Word painting

“ Painting, as the most ornate of the three, owing to its greater power of expression and beauty of colour, must nevertheless be employed to decorate, in the true sense of the word, the plain spaces in a building, and in the largest and simplest manner, without any definite attempts to represent the true facts of nature, or at least it should be suggestive of such facts rather than descriptive of them. ”

“ But while the great, the practical use of line and color followed parallel lines with sound and got farther and farther away from imitative features, the art of painting, as it is commonly called, developed in just the opposite direction, it became more and more imitative, until of late years it would seem that the last word has been said in the reproduction of natural objects and natural light and color effects. ”

“ To animate painting by qualities purely sensual, to make a lavish display of the gorgeous splendor of brilliant stuffs, rich brocades and velvets, and gold and silver plate, to paint in glowing rosy hues and amid voluptuous surroundings the plumpness of naked flesh, aroused his indignation and his repugnance as if such art were a desecration. ”

“ Though it be allowed that elaborate harmony of colouring, a brilliancy of tints, a soft and gradual transition from one to another, present to the eye, what an harmonious concert of music does to the ear, it must be remembered, that painting is not merely a gratification of the sight. ”

“ Painting is not a mere music of color and line expressive of abstract and objectless emotions alone, but a poetry, which, through the picturing of objects to which emotions are attached, renders the latter concrete and definite. Not mere feeling, such as a color or a line by itself can convey, but feeling in the presence of nature, which can be expressed only when color and line are made into a recognizable image of nature, is the substance of painting. ”

“ Make a water-color painting of a simple piece of still life, choosing a color not too brilliant. Make the entire drawing with the brush, trying not to "work" your colors until the life and freshness are lost. ”

“ They were seeking effects of line, light, color—mere sensuous and pictorial effects, in which religion and classicism played secondary parts. They believed in art for art's sake; that painting was a creation, not an illustration ”

“ The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with a view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. ”

“ The graphic branches of painting, owe everything to colour, which, if it does not constitute a picture, is its flesh and blood. Without it, the finest performances remain lifeless skeletons, and yield no pleasure. ”

“ Only one painting served as a link to connect the past and present—a crafty, mysterious head with haggard and gaunt features, cheekbones punctuated with a comma of paint, the hair overspread with pearls, a painted neck rising stiffly from the fluted ruff. ”

“ It is not in the style he lays the ink that the poet finds the expression, its thickness or its thinness bears no resemblance to his soul, but the intimacies of a painter’s genius are expressed in the actual substance of his paint and in the touch with which he lays it. So in painting the mysterious virtue arises which among painters is called “quality,” a certain beauty of surface resultant from the perfection of method. ”

“ But what is art in painting! Is all poetry and sentiment in a painting to be expressed by the actual handling of the colours, the process of handling and the mechanism of brushwork! Can all the poetry be contained in the objects themselves and the way they are painted? It has become the fashion of artists to say that they are painters, not artists.
Now what do they mean by this? What is a painter? A person who can handle the brush and who knows colour, or, in other words, who masters the tool of his trade. And what is an artist? The term artist is not limited to one profession. ”

“ That represents a certain style of drawing or painting, a conventional kind of art. But, if we are honestly trying to draw light and shade, if we are drawing varied tones, painting not merely flat washes of colour, then we cannot ignore the truth. ”

“ Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious tints. ”

“ Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive. We receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act.
To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a pre-eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, language in its most purged form, its remote associations and suggestions, its double and treble lights. These appliances sculpture cannot command. ”

“ The subject matter or content of painting is determined by its language, color, and line. These, as we have seen, by an imitation more or less exact, represent nature, the world of concrete things as directly presented to us in vision, colored and shapely. ”

“ Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas. ”

“ Do we conclude that a piece of painting is made by chance when we see in it either shades, or even some careless touches? The painter, we say, might have better finished those carnations, those draperies, those prospects. ”

“ Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more multiform. ”

“ First, the painting is something deliberately constructed and composed, the artist himself controlling and composing the colors and shapes, and hence their values also; while the natural beauty is an immediate reaction to given stimuli, each observer giving meaning to his sensations without intention or effort. ”

“ The best painting has form and character in every brush-touch.
OIL COLOR. Instruction in oil painting is usually limited to what might be called drawing in paint. Of course the student must know his pigments, how to obtain hues and values by mixing, how to use brushes, how to sketch in, and all the elementary details,—but this is but a beginning. Expression of an idea or emotion depends upon appreciation of art structure; the point is not so much [pg 128] how to paint, as how to paint well. Artists often say that it matters not how you get an effect, if you only get it. ”

