The Painter in Oil Part 6

CHAPTER IX

STUDIOS

A painting-room is always a matter of serious consideration, and to the beginner one of difficulty. The arrangement of light is not easy, and a special window is almost always out of the question; yet in some way the light must be so managed that the canvas is not covered with reflected lights which prevent one from seeing what the paint is really like.

=The North Light.=--The first thing to be looked for is a steady light which will be always about the same, and not be sunny part of the time and in the shade the rest. A window looking to the north for this reason is generally selected. The sun does not come into it, and the light is diffused and regular. The effect of the light in the studio is cool, but colors are justly seen in it, and the light that falls on any object or model in it will be always the same. If there is to be a skylight, this should be arranged in the same way. The sash must not be flat, but must be nearly enough to the vertical to prevent the sun's direct rays from entering, and it must for that purpose face to the north. This makes the skylight practically a high north light in the roof or ceiling, and that is what it should be.

Whether the sash is above the ceiling or just below it, in the roof or in the wall, is of no particular importance. The thing to be seen to is that it is high enough for the light to enter above the head of the painter, and that it be so directed that only north light can come in.

The size of the window is also to be carefully considered. It should not be too large. Too much light will be sure to interfere with the proper control of light and shade on your model, and too little will make your painting too dark. The position of the window with reference to the shape of the room has to do with this. The most probable form of a room is long and narrow. For painting it is better that the window be in the middle of the end wall, high up, rather than in the middle of the side wall. You will find that you can more easily get distance from your model, and at the same time get the light both on him and on your canvas. But a painting-room should not be too narrow.

About one-third longer than it is wide, with the window in one end, will give you a good light, and the further end of the room will not be too dark, as it would be apt to be if the room were longer.

Preferably, too, the window should be to the left of the centre of the wall rather than to the right, as you face it; so that when you are as near the side wall as you can get, with the light over your left shoulder (as it should be), the light will strike on the canvas well, and not too directly on the front of the model. It will give you a better lateral position to the window, in other words. If you have to accept a window in a side wall, this is even more to be looked for. If the window is to the right of the centre, you will have a strong side-light on your model; but you will either have no light on your canvas, or you will have to turn so that the light falls on your canvas from the right, which is awkward, as the paint is in the shadow of the hand and brush which puts it on.

The height of the lower part of the window should be at least six feet from the floor, and for ordinary purposes the proportion of window s.p.a.ce to floor s.p.a.ce should be about one-tenth. It is impossible to give a rule; but if the floor is about twelve feet by sixteen, say, a window about five feet by four will be enough, or six and a half by three if it is placed horizontally. If you want intense light with strong contrast of light and shade on your model, have the window smaller and squarer, and place your easel just under it, where the light is good. The rest of the room will be dark. Better have the window large enough, and have it so curtained that you can cut off as much light as you need to. All this is if you are going to make yourself a window; in which case you will think well before you commit yourself. More probably you will have to get along as best you can with the ordinary room and the ordinary window. In which case get a high room with the window running up as close to the ceiling as possible, and facing north, then you can curtain it so as to control the light.

=Arrangement of Ordinary Windows.=--For a good working light you should have only one window in your room; for the light coming in from two openings will make a crossing of rays which will not only interfere with the simplicity of the effect of light and shade on your model, but will make a glare on your canvas. You can either close the light out of the right-hand window, or, better, arrange a curtain so the light from one window will not fall on the same place as that from the other.

When you are working from still life or from a model this is often an advantage, for you can have a strong side-light on the model, and a second light on the canvas. To arrange this, have a sort of crane made of iron, shaped like a carpenter's square, which will swing at right angles with the wall, the arm reaching, say, six feet into the room.

Swing this by means of staples well up to the ceiling, so that the light cannot get over it, and near to the right-hand window. From this arm you can hang a thick, dark curtain, which will cover and shut out the light from the right-hand window when swung back over it. If you want to pose your model in the light of that window, while you paint in that of the other, swing the curtain out into the room at right angles to the wall, and it will prevent a cross light from the two windows; so that when the model is posed back of the curtain the light from that window will not fall on the canvas, nor the light from the other fall on the model.

The light will be best on your picture coming from well above you as you work. There will then be no reflections on the paint. You may find it necessary to cover entirely the lower half of the window which gives your painting-light. You will find it useful to have a shade of good solid holland, arranged with the roller at the bottom, and a string running up through a pulley at the top; so that you may pull the shade _up_ from the bottom instead of _down_ from the top, and so cut off as much of the lower part of the window as is necessary.

