‘Not quite as such, but the fact is that when you start drawing a nose, if you look at the light and the... blush, it’ll have a shape, and that shape is essentially abstract. Ian Dury,59 my art teacher, told me, “When you’re drawing a nose, for Christ’s sake don’t draw a nose. Just draw what you see. And after half an hour, you step away, and there will be a nose.” If you try and draw a nose you’ll fall flat on your face.’ It’s hard to look at the figures in Byzantine art without thinking of Dury’s advice: those paintings are full of body parts that don’t express patterns of shape and light,
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