“ Let them compare the patient finish, the complete thought given to every detail in the works of the greatest painters, the accumulated light and depth, the abounding life, with the hasty, jagged, contemporary manner of painting, straining into harshness from want of patience, tense and angular from want of real vitality, exhausted from the absence of inward repose. ”

“ For poets' and painters' minds are the same, and I infer that painting is superior to poetry from this:—that the painter possesses with the poet a vigorous imagination, where the poet stops, while the painter exceeds him in the mechanical and very difficult part of the art, that of handling the pencil. ”

“ But if any one desire the meretricious painting of warm light and cool yet not hard shade, the effect of colour, with the twitching of triangles, the spangles glittering, and all the arrangement contrived to take the eye, then he can have it here as well as noble sculpture. ”

“ The channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life, nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which does not depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of colour. ”

“ This magical result of appearance can, however, be carried to such a pitch, that in contrast to it the exhibition of content becomes a matter of indifference, and painting tends to pass over, in the mere charm and perfume of its colour tones, and the contrast, fusion, and play of their harmonies, into the art of music, precisely as sculpture, in the elaboration of its reliefs, tends to associate itself with painting. ”

“ I have taken up the art simply as I found it exemplified in the practice of the most approved painters. That approbation which the world has uniformly given, I have endeavoured to justify by such proofs as questions of this kind will admit; by the analogy which painting holds with the sister arts, and consequently by the common congeniality which they all bear to our nature. ”

“ In this sensibility to colour we find a second and distinct origin of the art of painting.
What a perspective does a glance back at the development of painting afford! Painting, an art that on a flat surface can suggest to illusion the presence of solid forms with length, breadth and thickness; that on the area of a few square inches can convey the impression of the vast spaces of the universe, and carry the eye from receding plane to plane till the persons or objects that people them grow too minute for the eye to discern ”

“ What I desire to enforce is the great truth that within the art of painting there exists, flourishes and advances a noble and glorious science which is essential and progressive.”
“Any one who can learn to write can learn to draw;” and every one who can learn to draw should learn to compose pictures. ”

“ The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. ”

“ In producing a painting of an object, the early artists mixed colored paints and spread them according to taste on stretched canvas or on the walls or windows of buildings. You know that our artists simply throw light and darkness into space in the necessary variations, and the effect is all that could be desired in the way of imitating nature. ”

“ The brush will 98not reveal and can scarcely do more than hint at things without form. It is perhaps possible for painting to be as clear-cut and as definite in its ideas as literature, but, as a matter of fact, it seldom is so. More often there is suggestion than realization, and the poetry comes to us in an almost indescribable feeling or sentiment of the painter. ”

“ An artist's eye is sensitive to beauty of color and line and form wherever he sees it. The student's should be also. No artist but has found delight in painting still life. No student should think it beneath his serious study.
[Pg 274] Procedure.—Study painting first in still-life compositions. When you set up your canvas first, and set your palette, let it be in front of a few simple objects grouped interestingly; or, better, set up a single jar or a book, with a simply arranged background for color contrast. All the problems of manipulation are there for you to study. ”

“ Knowledge of the harmony of analogy, a simple, effective, and ready way of varying painting, together with a knowledge of contrasts, the finer, higher, and superior system of effecting the most adorable and fetching color adornment, is an indispensable help to the painter, to attain which he can well afford to make many sacrifices. ”

“ The art of painting awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light) , firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour; secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a comprehension of the artist’s intention ”

“ The development of painting in the last century is a striking illustration of such continuity. The painters sought to develop a definite tradition, thinking of themselves as carrying further the work of their predecessors. Of course these developments were largely technical in character, but beauty itself is the fruition of technique. ”

“ There are three things which constitute the art of painting, which make it interesting to the public, which give it permanence and rank among the efforts of human genius. They are, first, gusto or expression: i.e. the conveying to the eye the impressions of the soul, or the other senses connected with the sense of sight, such as the different passions visible in the countenance, the romantic interest connected with scenes of nature, the character and feelings associated with different objects. ”

“ When painting, if you feel that your colours are not what they should be, that your tones are dark, or too uneven, that your highest light is not 'in tune' with your middle light—take a piece of smoked glass and look through this at the reflection of your painting. ”