If you need the light from the lower part of the window, you may make a thin curtain of muslin to cover the lower sash, which will let the light through, but diffuse the rays and prevent reflection.

=The Size of the Studio.=--Of course a large studio is a good thing, but it is not always at one's command. But you should try to have the room large enough to let you work freely, and have distance enough from the model. The size that I have mentioned, twelve feet by sixteen, is as small as one should have, and one that you can almost always get. If the room is smaller than that, you cannot do much in it, and fifteen by twenty will give ample s.p.a.ce.

PART II

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

CHAPTER X

MENTAL ATt.i.tUDE

There is a theoretical and a practical side to art. The business of the student is with the practical. Theories are not a part of his work. Before any theoretical work is done there is the bald work of learning to see facts justly, in their proper degree of relative importance; and how to convey these facts visibly, so that they shall be recognizable to another person.

The ideals of art are for the artist; not for the student. The student's ideal should be only to see quickly and justly, and to render directly and frankly.

Technique is a word which includes all the material and educational resources of representation. The beginner need bother himself little with what is good and what is bad technique. Let him study facts and their representation only. Choice of means and materials implies a knowledge by which he can choose. The beginner can have no such knowledge. Choice, then, is not for him; but to work quite simply with whatever comes to hand, intent only on training the eye to see, the brain to judge, and the hand to execute. Later, with the gaining of experience and of knowledge, for both will surely come, the determination of what is best suited for the individual temperament or purpose will work itself out naturally.

The student should not allow the theoretical basis of art to interfere with the directness of his study of the material and the actual.

Nevertheless, he should know the fact that there is something back of the material and the actual, as well as in a general way what that something is.

Because the student's business is with the practical is no reason why he should remain ignorant of everything else. It is important that he should think as a painter as well as work as a painter. If he has no thought of what all this practical is for, he will get a false idea of his craft. He will see, and think of, and believe in, nothing but the craftsmanship: that which every good workman respects as good and necessary, but which the wise workman knows is but the perfect means for the expression of thought.

Some consideration, then, of the theoretical side of art is necessary in a book of this kind. A number of considerations arise at the outset, about which you must make up your mind:--

Is judgment of a picture based on individual liking?

Can you hope to paint well by following your own liking only?

Is it worth your while to try to do good work?

Can you hope to do good work at all?

You must decide these questions for yourself, but you must remember that it depends upon how you decide them whether your work will be good or bad.

To take the last consideration first, you may be sure that it is worth while to try to do good work, and mainly because you may hope to do as good work as you want to do. That is, precisely as good work as you are willing to take the trouble to learn to do. Talent is only another name for love of a thing. If you love a thing enough to try to find out what is good, to train your judgment; and to train your abilities up to what that judgment tells you is good, the good work is only a matter of time.

You will notice that you must train your judgment as well as your ability; not all at once, of course. But how can you hope to do good work if you do not know what good work is when you see it? If you have no point of view, how can you tell what you are working for, what you are aiming at? And if you do not know what you are aiming at, are you likely to hit anything?

=Train Your Judgment.=--Let us say, then, that you must train your critical judgment. How are you to set about it?

In the first place, don't set up your own liking as a criterion. Make up your mind that when it comes to a choice between your personal taste and that of some one who may be supposed to know, between what you think and what has been consented to by all the men who have ever had an opinion worthy of respect, you may rest a.s.sured that you are wrong. And when you have made up your mind to that, when you have reached that mental att.i.tude, you have taken a long step towards training your judgment; for you have admitted a standard outside of mere opinion.

Another att.i.tude that you should place your mind in is one of catholicity--one of openness to the possibility of there being many ways of being right. Don't allow yourself to take it for granted that any one school or way of painting or looking at things is the only right one, and that all the other ways are wrong. That point of view may do for a man who has studied and thought, and finally arrived at that conclusion which suits his mind and his nature,--but it will not do for a student. Such an att.i.tude is a sure bar to progress. It results in narrowness of idea, narrowness of perception, and narrowness of appreciation. You should try all things, and hold fast to that which is good. And having found what is good, and even while holding fast to it, you should remember that what is good and true for you is not necessarily the only good and true for some one else. You must not only hold to your own liberty of choice, but recognize the same right for others. If this is not recognized, what room has originality to work in?

The range of subject, of style, and of technical methods among acknowledged masters, should alone be proof of the fact that there is no one way which is the only good way; and if you would know how to judge and like a good picture, the study of really great pictures, without regard to school, is the way to learn.

=How to Look at Pictures.=--The study of pictures means something more than merely looking at them and counting the figures in them. It implies the study of the treatment of the subject in every way. The management of light and shade; the color; the composition and drawing; and finally those technical processes of brush-work by means of which the canvas gets covered, and the idea of the artist becomes visible.

