CHAPTER XVII: VALUES
The Term. - The word “values” is seldom understood by the average
individual, yet it should not be difficult to take in. It means simply the
relation between degrees of strength of light and dark, and of color
considered as light and dark. Translate the word into “importance,” and
think what it means. The relative importance, strength, force, power,
value, of a touch of color to make itself in the whole - that is its value.
A weak value is a note which does not make itself felt; a strong value is
one which does. A false value is a touch of color which has not its
proper relation to the other spots or masses of color in the picture,
considered as light and dark - not as color per se.
Importance. - As soon as you grasp this idea you see at once how important values
must be to the whole picture. It is not possible to do any good work, either in black and
white or color, without it. In one sense it is incidental to drawing. When you consider
drawing as the expression of modeling, the relative roundness of parts, and of relief, as
well as outline, values come into play to give the relations of planes of light and dark in
black and white. In this it becomes part of drawing.
Values and Color. - As soon, however, as color becomes a part of the picture, values
become the basis of modern painting as distinguished from the painting of previous
centuries. Values, of course, always existed wherever good painting existed, because you
cannot paint without recognizing the relations, the relative pitch and relative strength of
tones. But the word is never heard in relation to old masters. It is apparently of quite
modern coinage and use, and it probably was coined because of a new and greater
importance of the fact which it represents.
The older painters in painting a picture kept parts of a whole object - a head or a
figure, say - in relation to itself; and that was values - but restricted values. The whole
picture was arranged on the basis of arbitrary lighting, which entered into the scheme of
composition in that picture. This is not values, but what us generally understood by the
older writers when they speak of “chiaroscuro.”
The modern painter deals little with chiaroscuro. It is almost obsolete as a technical
word. Arbitrary arrangement of light and shade in a picture is not usual nowadays, and
consequently the word which expressed it has dropped somewhat into disuse. Basis of
Modern Painting. - Instead of the old composition in ordinary light and shade, the
modern painter accepts the actual arrangement of light as the basis of his picture, and
spreads the values over the whole canvas. In this way the quality of “value” becomes the
very foundation of the modern picture. For you cannot accept the ordinary or actual