A new note and a few things from Kenneth Clark about impressionism.

-Don't stop making marks; keep up the pace. If you slow down you risk stopping, and if you stop you risk not starting again. This also keeps all the elements close together, Give yourself time to think and you risk separating them.

-You're not copying, you're making. Drawings aren't facsimilies; they're you and what's in your head and what's in your hands and the motif. You may be working from the motif but everything is of equal importance and has to all work together. If you try to be a camera you get dead pictures (not knocking photography itself; there's a bloke behind the camera).

-Have no fear. If you don't give yourself time to think you should be fearless anyway.

-A drawing is done when you stop making and start fiddling.

"Then impressionism gave us something which has always been one of the great attainments of art: it enlarged our range of vision. We owe much of our pleasure in looking at the world to the great artists who have looked at it before us. In the eighteenth century, gentlemen carried a device called a Claude glass in order that they might see the landscape with the golden tone of a Claude [for my readers: [link] - or rather of the varnish on a Claude. The impressionists did the exact reverse. They taught us to see the colour in shadows. Every day we pause with joy before some effect of light which we should otherwise have passed without notice. Impressionism achieved something more than a technical advance. It expressed a real and valuable eithical position... their painting is full of a complete confidence in nature and in human nature. Everything they see exists for their delight, even floods and fog."

Compare Constable's comment:

"I never saw an ugly thing in my life."

This is why I love painting.