CHAPTER XIV: HOW TO STUDY
There is a right and a wrong way to study, and it all centres around the
fact that what you aim to learn is perception and expression. What you
are to express you do not learn; you grow to that. But you must learn
how to use all possible means; all the facts of visible nature, and all the
characteristics of pigments. All qualities, color and form and texture, are
but the means of your expression, and you must know how they may be
used. Your perception and appreciation must be trained, and your mind
stored with facts and relativities. Then you are ready to recognize and
convey the true inwardness you find in conditions commonplace to
others.
You are to see where other see not; for it is marvelous how little the average eye sees of the
really interesting things, how little of the visual facts, and how rarely it sees the picture before
it is painted. All is material to the painter. It is not that “everything that is, is beautiful,” but
that everything that is has qualities and possibilities of beauty; and these, when expressed,
make the picture, in spite of the superficial or obvious ugliness. In one sense nothing is
commonplace for everything exists visibly by means of light and color, and light and color
are of the fundamental beauties. So arrange or look upon the commonplace that light and
color are the most obvious qualities, and the commonplace sinks into the background - is
lost. There is nothing like painting to make life fascinating; for there is nothing which brings
so many charming combinations into your perception, as the habit of looking to find the
possibilities of beauty in everything that comes within your view.
You must form the habit of looking always for the painter’s point of view. The painter deals
primarily with pigment, and what can be represented with pigment; chiefly color and light in
the broadest sense, including form and composition, as things which give bodily presence
and action to the possibilities of pigment. Shade, or shadow, of course, is an actuality in
painting, because it is the foil of light and color, and furnishes the element of relation.
Methods. - Two general methods are at the command of the student from the first, - to
study at once from nature, or to copy. I think I may safely claim to speak for the great body of
teachers who are also professional artists, in saying that copying is a means of study rather
for the advanced student than for the beginner. You cannot begin too soon to study nature
with your own eyes, and to accumulate your own facts and observations and deductions. The
use of copying is not to find out how to paint, but to see how many ways there are of painting.
The great end of all study in painting is to train the eyes to see relations, to see them in
nature. It is not to see that there are relations, but to see where they are; to recognize and