CHAPTER XI: TRADITION AND INDIVIDUALITY
A picture is made up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially
abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of mental vision without words.
This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the
means by which the ideal is brought into the picture.
Line, Mass, and Color. - Such are the qualities of line, dissociated from
representation; of mass, not as representing external forms; and color, considered as a
quality, not as yet expressed visibly in pigment, nor representing the color of any thing.
When these elements are combined they may make up such conceptions as proportion,
rhythm, repetition, and balance, with all the modifications that may come from still
further combination.
It is because these elements are qualities in themselves beautiful the actual objects not
beautiful may be made so in a painting, by being treated as color or line or mass, and so
given place on the canvas, rather than as being of themselves interesting.
A face, for instance, may be ugly as a face, yet be beautiful as color or light and shade in
the picture. These qualities, I say, do not represent - they do not necessarily even exist,
except in the mind to which they are the terms of its thought. Nevertheless, they are the
soul of the picture. For whatever the subject, or the objects chosen for representation, it
is by working out combinations of these elements, through and by means of those
objects, that the picture really is made.
The picture, as a work of art, is not the representation of objects making up by
subject, but a fabric woven of color, line, and mass; of form, proportion, balance,
rhythm, and movement, expressed through those actual objects in the picture which give
it visible form.
I do not purpose to go deeply into these matters here. Elsewhere, as they bear
practically on the subject in hand, as in the chapters on “Composition” and on “Color,” I
shall speak of them more fully. But I wish here to call attention to this abstract side of
painting in order to show the relation between the two classes of things, the one abstract
and the other concrete, which together are needed to make up a picture.
The concrete, or material, part of a picture includes all those things which you can
look at or feel on the canvas; and by seeing which you can also see the abstract qualities,
which do not visibly exist until made visible through the disposition of these tangible
things, on the canvas.
Beyond this is included all the technical qualities of expression; form, as drawing; all
representations of objects; the pigment by means of which color is seen; and all those
technical processes which produce the various kinds of surface in the putting on of paint,
and bring about the different effects of light and shade and color, form or accent.
In learning to paint, it is with these concrete things that you should concern yourself
mainly. The science of painting consists in the knowledge of how to be the master of all
the practical means of the craft. For it is with these that you must work, with these you