I’ve been thinking on the question of what compels me to draw. This has led to questioning what has moved other artists to pick up implements and make marks, any artist in any medium really, though I’m thinking specifically about drawing. McKenzie Clark had an interesting description of what painters of a classical persuasion were possibly feeling when they poised creative hand to canvas:
Millet was one of those artists on whom a few formal ideas make so deep an impression that they feel compelled to spend the whole of their lives in trying to lever them out. Perhaps this is the chief distinguishing mark of the classical artist… A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time. He must give to his subjects an air of complete inevitability, and this becomes a problem of formal completeness. That is why the classic artists, Degas no less than Poussin, return to the same motives again and again, hoping each time to mould the subject closer to the idea.
The various bronze studies of dancers by Degas are part of the Courtauld Gallery collection.