Start with a Teapot: An Unexpected Guide to the Art of Drawing

The forty-nine activities in this book claim to be a guide to the art of drawing. Many teachers have been faced with a child who says they ‘can’t draw.’ Enric Lax (and the translator Daniel Hahn) address this crisis of confidence in a roundabout way – although when I say ‘roundabout’, I really have to warn that this book is so bizarre it almost defies review. On a single page or double-page spread, apparently simple steps take the reader through ways to draw a pear (‘Start with a double bass’) or a car (‘Start with a sneaker’). I am reminded of Saint-Exupery’s apology for not being able to draw at the start of Le Petit Prince, where a hat and a python and an elephant become hopelessly jumbled together.

It is only on reflection that the reader gleefully comprehends how unworkable the advice is. On p60 for example we are instructed on how to draw a fly starting with the advice, ‘Draw a tulip’; on p78, drawing a carrot starts with ‘Draw a rocket.’ This is a book where drawing instruction books and websites are gently satirised to address the frustration of the young artist. Satire does not always sit easily in children’s books, and here it is at times hard to grasp. Certainly this is not a clear instruction manual for drawing, but needs an understanding of that genre to pick out the humour. The subtleties of the construction of the book – drawing mountains starts with drawing a camel, that had been the subject of a previous activity, drawing a hat starts with drawing mountains from a previous task – also need to be carefully explored to see the sheer oddness of the teaching that Lax supposedly is trying to achieve. This doesn’t mean that the book is too weird to work, only that its zaniness requires a certain attentiveness for the comedy or the art to shine through. The final sequence holds the key to understanding the book, where the artist fails on numerous occasions to accomplish the choice of subject to draw: it is through trying and failing, through looking at things askew, through taking a break, that the art becomes possible.