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I'm not sure whether lines exist in nature or not (though any given segment of a spider web seems, for example, pretty linear to me, and that took only an idle moment to think of -- there must be lots of other instances), but it seems to me that the point of learning to draw well -- which is much much more than making linear outlines -- is that, if there are lines in nature and I want to depict them, I would -- because of my drawing experience and the way it trained my eye -- know where to put that line in relation to other lines or objects, I would be able to correctly represent its angle from the horizontal or vertical and accurately gauge its length. These are the same judgments I later had to make when painting, as I considered whether an eye was the correct width, whether the eyes were in proper relation to each other and to the brow, the nose, the ears, whether the hands were too long or the foreshortened feet foreshortened too much. A well executed pencil drawing with accuracy and economy of line is a very beautiful thing in its own right, and the beauty extends to the fact that in order to create the drawing, the artist had to be able to accurately see and then accurately replicate what was seen. If the artist was using Bouguereau as a standard but, for lack of the skills that a trained draftsman's eye can implement, winds up with the flounder features of a Picasso, it's generally disappointing for both artist and viewer. If a painter is gifted or talented enough to be able to work in a realistic representational style without having to learn to handle graphite or charcoal, that's fine. I wasn't, so I did.
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