The Painter in oil

Bright Pictures. - Whatever may be thought of the work of those painters who
are called “impressionists,” it must be recognized that they have taught us how some
things may be possible. And the present quality of brightness will necessarily be to a
certain extent a permanent one in art. For like it or not as we may, it is true - true to
a certain great, fundamental characteristic of nature. For outdoor light is bright,
even on a gray day. The luminosity of color is too great to be represented with dark
paint or lifeless color. And once this fact is recognized, it is a fact which will
inevitably influence all kinds of work. What is possible and right at a certain stage of
knowledge or recognition may be impossible when other points of view have once
been accepted. We see only what we look for, and we look for on1y what we expect to
see or are interested to see. You cannot go out-of-doors now and paint as you would
have painted a hundred years ago. Then you would have painted what you saw then;
but you would not have seen nor looked for things which you cannot help seeing
now. For our eyes have been opened to new qualities and new facts, and once the
eyes have been opened to them they can never be closed to them again.
Average Observation. - I say we see only what we look for, what we expect to
find; anything out of the ordinary is hard to believe at first. In looking at nature the
average observer does not even see the obvious. Certain general facts he accepts in
the general, but as a rule there is no real recognition of what is there; no perception
of the relations of things; no analysis; no real seeing, only a conventional acceptance
of a thing as a thing. Men look at nature with one idea, and at a picture of nature
with an entirely different idea.
Nature in the picture is to most people just what they have I been accustomed to see
in other pictures. They get their idea or how nature looks from those pictures, and if
you show them a picture differently conceived they have difficulty in taking it in.
For this reason the “bright picture” does not “look right.” I remember being asked
by a man in a modern exhibition what I thought or “these bright pictures.” When I
asked which pictures he had reference to, I found that he meant the work of a man
whose whole aim in painting landscape was, as he once said to me, to get “the just
note” in color and value. One would think that the fact that the whole force of an
extremely able and sincere mind was directed to that purpose, would produce a
picture with at least truth of observation. Yet this was not what my passing
acquaintance wanted to see. The picture he liked, which “had some nature in it,” as
he pointed out to me, was an extremely commonplace landscape with a black tree
against a garish sky, reflected in a pool of water. The “bright picture” seemed to me
exquisitely gray and quiet, though high in key, and the one with “nature in it,” harsh
and crude, but conventional; and that was just the point. The average observer wants
to see, and does see, in nature what he is accustomed to accept in a picture as nature.
But a painter cannot go on such a basis. He may paint a dark picture, but he must
find a subject which is dark to do so. He may not paint daylight with false pitch and
false relations, and say he sees it so. With every liberty for personal seeing, there are
still certain facts so established and obvious that personality must take them and
deal with them, must use them and not ignore them, in its self-expression.