CHAPTER XXV: KINDS OF PAINTING
Why not recognize that conviction, intense personal attraction to
asserted sort of thing is the life of all art. How else can life get into art
than through the love of what you paint? A man may understand what
he does not love, but he will never infuse with life that which he does
not love. Understand it he should, if he would expresses it; but love it he
must, if he would have others love it.
You see it is not the thing, but the manner; not the fact, the what you can find in it; not
the object, but what you can express by it. “Un chef d’oeuvre vaut un chef d’oeuvre,”
because perfect delight in loveliness found in a small thing is as perfect as perfect delight
in loveliness found in great things. And still life and uninteresting as a fact, may be
fascinating if “seen through the medium of a temperament”.
Don’t let the idea get into your head that one thing is easier to do than another thing.
Perhaps it is, but it is a bad mental attitude to think so. An even then, you may find that
when you have worked out all that its easiness show you, some one with better
knowledge or insight may come along and point out undreamed-of beauties and
subtleties. And are they easy? To see an express the possibilities in easy things is the
hardest of all.
Classification. - Divide paintings into two classes, - those representing objects seen
out-of-doors, and those representing object in-doors. This is the most fundamental of all
classifications, and it is one which belongs practically to this century. Before this century
it was hardly thought of to distinguish out-door light from in-door light. Some of the
Dutchmen did it. But it is only in this century that the principle has made itself felt. It is
this which makes the difference of pitch or key so marked between the modern and the
ancient pictures. It has changed the whole color-scheme.
An out-door picture may be still painted in the studio, but it must be painted from
studies made out-doors. It is no longer possible to pose a model in a studio-light and
paint her so into a landscape. It was right to do it when it was done frankly, when the
world had not waked up to the fact that things look different in diffused in concentrated
lights. It is not right now. You cannot go back of your century. To be born too late is
more fatal than to be born too soon.
Whatever kind of picture you take in hand, remember that what distinguishes the
treatment of it from that of other pictures depends on the inherent character of it. That
the difficulties as well as the facilities in the working of it are due to the fact that it
demands a different application of the universal principles. Don’t think that landscape
drawing is easier than that of the figure because smudges of green and blue and brown
can be accepted as a landscape, while a smudge of pink will not do duty for the nude
figure. It is only that the drawing of the figure is more obvious, and variations from the
more obvious right are more easily seen.
You must study the necessities, the demands of treatment of the different sorts of
objects - see what is peculiar to each, and what common to all. You must find to what
aesthetic qualities each most readily lends itself, where the subtleties to be sought for,
and what are the problems they offer.