My mind is completely blown by this new restaurant in New York, and I want to go there immediately with every artist I know so that we can be in this place and draw it together.

But first, some background…

A funny thing about drawing is that we tend to put black lines around the edge of everything, even though things in real life mostly tend not to have black lines around them. For instance, in this drawing I made of a park in my neighborhood, you know that the buildings and the plants and the people do not have black lines around their edges. But we draw like this and it somehow makes sense.

Drawing lines around things is very satisfying, because it’s a kind of handwriting for what you see. If you want to describe the shape of a leaf or a tree or a car, you probably want to take a little tour around the edge of it. And then you’re left with this line that doesn’t exist in real life, but it’s a kind of souvenir of the journey you took to get to know it.

This is something I think about every time I draw, and I spend way too much time thinking about it when I’m not drawing, too. Why do we do it? Why do we put lines around the edges of things, and why is it so satisfying, and why do other people (the viewer, the person seeing the drawing) seem to like it, or at least accept it as a somewhat realistic image?