A travel sketch in watercolour again… a village called Sarrion, somewhere between Teruel and Valencia (Spain). And don’t think twice: if the house edges are not straight and some houses dance in all directions and the perspective has lost its laws, it is not me lacking in drawing ability!
Although, to be honest, I have still a lot to learn until I am really able to render homage to all these beautiful villages we have here in Spain…
But in fact, an exaggerated knowledge of industrial drawing, so precise in straight lines and perspective, would damage the soul of these villages. I have had students, engineers and architects, all equipped with a solid education in drawing and perfectly able to draw complicated monuments like the Eiffel Tower or The Guggenheim Museum, but when they tried to draw Spanish villages, they totally failed. They didn’t see what made them so special, exactly the deviation from the straight lines and perfection of the perspective. Or even if they saw them, their hands were so trained to draw straight lines and right angles and slopes that they couldn’t get free.
And this was exactly the reason why they came to me: to learn to forget everything they knew about drawing! Which normally takes much more time than to learn what you don’t know.
This is true in many fields of life… There as a famous golfer, for example -and yes, I am myself a passionate golfer!- he could hit the ball very very far, too far indeed! Each deviation from the perfect hit had lethal repercussions at the end of the ball trajectory. He had to retire from the international golf scene for years, only to learn to hit the ball less far!
Read more about our trip in Cafe Crem:
