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On old sketchbooks: 2

May 1985: Person leaning on rail on cross-Channel ferry

Another drawing from a sketchbook/diary I kept in 1985. Here is Hiroshige writing in 1834 on the practice of drawing:

"Ever since I was six I've been obsessed by drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an endless number of drawings, but everything I produced before the age of seventy is not worth counting. Not until I was seventy-three did I begin to understand the structure of real nature, animals, plants, trees, birds, fish, and insects.

"Consequently, by the time I am eighty-six, I will have made even more progress; at ninety I will have probed the mystery of things; at a hundred I will undoubtedly have attained a marvellous pinnacle, and when I'm a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive."

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