"For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing Roundness. If you can do that, all the rest is easy and straightforward." -- John Ruskin
Leonardo da Vinci said almost the same thing in his treatise on painting. There is great truth in the statement that the essence of the plastic arts (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.) resides in the ability to project roundness as it implies a discipline whereby the mind can conceive of and manipulate three-dimensional forms in its imagination -- a skill that masters like Leonardo, Ruskin, and others considered both rare and difficult. (Worth pondering why that is.) If the object of painting is to simply 'represent' lines and shapes that create an illusion of solidity -- then this idea is not interesting, it is simply another technical trick. But if the object of painting is to conceive of three-dimensional forms in the mind and project them onto a plane, it is an entirely different story as we are talking about not a mechanical trick but a mental operation -- perhaps not different from the ability of the musical composer to interweave melody and harmony and to think in counterpoint. It is the difference between the blind application of some rules ... and the very power of the imagination to think literally in several dimensions at once, to interweave and play with forms in space, to communicate awful feelings of depth; expansive feelings of volume; profound sensations of weight and mass and cohesion. And when the object of the painter's attention is not just any old round shape but an organic form, like the human or animal body, or a landscape, the power for these sensations to move us is vastly amplified, through our innate sympathetic attachment to natural forms. Of all these, the human body is of course the most sympathetic as its nervous system is a thing we have intimate knowledge of -- so to draw this truly in the round, where the three-dimensional counterpoint of muscle and bone and tendon and flesh is woven into a human fugue and animated with human passions, well, to draw 'in the round' in such a way is a very profound experience -- and is a long, long way from merely imitating the inclination or declination of some perspective lines.
