In an extract from his new book, The Real Work, the New Yorker writer and critic sets out to learn to draw for the first time – and to drive a car
agicians have a beautiful term. Over late-night drinks in New York, or over 3am breakfasts in Las Vegas, they love to talk to one another about “the real work”. By the “real work”, they mean the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.
“I’m an artist,” he said. “A teacher. I teach people how to draw.” “Would you teach me how to draw?” I asked, for reasons that at the moment seemed as clear-flying as a lark in spring air, but that, over the next two years, receded and rose mysteriously, like fish swimming in a muddy aquarium. After two more flipped pages, Jacob came over. In a gentle tone, he said, “Yes, well… I would argue that the space you’re asserting here in this corner could be seen as something much spacier. I think you could allow these intervals to… ” He struggled for words.
“Hey,” he said. “If you’re still interested, why don’t you come around to my studio sometime and watch while I draw? We can just talk.” And so that Friday I went over to his studio to watch him draw. “Just make tilts in time,” he said. “Imagine that there’s a clock overlaying what you’re drawing. Then make one tilt on the clock, then check to see if it matches up with what you see and then correct it. Now, there, you’ve got that line” – a descending scrawl meant to indicate the upper slope of a skull we were drawing – “and it’s at, oh, what would you say, 12.10? I mean in relation to the vertical axis.
The very next week, permit in hand, I signed up with a driving school in Manhattan that was supposed to be particularly good with later-in-life students. At 5.30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I got into the driver’s seat of a car parked outside my apartment building and advertised on the side as “Student Driver”.it!” Arturo Leon, my driving instructor, said with more enthusiasm than I expected as I adjusted my mirrors.
Unlike drawing, driving seemed at first to negate the usual path of learning: the incremental steps, the curve we go up as one small mastery follows another. Driving, I realised, isn’t really difficult - it’s just extremely dangerous. You hit the gas and turn the wheel and there you are – in possession of a two-ton weapon capable of being pointed at anything you like.
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