"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her and make the lines on the
paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found
that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and
there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my drawing had
a kind of strength ­­ a funny, semi­Picasso­like strength ­­ which appealed to me. The
reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that
way, and therefore it didn't have to be good ­­ and that's really what the loosening up was
all about. I had thought that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really
meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good. Up until the
last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out of shape; they were rather
interesting to draw. But in the last class we had a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly
proportioned. It was then that I discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't
make anything come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other
models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn't make any
difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're trying to draw something
that's so well put together, you can't fool yourself: It's got to be just right!
During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking this
model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I don't have a studio yet. I'll
have to work that out first."
I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another chance to
draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said to him, "I have a room
downstairs in my house that could be used as a studio."
They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend Jerry, but he
was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to explain why, but I never really
understood.
Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. I had
very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very rarely, such as once when I was
in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done on brown paper of bamboo, and what was
beautiful about it to me was that it was perfectly poised between being just some brush
strokes and being bamboo ­­ I could make it go back and forth.
The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science conference and I
thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there very early in the morning, bought my
ticket before anybody else, and ran up the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore
had the unusual pleasure of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe,
before anybody else came in.
Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around, talking
different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around, looking at the ceiling
for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I saw some big, framed pictures, and
I thought, "Gee! I never knew about these!"
Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to myself, "I know