The Question of Sacrifice

Samuel Bjorklund: When you set out to do your first pencil drawings in the Aix streets and landscape scenes, you probably never dreamed of the dimension it would take, you never dreamed of the importance it would have. It just grew.

Leo Marchutz: No, it’s true. It just happened. I was more satisfied with this… contrast.

SB: Would you say of the various things one can draw, figures or landscape or streets, that it’s the one domain where perhaps one risks to learn the most intensely about drawing?

LM: I think one learns about drawing as soon as one goes down to draw something. I think because one eliminates, there is a question of elimination too, of sacrifice, what is important, what is the stuff that vision has left out, and what is unimportant. One can find it only by doing it. If one does it around here there is time to do it again later on. But all these lovely places around Aix, they are the stuff of painting or drawing.

…Then there are things which are difficult, to show a street that’s going down or going up, one has to learn to focus here. But here the rooflines are more important than what’s going on on the floor.