Six Drawing Lessons

What a beautiful, beautiful book. And that is part of the point. Kentridge is an acclaimed South African artist, a printer and a filmmaker, but he was unknown to me before this volume. His lessons, based on the Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard, won't teach you to draw, in the technical sense, but they will likely help you to see and to make, in concert with William Carlos Williams's belief that there are "no ideas but in things." With an equal reverence for the truths of beauty, observation, and history (the latter gained in part while raised under apartheid), he examines the pieces of his own process of art-making and discovery. It's not a simple book, but it's a humble one, deeply ambitious in its willingness to fail, and try again.