The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed – Part 1

Author: Harold Speed

Publication Year: 1913

Inspecting and Learning from Art

This book by Harold Speed is not a typical art instruction book. I view it as a long form essay examining different components of art that make it appealing to the viewer. If you are looking for a book that explains how to draw or gives a guided explanation, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a more in-depth examination about the psychology of drawing, composition, art, and different ways to view art, then this book’s highly theoretical approach will be appealing to you.

I will give my review right here at the start: I enjoyed reading this book. As an intermediate artist that is mostly self-taught, the concepts in this book are thought-provoking and dense. It will make you think about your own artwork as you sketch or paint, and re-reading parts of this book are warranted as a refresher throughout a career in art. If you are interested in learning more about how to think about art, whether it is your own or from the masters, I recommend picking up this book.

Speed introduces to the reader the essence of art. If artwork was the same as reproducing images as we see them, then all artwork would have the same end as photography. However, it is the feeling in artwork that makes it have such a high impact on the viewer.

“Fine things seem only to be seen in flashes, and the nature that can carry over the impression of one of these moments during the labor of a highly wrought drawing is very rare, and belongs to the few great ones of the craft alone.”

– Harold Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing

Inspecting and Learning from Art

Chapter II – Drawing

Harold Speed emphasizes heavily on the aspect of feeling in art. Artwork is meant to be a reproduction through the interpretation and feeling of the artist. The better the artist, the better the feeling they can convey to their audience. Speed states that an emphasis on form is most important, followed by color. In essence, artwork allows us to extend our experience beyond ourselves and have an idea of life beyond ourselves.

Chapter III – Vision

Vision is the sense through which humans experience the world. However, at the very beginning of mental and cognitive development, children learn about the world through touch and tactile experience. Speed goes through the explanation of how children grab and reach for everything around them, learning about something not from how it looks, but how it feels. The human first experiences the world through touch, learns to associate visual cues with tactile memories, and then we are able to create an understanding of the world around us.

For example, Speed illustrates the idea that we develop our understanding of the world through symbols. If you ask a child to draw a picture of a person, they’ll draw two circles, a semi-circle for a smile, a round head, squiggly hair, and maybe a triangle for a nose. This is through the understanding of symbols for a human face rather than the actual visual reality. Artists must later reprogram themselves to truly see what is around them to illustrate their surroundings not based on learned symbolic representations, but from transferring a three-dimensional reality to a two dimensional sheet of paper.

“Finish in art has no connection with the amount of detail in a picture, but has reference only to the completeness with which the emotional idea the painter set out to express has been realized.”

– Harold Speed. The Practice and Science of Drawing

Speed is a big believer in conveying emotion and feeling in artwork. Often times the ambiguity of a piece of art can be the most evocative aspect. And other times, it can be the insane levels of detail that invite the viewer to be a part of the scene.

Chapter IV – Line Drawing

Speed breaks down his book into two main categories of drawing: line drawing and mass drawing. The first type he looks at is line drawing which are the contours and boundaries of the things we see. Line drawing, according to Speed, is a much older technique seen in the cave paintings, all the way through to the middle ages and beyond. It is arguably simpler, but it can be more evocative through the artist’s control of the viewer’s eye and the path that they bring them through their piece of art. Line drawing brings strength to a piece as well, it creates strong boundaries, reinforces the viewer’s conception, and can create strong feelings.

Chapter V – Mass Drawing

Mass drawing, as Speed describes it, is the consideration of two dimensional surfaces of color and form. The way Speed explains to think about it is the art of China and Asia versus the art of the renaissance painters. The Asian art is mainly two dimensional with flat surfaces of color creating the contrast between planes. Another comparison he mentions is the difference between the renaissance painters and the impressionists. The impressionists also emphasize the importance of the mass of forms, their color, and use the masses of lights, darks, and tones to separate forms within their work.