 5 and a fraction over 8.  Stated accurately to eleven places of decimals it is (1 + sqrt(5))/2 = 1.61803398875 (nearly).