The Painter in Oil Part 10

Or the pitch, relation to absolute light and dark, of each value may be the same, value for value, as in nature. This would be absolute values.

The attempt at absolute values was not made at all before Manet's time. A landscape was frankly painted down, or darker, from the pitch of nature, and an interior as frankly painted up, or lighter. In both cases the values had to be condensed,--telescoped, so to speak,--because pigment would not express the highest light nor the lowest dark in nature; and to have the same number of gradations between the highest and lowest notes in the picture, the amount of difference between each value had to be diminished--but _relatively_ they were the same. The degree of variation from the actual was the same all through.

With absolute values the painter aims at giving the _just note_,--the exact equivalent in value that he finds in nature. He tries to paint up to out-door light or paint down to in-door light.

=Close Values.=--This naturally calls for a fine distinction of tones--the utmost subtlety of perception of values. To paint a picture in which the highest light may not be white nor the lowest dark black, and yet give a great range and variety to the values all through the picture, the values must be _close_; must be studied so closely as to take cognizance of the slightest possible distinction, and to justly express it. This sort of thing was not thought of by the older painters. It is the distinguishing characteristic of modern painting.

It is a subst.i.tution of the study of _relation_ for the study of _contrast_.

=Study of Values.=--You see at once how important, how vital, the study of values is to painting. Even if you paint with arbitrary lighting, as is still done by many painters, especially in portraits, you have to consider and study them as they apply to _parts_ of your picture. You will find no good painter of old time who did not study relations. If you look at a Velasquez, you will find that he knew values, even though he did not use the word.

But if you are in touch with your century, if you would paint to express the suggestion you receive from the nature you study, or if you would convey the idea of truth to the world around you, as that world exists, frankly accepting the conditions of it, you will have to make the study of values fundamental to your work.

="The Fourth Dimension."=--You study values with your eyes only, but you cannot _measure_ values. Length, breadth, and thickness you can measure; but values const.i.tute what might be called a "_Fourth Dimension_," and you must measure it by your eye, and without any mechanical aid. Your eye must be trained to distinguish and judge differences of value.

=Helps.=--There are, however, several things which you can use to help you in training your eye to distinguish values. When you look for values you do not wish to see details nor things, you wish to see only ma.s.ses and relations. You must _unfocus_ your eye. The focussed eye sees the fact, and not the relation. Anything which will help you to see outlines and details less distinctly will help you to see the values more distinctly.

=Half-closed Eyes.=--The most common way is to half close the eyes, which shuts out details, but permits you to see the values. Some painters think this falsifies pitch, and prefer to keep the eyes wide open, but to focus them on some point _beyond_ the values they are studying. This is not so easy to do as to half close the eyes, but becomes less difficult with practice.

=The Blur Gla.s.s.=--An ordinary magnifying-gla.s.s of about 15-inch focus, which you can get at an optician's for fifteen or twenty cents, will blur the details, and help you to see the values, because it makes everything vague except the ma.s.ses. You can frame it for use by putting it between two pieces of cardboard with a hole in them, or you can do the same with two pieces of leather sewed around the edge. Of course the gla.s.s itself is all you need, but it will be easily broken if unprotected.

Do not try to look _through_ the gla.s.s at your subject, but _at_ the gla.s.s and the image on it.

=The Claude Loraine Mirror.=--This is a curved mirror with a black reflecting surface. The object is reflected on it, _reduced_ both in size and pitch. It concentrates the ma.s.ses and the color, and so helps to distinguish the relative values.

You can make a mirror of this sort for yourself by painting the back of a piece of plate gla.s.s black. The real Claude Loraine mirror is expensive.

=The Common Mirror= is also very helpful in distinguishing values. It reduces the size of things, and reverses the drawing so that you see your subject under different conditions, and a fresh eye is the result. Place the group and your painting side by side, if you are painting still life, and look at both at the same time in the mirror.

Do the same with a portrait and the sitter.

=Diminishing Gla.s.s.=--Much the same effect can be had by using a double concave lens. The picture is not reversed, but it is reduced, and the details eliminated.

In using any of these means you must remember that it is always the relations and not the things you are studying; and the most useful of these aids is the blur gla.s.s, because you cannot possibly see anything in it but the values and color ma.s.ses, everything else being blurred.

CHAPTER XVIII

PERSPECTIVE

There are two kinds of perspective, linear and aerial. The former has to do with the manner in which horizontal lines appear to converge as they recede from the foreground, and so produce the effect of distance. The latter has to do with the effect of distance, which is due to the successive gradations of gray in color noticeable in objects farther and farther away from the observer.

