The Painter in oil

See which are the most expressive lines in it. Get the swing and movement of
those lines in the large; then study the more subtle movement of them. Get these
things on the can vas first, and put everything else in as subsidiary to them. Have all
this well placed before you I begin to paint, and allow for little things being painted
on to this.
Don’t get too many things into one landscape. The spirit of the time and place is
what will make the beauty of it, not the details nor the mere facts. This spirit you will
find in a few things, not in many. Having found which lines and forms, which masses
and relations of color and value, express this, the more carefully you avoid putting in
other things the more entirely you emphasize the quality which is the real reason of
existence of your picture.
In studying landscape, work for one thing at a time. What has been said of
sketching and studies applies here. Landscape is the most bewildering of subjects in
its multiplicity of facts and objects and colors and contrasts. If you cannot find a way
to simplify it you will neither know where to begin nor where to leave off. I cannot
tell you just what to do or not to do, because no two landscapes are alike. Recipes
will do nothing in helping you to paint. But there is the general principle which you
may follow, and I try to keep it before you even at the risk of over- repetition. In no
kind of picture can you drag in unimportant things simply because they exist in
nature. In landscape more than elsewhere, because you cannot arrange it, but must
select in the actual presence of everything, you must learn to concentrate on the
things which mean most, and to refuse to recognize those which will not lend
themselves to the central idea.
Selection. - When you select your subject, or “motif” as the French call it, select
it for something definite. There is always something which makes you think this
particular view will make a good picture. State to yourself what it is that you see in it,
not in detail, but in the general. Is if the general color effect of the whole, or a
contrast? Is it a sense of largeness and space, or a beautiful combination of line in
the track of a road, or row of trees, or a river? Perhaps it is the mass and majesty of a
mountain or a group of trees. Something definite or definable catches you -else you
had better not do it at all; and what that something is you must know quite precisely,
or you will not have a well-understood picture.
When you have distinctly in your mind what you want to paint it for, then see that
the composition is so placed on your canvas that that characteristic is the main thing
in evidence. With this done it is a very easy thing to concentrate on that
characteristic, and to leave out whatever tends to break it up or distract from it. This
is the only way you can simplify your subject.
First by a distinct conception of what you paint it for, then by so much analysis of
the whole field of vision as will show you what docs and what does not help in the
expression of it.
Detail. - Much detail in landscape is never good painting. Whether big or little,
your canvas must express something larger and more important than detail. Give
detail when it is needed to express character or to avoid slovenliness. Give as much
detail where the emphasis lies as will insure the completeness of representation - not
a touch more.