The irony is that the sort of spontaneous discoveries which art schools advocate in place of disciplined practice actually occur most often during disciplined practice, as Ruskin demonstrates in The Elements of Drawing:

...as you draw trees more and more in their various states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for mankind to know; and you will see what this vegetation of the earth, which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for us and then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of the earth — what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as we contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or spoken for us... [in] sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom, and playful morality.

Practice provokes new thoughts by the surprise of the wonderful variety of everything, and these thoughts grow ever subtler. Could the sympathy so evident in Ruskin's peerless writing on nature have been achieved had he not spent years making meticulous drawings of nature's smallest features? Do we imagine that an artist whose teachers taught him only to find "the necessary confidence in his work" could find "sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom" among the foliage?

And all this therapy will make our budding artist vain. Ruskin wrote to a student to recommend his method of art study which, in its early emphasis on naturalism, would have seemed quite irresponsible to most of his artistic contemporaries:

I should at once forbid sentiment for a couple of years and set you to paint, first, — a plain white cambric pocket handkerchief — or linen napkin, thrown at random on the table... taking about a week's hard work... Then a coloured one, with a simple pattern. Then an apple. Then a child's cheek... Then a curl or two of golden hair — putting you back to bricks the moment I saw you getting sentimental. If you won't do this I can't help you.

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