prerequisite and reward.

These are some old notes from James McMullan's High-Focus Drawing: A Revolutionary Approach to Drawing the Figure, which apparently now is out of print.

"Much of this book will deal with the issue of pleasure as a necessary part of perception in drawing."

"The pleasure was contained within the moment itself and not projected out into future hopes of praise. I had stumbled however momentarily, into the state of 'here-and-nowness' that is both the prerequisite and reward of drawing."

-John McMullan

I find that fascinating.

Can something be both a prerequisite and reward?
Is pleasure a necessary part of accurate perception?

If you believe in any kind of objective beauty, then it would make sense that love would be a part of seeing. (Leithart has a couple posts on love and knowledge: here and here.)

This also reminds me of my favorite quote from Hart's the Beauty of the Infinite:

"Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its 'sufficient reason', but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one's will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully 'adequate' discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is 'poetic' before it is 'rational'-indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail-and cannot truly be known if the order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first love, and having known one must finally delight; only this 'corresponds' to th trinitarian love and delight that creates."

-David Bently Hart

After typing out that quote, I now realize that it has been wandering around in the back for a while influencing how I read things.