The Painter in oil

to measure and to judge them. Painting is the art of perception before everything,
and when you copy you only see, accept, what some one else has already perceived.
Copying does not help you to perceive, it can only help to show how something can
be expressed after it has been perceived, and that is not the vital thing in the study of
painting. Handling, composition, management of color, technique of the brush
generally, may be studied by copying. These only - and for these things it is useful
and wise. But the beginner is not ready for these, for they are not the alphabet, but
the grammar of painting.
Danger. - The danger of too early copying is that the student learns to set too
much value on surface qualities rather than those to which the surface is merely
incidental. With this is the danger (a serious one, and one hard to overcome the
results of) that the student becomes clever as a producer of pictures before he has
trained his power to see. He becomes student of pictures rather than a student of
nature, and when in doubt will go to art rather than to nature for help and
suggestion. Could anything be more fatal? Consider the things that student will have
to unlearn before he can think a picture in terms of nature - the only healthy, the
only prolific way of thinking. He sees always through other people’s eyes, and thinks
with other people’s brains, and feels with other people’s emotions; that is not
creation; that is the attitude for the spectator, not for the painter.
These things are all useful and good, but not for the beginner. Later, when you
have found out something for yourself, when you have ground of your own to stand
on, then you may not only without danger, but with benefit, go to work of other men
to see the range of possible point of view and expression, to see the scope of technical
material and individual adaptation; and so broaden your own mental view and
sympathy, possibly reform or educate your taste, and perhaps get some hints which
will help you in the solving of some future problem.
But rather than the undue sophistication which can result from unwise copying, —
the over-knowledge of process and surface, and under-knowledge of nature, — is to
be preferred a frank crudeness of work which is the result of an honest going to
nature for study. You should not expect a perfect eye for color and form too soon.
Better healthily youthful crudity of perception based on nature, and standing for
what you have yourself studied and worked out, which represents your own
attainment, than a greater show of knowledge which is insincere to and superficial
because it represents a mere acceptance of the facts set down by others; and not only
that, but even with it an acceptance also of the actual terms used by those others.
Often copying is the most convenient way in which you can get help. There is
really much to be learned from it, and you make a picture serve as a criticism on
your own work. Particularly in the matter of color or tone, as something to recognize
the achievement of for its own sake. If you an recognize good color as such, aside
from what it represent, if you can appreciate tone in a picture which is the work of
some one else, you are so much the more likely to notice the lack of those qualities in
your own work. So, too, there are qualities of brush-work which are always good,
and some which are always bad. You can study the former positively, and the latter
negatively, in studying and copying other pictures.