There is only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure: both because the lines of a man's body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong...The sense of pleasure in drawing a good line, would really, I think, be education in the due sense of the word for all such people as had the terms of invention in them (248)
What's interesting here, incidentally, is not that the line serves as evidence of work or labor (or alternatively, the pleasure, as after-effect / evience, of making the line in the first place) -- but its sympathetic (and markedly erotic) association with human-feeling in the present moment. The lines are subtle because the body itself is subtle - which is something you don't get, unless you're actively trying to draw it. The artist understands work, in part, because they directly enact it by putting ink to paper -- for Morris a deeply physical move, the enactment of labor through the production of art. The movement of the body - enacting labor *through* the body - is a key part of what seems to sublimate labor through the work of art.
On second read, maybe what he's actually doing here is just putting the 'work' back into 'work of art' - taking it down off the pedestal, and making it analogous to other forms of labor. Still, it seems worth parsing out the difference in these terms -- looking at how 'pleasure' and 'leisure' are correlated, if ever so slightly different ways, with Morris' broader definition of 'work.'
Elaine Scarry would probably be a good place to go for this. Might be worth looking into.
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