How can knowing how to draw make me a better painter? This is a question that many artists used to ask, until in many ways the Impressionist movement detached oil, pastel, and watercolor work from any responsibility to what one might call an underdrawing. In many ways, the Italian painter Caravaggio, whose great canvases of varied religious subjects revolutionized Rome in the early 1600s, was the first Western artist to defy the academic pedagogy of drawing and to flaunt that tradition by leaving not a single trace of pencil or crayon drawing preliminary to his oil compositions and by exiling from his compositions any statuary or architecture that might vaguely suggest an academic element like drawing in his creative act. Continue reading How to Draw A Painting