Conclusion

WHETHER or not the student with the inner aesthetic vision can be considered an artist unless he makes some attempt at personal expression is a matter of controversy. Perhaps the artist is the person with aesthetic ideas who expresses them to prove that they really “happen”!

If we put all commercial considerations, commissions, and the like aside, we shall probably agree that something of this inner aesthetic feeling is the first urge towards expression. The second desire (a long way second) of the real innovators is to communicate such ideas to others.

Even when technique has been mastered early in an artist’s life the question of whether his conceptions are given their proper channel of expression is perplexing.

Many an artist whose ideas are conceived in planes, in cubic content, in facets, or in mass relations, paints when perhaps architecture or sculpture would have allowed more complete expression of his inspiration. Others, whose ideas come in tone-pattern, might be well advised to give up etching. 

Then there is the man who scrupulously and conscientiously paints “what he sees,” who paints without selection—the stickler for fragmentary truth. We all know this man and sometimes feel that a camera should be his weapon. It is extremely unlikely that the photographers would admit him to their ranks, however. It is our business as artists as composers, to make sure that our ideas arrive in their final state as pictures, illustrations, or decorations with the least amount of vacillation en route. Most artists, by tradition, by personal experience, and by giving little thought to the matter, begin their pictures by form.

It is admitted that forms, the sweeping rhythmic lines that give significant intention to a composition, are often put down first, and in most cases rightly so. The ideas may really come that way. After the limiting forms we allow tone and colour to enter into the scheme—to “improve” it.

Such a plan of work is so obvious and so well established that it seems almost like sacrilege to suggest that such a method of approach does not always succeed. Yet if the attist is critical and honest, as he must be, he knows that ideas occasionally elude him. They have slipped away somewhere in the approach, and it is this fact that should justify the student in arming himself with two other effective methods of beginning a composition. Sometimes an idea can come into being better if we approach our scheme through tone.

Ideas that ate by their nature evanescent, mysterious, or romantic seem eminently suitable for this approach. A delightful pattern of light and dark, a complicated scheme of tone, is often realized better if we adopt this method. Form must, obviously, enter into such an approach, yet with a little thought on the part of the student it can be kept in abeyance or delayed. Such forms that we know must eventually be drawn can, for a while, be kept at the back of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci was fond of nebulous blots on walls or paper, and after his powerful imagination had pondered on them he amplified and encouraged them until forms emerged. In such a case the forms wete suggested as the tones developed. It is quite possible—indeed, we can say preferable—on occasions to keep the form-content of an idea held back in order that the areas of tones, the subtleties of dark and light, may appropriately convey the idea.

When one is sketching out of doots, significant forms can sometimes be given a rest and a significant tonal pattern, a spotting, take their place, making an approach to natural representation by tonal mass.

Form, when it comes first, is inclined to pre-distribute the tone unfavourably. It requires courage to knock out the forms in order to re-arrange the unsatisfactory tonal scheme, whereas if a beginning had been made with tone, with a special eye on the tonal pattern, the forms could take their proper place as the work proceeded.

Colour as the approach to an idea is almost unknown to students. Many artists, teachers, and att critics have considered colour as a sort of additional flavour. Forms, and consequently the tonal areas, ate usually given the first consideration. The saturations of the hues in such a method would be limited.

Although hues can be freely chosen to fill all the areas of such a pattern, the saturations are governed by the areas. Thus freedom of colour is curtailed considerably. Vitality is usually restored by widening the range of tones or strengthening the forms, thus effecting a compromise. Corot writes: “The two principal things to study are form and then values. These two things are my support and are important in art. Colour and execution put charm into one’s work.”

Many other painters and art critics have come to similar conclusions. There is such stability and intellectual certainty in the form method of apptoach to painting that no one can be blamed for adopting this hereditary track.

Some artists have felt, however, that if there is one thing that differentiates painting from all the other forms of art— sculpture, architecture, etching, etc.—it is the quality that can be given to colour. Perhaps painting is the one permanent medium whereby colour can teceive its best expression.

Most of us have on occasion felt the delirious joy that is to be found in colour. We have tried to retain such ideas, but by the time forms have been arranged “to contain” the colours a disappointment is experienced; the quantities have gone wrong and a compromise has to be made. It is possible to some extent to avoid this limitation, but we must give up our hereditary methods of approach. We must take our colours first, spread them on, making them vary in hue, add out discords, and give variety to the tonal side of colour. We must “live” in colour, and to the best of our ability fight the tendency to bind up of to give boundaries to such areas.

The work must remain nebulous and mobile until the “colour-sensation” we felt has arrived. Nor must it be thought that such a procedure drives one into vague, dreamy work, or that such results will be inevitably weak.

All the time we must attempt to keep the “form-content in such an approach submerged.

If colour is our objective, we should attempt it first, adding our forms last after the hues and the saturations we desire have been gradually worked up. By such means we make the colours we want occupy areas where their desirable saturations will be in order.

Monticelli, Turner, and many other artists, even if they did not use such an approach, might presumably have worked in this way. The three methods of approach here outlined are illustrated in Plate XXXV. 

Once the composition or design of a picture has been arrived at, no matter which approach was used to bring it into being, the painting of a picture should be a fairly straightforward task. In the old days it was the master who composed the picture in line, tone, and colour, whereas in many instances the actual painting was looked upon as a secondary affair, a job. The apprentices of those days possessed considerable technical efficiency in drawing, painting, colour-mixing, enlarging, and the other details of the craft. It was only when the pupil could compose that he became a possible rival to his master.