CHAPTER XIII

THE ARTIST AND THE STUDENT

IT is a mistake to make pictures too soon. The nearest a student is likely to get to a picture is a careful study, and he will be as successful with this, if he makes it for the study of it, as if he made it for the sake of making a picture — better probably. The making of a picture for the picture's sake is dangerous to the student. His is less likely to be sincere. He is apt to “idealize,” to make up something according to some notion of how a picture should be, rather than from knowledge of how nature is. Real pictures grow from study of nature.

They are the outcome of maturity, not of the student stage. This implies something deeper than superficial facts, and a power of selection, — of choice and of purpose which must rest on a very broad and deep knowledge. The artist is always a student, of course; but he is not a student only. He is a student who knows what and why he wants to study; not one who is in process of finding out these things.

Aims. — It should be noted that the aim of the [108] student and the aim of the artist are essentially different. The student's first aim is to learn to see and represent nature's facts; to distinguish justly between relations. It is the training of the eye and the judgment. Imitation is not the highest art; but the highest art requires the ability to imitate as a mere power of representation. The mind must not be hampered in its expression by lack of knowledge and control of materials, and the painter who is constantly occupied with the problems he should have worked out in his student days, is just so far from being a master. He must have all his means perfectly at his command before he can freely express himself.

The acquirement of this mastery of means is the student's business. Everything he does which aids him in this makes him so much nearer to being a painter. But he must remember that he is still a student, and as he hopes to be a painter, must have patience with himself; must not hurry himself, must work as a student for the ends of a student.

All the facts of nature art uses. But she uses them as she needs them, simplifying, emphasizing, suppressing, combining as will best meet the necessities of the case in hand. All this requires the utmost knowledge, for it must be done in accordance not only with laws of art, but with the laws of nature. [109]

There are changes which can be made, and be right — made as nature might make them. Other changes which would be false to nature's ways, and so false to art also. For art works through nature always, and in accordance with her. This is the aim of the painter, to express ideas through nature, not to express notions about nature.

The facts of nature are the material of art; the words of the language in which the ideas of art are to be conveyed. But there are truths more important than these facts. The underlying sentiment of which they are the external manifestation, and which is the vivifying spirit of them. This is the true fact of the picture.

It is more important to give the sentiment of the thing than to give the fact of it; not merely because it is more truly represented so, but because the beauty is shown in showing the character. For the character of the fact is the beauty of the fact.

To bring out the beauty which may lie in the fact is the aim of the artist; to acquire the ability to do this is the aim of the student. [110]

CHAPTER XIV

HOW TO STUDY

THERE is a right and a wrong way to study, and it all centres around the fact that what you aim to learn is perception and expression. What you are to express you do not learn; you grow to that. But you must learn how to use all possible means; all the facts of visible nature, and all the characteristics of pigments. All qualities, color and form and texture, are but the means of your expression, and you must know how they may be used. Your perception and appreciation must be trained, and your mind stored with facts and relativities. Then you are ready to recognize and to convey the true inwardness you find in conditions commonplace to others.

You are to see where others see not; for it is marvellous how little the average eye sees of the really interesting things, how little of the visual facts, and how rarely it sees the picture before it is painted. All is material to the painter. It is not that “everything that is, is beautiful,” but that everything that is has qualities and possibilities of beauty; and these, when expressed, make [111] the picture, in spite of the superficial or obvious ugliness. In one sense nothing is commonplace, for everything exists visibly by means of light and color, and light and color are of the fundamental beauties. So arrange or look upon the commonplace that light and color are the most obvious qualities, and the commonplace sinks into the background — is lost. There is nothing like painting to make life fascinating; for there is nothing which brings so many charming combinations into your perception, as the habit of looking to find the possibilities of beauty in everything that comes within your view.

You must form the habit of looking always from the painter's point of view. The painter deals primarily with pigment, and what can be represented with pigment; chiefly color and light in the broadest sense, including form and composition, as things which give bodily presence and action to the possibilities of pigment. Shade, or shadow, of course, is an actuality in painting, because it is the foil of light and color, and furnishes the element of relation.