=Aerial Perspective.=--To the student, aerial is _color_ perspective, because of the modifications which colors undergo when removed to a distance. Modifications of tone are largely due to varying distance, and so aerial perspective is largely a matter of _values_. That they are due to the greater or less thickness of the atmosphere is only a matter of interest, not of importance, to the artist; the important thing to him is that the careful study of values is necessary to relief, perspective, and particularly, atmosphere and envelopment in a picture.

To the student, aerial perspective should be only a matter of observation and of the study of relations of color and value. There are no rules. The effect depends on greater or less density of atmosphere. Near objects are seen through a thin stratum of air, and farther objects through a thicker one. All you have to do to express it is to recognize the relative tones of color. Paint the colors as they are, as you see them in nature, and you need have no trouble with aerial perspective.

But though I say "this is all you have to do," don't imagine that I mean that it is always easy, or that it can be done without thought and study. You will have to use all your powers of perception if you wish to do good work in this direction. Especially on clear days, or in those climates where the air is so rare that objects at great distances seem near, you will find that atmospheric perspective is simply another name for close values. And close values, you remember, are the most subtle of relations of light and shade and color.

The only rule for aerial perspective is to use your eyes, and do nothing without a previous careful study of nature.

=Linear Perspective.=--For most kinds of painting, a technical knowledge of linear perspective is not necessary, although every painter should understand the general principles of it. In most cases all the exactness needed can be obtained by comparing all lines carefully with the pencil or brush handle held horizontally or vertically, and studying the angle any line makes with it. Apply to all objects in perspective the same observation that you do in any other kind of drawing, and you will have little trouble, as long as you are drawing from an object before you. But if you go into perspective at all, go into it thoroughly. A little perspective is a dangerous thing, and more likely to mix you up by suggesting all sorts of half-understood things than to be of any real help.

There are some kinds of subjects, however, which require a complete knowledge of all the rules and processes of perspective. Whenever you have to construct a picture from details stated but not seen; when you have a complicated architectural interior or exterior; when figures are to be placed at certain distances or in definite positions, and they are too numerous or the conditions are otherwise such that you cannot pose your models for this purpose; then you may have to make most elaborate perspective plans, and lay out your picture with great exactness, or the drawing which is fundamental to such a picture will not be true.

Such men as Gerome and Alma-Tadema plan their pictures most carefully, and so did Paul Veronese, and it requires a thorough and practical knowledge of perspective.

But this is not the place to teach you perspective. It is a subject which requires special study, and whole volumes are given to the elucidation of it. In a work of this kind anything more than a mention of the bearings of perspective on painting would be out of place. If you do not care to take up seriously the study of perspective, avoid attempting to paint any subjects which call for it; or, if you do care to study it, get a special work on that subject, give plenty of time to it, and study it thoroughly.

=Foreshortening.=--In this connection I may speak of something which is akin to perspective, yet the very reverse of it. As its name implies, foreshortening means the way in which anything seems shortened or in modified drawing as it projects towards you; while perspective is the manner in which lines appear as they recede from you. Like aerial perspective, the best way to study foreshortening is to study nature, not rules.

Perspective can be worked out by rule, foreshortening cannot. Pose your model, or if it be a branch of a tree, or anything of that sort, place yourself in the proper position with reference to it, and then study the drawing _as it appears_, thinking nothing of _how it is_; make your measurements, and place your lines as if there were no problem of foreshortening at all, but study the relations of lines, of size, and of values, and the foreshortening will take care of itself.

After all, foreshortening is only good drawing, and a good draughtsman will foreshorten well, while a bad draughtsman will not. Therefore, learn to draw, and don't worry about the foreshortening.

CHAPTER XIX

LIGHT AND SHADE

=Chiaroscuro.=--A few words about chiaroscuro will be useful. This is a term of great importance and frequent use with artists and writers up to within the last thirty or forty years. It has of late become almost unused. The reason for this was explained in the chapter on "Values." Nevertheless, it is well that the student should know what the word meant, and still means. Although he may hear and use it less frequently than if he had lived earlier in the century, the pictures, certain qualities of which no other word expresses, still exist, and are probably as immortal as anything in this world can be. He should know what those qualities are, and he should understand their relation to the work of to-day.

Chiaroscuro is described by an old writer as suggesting "a theme which is the most interesting, perhaps, in the whole range of the art of painting. Of vast importance, great extent, and extreme intricacy.

