The Meaning of Life is to See.
~ Huineng
How does one progress in drawing? By making the eye-heart-hand reflex ever more sensitive, so that the hand may become ever more the willing tool of the eye.
Jacaranda seed-pod study VI
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
~ John Berger
Jacaranda seed-pod study I & II
Everyone thinks he knows what a lettuce looks like. But start to draw one and you realize the anomaly of having lived with lettuces your whole life but never having seen one, never having seen the semi-translucent leaves curling in their own lettuce way, never having noticed what makes a lettuce a lettuce rather than a curly kale. I am not suggesting that you draw each vein of each leaf, but that you feel them being there.
What applies to lettuces applies equally to the all-too-familiar faces of husbands . . . wives…
The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (1973)
sub rosa 
When I started drawing and painting portraits I always got to the same point no matter who it was I was trying to convey, it was the point where I realized what parts were actually my face. Once I removed myself from the portrait they looked like themselves.
Interesting –
These are beautiful exercises – they’re yours? I love the contour drawing and the no line wash drawing.
Yes, mine & thank you! I love proper botanical drawings, but don’t know if I’ll ever have the patients for becoming skilled in it. Per now it’s all play.