CHAPTER XVI: DRAWING
Drawing is basic to painting. Good painting cannot exist without it. I do
not mean that there must be always the outline felt or seen, but that the
understanding of relative position, size, and from bust be felt; that is
drawing. Drawing is not merely form, but implies these other things, and
painting is not legible without them. They go to the completeness of
expression. Movement, and action, as well as composition and all that it
implies or includes depends upon drawing, and they are vital to a
painting.
Importance of Drawing. - Much has been said and written of drawing as being the
most important thing in a picture; so much so, as to excuse all sorts of shortcomings in
other directions. This is a mistake. Drawing is essential because you cannot lay on color
to express anything without the colors taking shape, and this is drawing. But still the
color itself, and other characteristics which are not strictly a part of drawing, are quite as
important to painting, simply because the thing without them could not be a painting at
all: it would be a drawing.
All painters fall into two classes, - those who are most sensitive to the refinements of
form, and those most sensitive to refinements of color and tone. But the great colorists,
the painter par excellence, the workers in pigment before everything else, those who find
their sentiment mainly there, these are the men who have made painting what it is, and
who have brought out its possibilities. And looking at painting from their point of view,
drawing cannot be more important than other qualities.
Neglect of Drawing. - Great artists have sometimes not been perfect draughtsmen.
They have been careless of exactness of form. But they have always been strong in the
great essentials of drawing, and they have made up for such deficiencies as they showed,
by their greatness in other directions. Delacroix, for instance, sometimes let his
temperament run him into carelessness of form in his hurry to express his
temperamental richness of color. These things are superficial to the greater ends he had
in view, but we have to distinctly forgive it in accepting the picture. And a great colorist
may be so forgiven; he makes up for his fault by other things. But there is no forgiveness
for the student or the painter who is simply a poor draughtsman.
The effect of neglect of drawing is to make a weak picture. A painter, who was also an
exceptionally fine draughtsman, once spoke of work weak in drawing as resembling
“bone turkey.” Lack of firmness, indecision, characterize the painter who cannot draw.
Those firm, simple, but effective touches which are evident somewhere in the work of all
good painters, are impossible without draughtsmanship. They mean precision. Precision
means position. Position means drawing.