ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 focuses on the relationship between artist and subject. Using my recollection of drawing my sister on the train as a starting point, and referring to the experiences of other artists, I describe how practitioners feel drawn, in the original sense of the word as “pulled” to draw someone, and how a subject “holds” their attention. At the hand of accounts of drawing experiences, I describe how the intense scrutiny of drawing can uncover a likeness not only to what makes a person recognizable, but to aspects of a person that are not usually visible, and how the relationship between artist and subject is simultaneously suspended and intensified while drawing. The chapter ends with a discussion of the uncanny experience of seeing oneself in a drawing of someone or something other than oneself: by being attentive to an other while drawing, one expresses oneself honestly and unselfconsciously.
