The Painter in oil

Structure. - Have your foreground details well understood in drawing and value.
This does not require the drawing of leaf and twig, but it does require structure.
Everything requires structure. Structure is fundamental to character. If you will not
take the trouble to study the character of any least thing you put in, don’t put it in at all.
Nothing is important enough to put in, if it is not important enough to have its character
and its purpose in the picture understood.
I spoke of structure in speaking of the head. If I said nothing but “structure, structure,
structure” to the end of the section, you would get the impression of what is the most
important thing in drawing. If you will look for and find the line and proportion
expressing the anatomy which makes the thing fulfil its particular function in the world,
you will understand its character, and that is what is important everywhere.
Work In Season. - Make your picture in the season which it represents- I don’t say
that a good summer picture may not be made in winter; but I do say that you are more
likely to express the summer quality while the summer is around you. There is too much
half painting of pictures, and then leaving them to be “finished up” afterwards.
Of course you can make all your studies and sketches, and then begin and finish the
picture from them. If you are careful to have plenty of material, to accumulate all your
facts with the intention of working from those facts, all right; but it would be better if
you were to work your picture in the season of it, as long as you are a student at least.
For until you have had a great deal of experience, you will find when you come to paint
your picture that some very much needed material you have neglected to collect, and you
cannot safely supply it from memory. If this occurs in the time of year represented in the
picture, you can just go out and study it.
Out-of-door Landscapes. - The most important movement in modern art, the most
important in its effects on all kinds of work, is what I have mentioned as the plein air
movement. It was thought by some clear-headed men that the best way to paint an out-
door picture was to take their canvases out-of-doors to paint it. Instead of working from
a few color sketches and many pencil studies, they painted the whole picture from first to
last in the open air. Working in this way, certain qualities got into the pictures
unavoidably. Necessarily the color was fresher and truer. Necessarily there was more
breadth and frankness, and less conventionality and mere picture-making. The spirit of
the open got onto the canvas, and the whole type of picture was changed. For the first
time out-of-door values were studied as things in themselves interesting and important.
The result on landscape pictures was that pictures painted in the studio seemed unreal
and insincere, and that men looked and studied less for the making of pictures, and
more for what nature had to reveal.
It would be a good thing for you as a student if you would do as these men did
whenever you want to do any work at landscape, whether for itself or for background. If
you wish to pose any kind of figure with landscape background, pose and paint your
figure out-of-doors. Make sketches as much as you please, make studies as much as you
please; but make them for the suggestions and knowledge they will give you, and not for
material to be used in painting a picture at home. For your picture, start, and go on with,
and finish it out-doors; you will get a feeling of freshness and truth in your work which
you cannot get any other way. You will also acquire a power of concentration and of
selection and rejection in the presence of nature which is of the utmost importance to
you.