Methods. — Two general methods are at the command of the student from the first,-to study at once from nature, or to copy. I think I may safely claim to speak for the great body of teachers who are also professional artists, in saying that copying is a means of study rather for the advanced [112] student than for the beginner. You cannot begin too soon to study nature with your own eyes, and to accumulate your own facts and observations and deductions. The use of copying is not to find out how to paint, but to see how many ways there are of painting. The great end of all study in painting is to train the eyes to see relations, to see them in nature. It is not to see that there are relations, but to see where they are; to recognize and to measure and to judge them. Painting is the art of perception before everything, and when you copy you only see, accept, what some one else has already perceived. Copying does not help you to perceive, it can only help to show you how something can be expressed after it has been perceived, and that is not the vital thing in the study of painting. Handling, composition, management of color, technique of the brush generally, may be studied by copying. These only — and for these things it is useful and wise. But the beginner is not ready for these, for they are not the alphabet, but the grammar of painting.

Danger. — The danger of too early copying is that the student learns to set too much value on surface qualities rather than those to which the surface is merely incidental. With this is the danger (a serious one, and one hard to overcome the results of) that the student becomes clever as a producer of pictures before he has trained his [113] power to see. He becomes a student of pictures rather than a student of nature, and when in doubt will go to art rather than to nature for help and suggestion. Could anything be more fatal? Consider the things that student will have to unlearn before he can think a picture in terms of nature — the only healthy, the only prolific way of thinking. He sees always through other people's eyes, and thinks with other people's brains, and feels other people's emotions; that is not creation; that is the attitude for the spectator, not for the painter.

These things are all useful and good, but not for the beginner. Later, when you have found out something for yourself, when you have ground of your own to stand on, then you may not only without clanger, but with benefit, go to the work of other men to see the range of possible point of view and expression, to see the scope of technical material and individual adaptation; and so broaden your own mental view and sympathy, possibly reform or educate your taste, and perhaps get some hints which will help you in the solving of some future problem.

But rather than the undue sophistication which can result from unwise copying,-the over-knowledge of process and surface, and under-knowledge of nature, — is to be preferred a frank crudeness of work which is the result of an honest going to [114] nature for study. You should not expect a perfect eye for color and form too soon. Better a healthily youthful crudity of perception based on nature, and standing for what you have yourself studied and worked out, which represents your own attainment, than a greater show of knowledge which is insincere and superficial because it represents a mere acceptance of the facts set down by others; and not only that, but even with it an acceptance also of the actual terms used by those others.

Often copying is the most convenient way in which you can get help. There is really much to be learned from it, and you can make a picture serve as a criticism on your own work. Particularly in the matter of color or tone, as something to recognize the achievement of for its own sake. If you can recognize good color as such, aside from what it represents, if you can appreciate tone in a picture which is the work of some one else, you are so much the more likely to notice the lack of those qualities in your own work. So, too, there are qualities of brush-work which are always good, and some which are always bad. You can study the former positively, and the latter negatively, in studying and copying other pictures.

I have mentioned the training of your critical judgment as a necessity in your education. You [115] can do it slowly in learning to paint, but you can facilitate that training by copying and studying really good pictures, if you do it in the right way.

The Right Way. — So if you do copy, do it in the right way, so as to get all the real help out of it, and not so as to have to unlearn the greater part of it. Don't copy “to get a picture.” Don't make a copy which at a distance has a resemblance to the original, but which on a more careful study shows none of the qualities which make the original what it is. Not only see to it that the same subtleties of perception and representation are preserved in your copy, but that they are attained in the same way. Use the same brush-work or other execution. Use the same pigments in the same places, with the same vehicles; study the original with your brain as well as with your eyes and hands; try to see not only how the painter did a certain thing but why. So that as you work, you follow him in the working out of his problem, and make it your problem also. In this way you will get some real good from his picture, and not a mere canvas which has been of no use to you, nor can be of any satisfaction to any one else who knows a good picture (copy or original) when he sees it.