All these things are important in some degree; they all go to the making of the complete work of art: and you do not understand the picture, you do not really and fully judge it, unless you know how to appreciate the bearing on the result, of all the means which were used to bring it about. All this adds to your own technical knowledge as well as to your critical judgment, both of which ends are important to your becoming a good painter.

=Why Paint Well.=--You see I am a.s.suming that you wish to be a good painter. There is no reason why you should be a bad painter because you are not a professional one. The better you paint the better your appreciation will be of all good work, the keener your appreciation of what is beautiful in nature, and the greater your satisfaction and pleasure in your own work. There are better reasons for painting than the desire to "make a picture." Painting implies making a picture, it is true; but it means also seeing and representing charming things, and working out problems of beauty in the expression of color and form: and this is something more than what is commonly meant by a picture. The picture comes, and is the result; but the making of it carries with it a pleasure and joy which are in exact proportion to the power of appreciation, perception, and expression of the painter.

This is the real reason for painting, and it makes the desire and the attempt to paint well a matter of course.

=Craftsmanship.=--The mechanical side of painting naturally is an important part of your problem. You cannot be too catholic in your opinion with regard to it. It is vital that you be not narrowed by any prejudices as to the surface effect of paint. Whether the canvas be smooth or rough, the paint thick or thin, the details few or many,--the goodness or badness of the picture does not depend on any of these. They are or should be the result, the natural outcome because the natural means of expression, of the manner in which the picture is conceived. One picture may demand one way of painting and another demand a quite different way; and each way be the best possible for the thing expressed. It all depends on the man; the make-up of his mind; the way he sees things; the results he aims to attain,--all of them controlled more or less by temperament and idiosyncrasy. What would produce a perfect work for one man would not do at all for another. The works of the great masters offer the most marked contrasts of ideal and of treatment, and painters have varied greatly in their manner of some painting at different periods of their lives. Rembrandt, for instance, painted very thinly in his early years, with transparent shadows and carefully modelled, solidly loaded lights. Later in life he painted most roughly; and "The Syndics" was so heavily and roughly loaded that even now, after two hundred years, the paint stands out in lumps--and this is one of his masterpieces. So again, if you will compare the manipulation in the work of Raphael with that of Tintoretto, that of Rubens with that of Velasquez, or most markedly, the work of Frans Hals with that of Gerard Dou, you will see that the greatest extremes of handling are consistent with equal greatness of result.

=Finish.=--From this you may conclude that what is generally understood by the word "finish" is not necessarily a thing to be sought for. The tendency of great painters is rather away from excessive smoothness and detail than towards it. While a picture may be a good one and be very minute and smooth, it by no means follows that a picture is bad because it is rough. The truth is that the test of a picture does not lie in the character of the pigment surface _in itself_ at all, nor in whether it be full of detail or the reverse, but in the conception and in the harmonious relation of the technique to the manner in which the whole is conceived. The true "finish" is whatever surface the picture happens to have when the idea which is the purpose of the picture is fully expressed, with nothing lacking to make that expression more complete, nor with anything present which is not needed to that completeness. This too is the truth about "breadth," that much misunderstood word. Breadth is not merely breadth of brush stroke. It is breadth of idea, breadth of perception; the power of conceiving the picture as a whole, and the power of not putting in any details which will interfere with the unity of effect.

=Intent.=--In this connection it would be well to bear in mind the purpose of the work on which the painter may be engaged. A man would, and should, work very differently on canvases intended for a study, a sketch, and a picture. The study would contain many things which the other two would not need. It is the work in which and by which the painter informs himself. It is his way of acquiring facts, or of a.s.suring himself of what he wants and how he wants it. And he may put into it all sorts of things for their value as facts which he may never care to use, but which he wishes to have at command in case he should want them.

The sketch, on the other hand, is a note of an effect merely, or of a general idea, and calls for only those qualities which most successfully show the central idea, which might sometime become a picture, or which suggests a scheme. A carefully worked-up sketch is a contradiction in terms, just as a careless study would be.

A picture might have more or less of the character of either of these two types, and yet belong to neither. It might have the sketch as its motive, and would use as much or as little of the material of the study as should be needed to make the result express exactly the idea the painter wished to impart, and no more and no less.

All these things should be borne in mind, as you study the characteristics of paintings to learn what they can mean to you beyond the surface which is obvious to any one; or as you work on your own canvas to attain such power or proficiency, such cleverness or facility, as you may conclude it is worth your while to try for.