Chiaroscuro is an Italian compound word whose two parts, _chiar_ and _oscuro_, signify simply _bright_ and _obscure_, or _light_ and _dark_. Hence the art or branch of art that bears the name regards all the relations of light and shade, and this independently of coloring, notwithstanding that in painting, coloring and the clair-obscure are of their very nature inseparable. The art of clair-obscure, therefore, teaches the painter the disposition and arrangement in general of his lights and darks, with all their degrees, extreme and intermediate, of tint and shade, both in single objects, as the parts of a picture, and in combination as one whole, so as to produce the best representation possible in the best manner possible; that is, _so as to produce the most desirable effect upon the senses and spirit of the observers_. In a word, its end and aim are fidelity and beauty of imitation; its means, every effect of light; chromatic harmonies and contrasts; chromatic values, reflections; the degradations of atmospheric perspective, etc." The italics are mine.

You see at once that this covers a pretty wide field. But it is to be again noted that the use of chiaroscuro by the old painters meant not only the expression of the light and shade of nature, but the so arranging of the objects and the way that the light was permitted to fall on them, that certain parts of the picture became shadow, while the light was concentrated in some other part or parts. In this way the arrangement of the light and shade of a picture became a distinct element of composition, and a very important one. The _quality_ of "light" was something to be emphasized by contrast. It is stated (whether truly or not) that the proportion of light to dark was according to a definite rule or principle with certain painters, some permitting more, and some less, s.p.a.ce of canvas to be proportioned to light and to dark. The gradations of light and dark were studied of course; but the quant.i.ty of light spread over the canvas was calculated upon, so that the less s.p.a.ce of light and the greater the s.p.a.ce of dark, the more brilliant would be the main spot of light in the picture. They wrought with the _quality of light and shade_ as an _element_, just as they would with the quality of line or of color, considered apart from objects or facts they might represent.

=Arbitrary Lighting.=--This is the arbitrary light and shade spoken of in the chapter on "Values"; and although the older painters included what we now call values in their word chiaroscuro, it is this fact of arbitrary lighting as opposed to accepting the light as it does fall, or selecting those places or times where it does naturally fall as we would like it to, that makes the difference between modern painting generally and the older method, and has made chiaroscuro as a word and as a quality of painting so much a thing of the past.

=Light and Shade.=--But we may use the old word with a more restricted meaning. If we use it to mean literally light and shade, the way light falls on objects and the relief due to the light side and the shadow side of them, we get a use which implies a very important and practical matter for present study.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Eggs. White against White.=]

=Objects Visible by Light and Shadow.=--If you will put a white egg on a piece of white paper, with another white paper back of it, you will see that it is only because the egg obstructs the light, the side of it towards the light preventing the light rays from touching the other side, and so casting a shadow on itself and on the paper, that the egg is visible. You will also see, if you manipulate the egg, that according as the light is concentrated or diffused, or according to the sharpness of the shadow and light, is the egg more or less distinct.

=Contrast.=--Apply these facts to other objects, and you will see how important the principle of contrast is to the representation of nature. Not only contrast of light and shade, but contrast of color.

And you should make a study, both by setting up groups of objects in different lights, and by studying effects of lights wherever you are, of the possibilities and combinations of light and shadow.

=Constant Observation.=--The painter is constantly studying with his eyes. It is not necessary always to have the brush in your hand in order to be always studying. Keep your brain active in making observations and considering the relations in nature around you. The amount of material you can store up in this way is immense, to say nothing of the training it gives you in the use of your eyes, and in the practice of selection of motives for work. Schemes of color or composition are not usually deliberately invented within the painter's brain. They are in most cases the result of some suggestion from a chance effect noticed and remembered or jotted down, and afterwards worked out. Nature is the great suggester. It is the artist's business to catch the suggestion and make it his own. For nature seldom works out her own suggestions. The effect as nature gives it is either not complete, or is so evanescent as to be uncopyable. But the habit of constant receptivity on the part of the artist makes nature an infinite mine of possibilities to him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =The Ca.n.a.l.= _Burleigh Parkhurst._ Effect of diffused out-door light to be compared with effect of studio light in "Bohemian Woman," and artificial light in "Woman Sewing by Lamplight."]

=Perception.=--Only by continually observing and judging of contrasts and relations can the eye be trained to perceive subtle distinctions; yet it must be so trained, for all good work is dependent on these distinctions.

=Effects of Light.=--It is important to study the different qualities of light. Take, for instance, the difference of character on a sunny day and on a gray day. On the former, fine distinctions of color are less p.r.o.nounced; they are lost in the contrasts of sunlight and shadow. On a gray day the light is diffused; contrast is less, but the finer distinctions are more marked. For the study of the subtleties of color choose a gray day.