drawing led image

On the hill above Saddlescombe I got the rare impulse to do the classic observational thing and sketch the delightful view, it being such a lovely day and the place being so conducive and all that. Now when I draw it is usually to communicate the look of something that doesn't yet exist, as a notation, so I was quite happy with the few lines that seemed to do the trick enough for my purposes.

Then I did the gratified observer thing and took a picture with my phone, assuming as we all do that this was the real catch.

But when I got home and compared the two images the quick sketch held so much more of what I felt and remembered about the place and the occasion, that I might as well have deleted the photo.
Perhaps if I had had a better camera, or a longer lens, or spent a while composing I could have done better - was the technology putting up more obstacles than it solved, making the issue one of mastering a technology, rather than the enjoyment of reacting to a scene. After all a bit of paper and a lump of graphite had almost done the job better than a photo could.

What if I dragged that miserable photo, kicking and screaming into the ways of drawing , rather than megapixel tech spec think.

So I dragged it around, casually lining up features, without worrying too much whether this hedge or that tree was perfectly placed, just so that it began to conform to my own admittedly distorted vision.
Like so...

Here is the result

Now it may not look like much but this image IS about what I saw on that day and how it was to be there, present in that landscape. What is more, for me it validates the whole idea of observational drawing as a tool to make far better (photographic) images that are less insipidly photographic. This is the beginning of a load of intriguing explorations into my own visual perception, I have found license to mistreat photography and its 'truth' while stripping drawing from its 'likeness'. Suddenly for me both forms seem to be collaborating towards making a new protocol full of new insights.

Drawn by gravity toward influences that are already codified by some other discipline?
As though to be an artist there is a duty to follow fashionable memes.
Of course every discipline needs its vocabulary of imperatives:
Science needs empirical research and experimentation.
Sport needs objectives and rules.
But the arts owe no allegiance, they are in theory free of any implicit methodology.
Yet while the arts may be the greatest playground, artists themselves too often shackle themselves to schools, movements, ideologies, media or practices that keep the world tightly defined, if only to give us some semblance of a professional discourse.
What if we reject this?
Plunder the world for ideas.
Shift form like an amoeba.