As I have hinted on previous pages, the selection of a subject is of paramount importance in painting any picture. So often good painting has been spoiled by silly choice of subject. It is quite true that almost any­thing will make a subject for the painter, and I am by no means trying to say that you should select some pic­turesque piece or some sentimental scene. The whole matter boils down to this—that the subject must have in it line, mass, color, in certain proportions that will make a good combination when translated into your medium of oil paint.

In order to see pictures in life one has to cultivate the pictorial vision, the capacity to recognize in a scene the essential pictorial ingredients. It is no use looking for a pretty cottage or an old bridge and then trying to make a picture out of that whatever the surrounding objects or colors may be. Look first for a "composition" —a combination of line, shape, and color in harmony, in perfect accord.

As we saw in previous pages, the types of visual sub­ject matter suitable for re-creating in terms of water-color paint are slight, delicate, ephemeral. The liquid medium, the sparkle of the white paper, make it suit­able for impressions of weather, of billowing clouds, of quickly passing effects. With oil color you do not rely upon the canvas color, for all the canvas should be covered with paint when the picture is finished—blank spaces of canvas are, to me, simply a mark of inadequacy in oil painting. The detail of drawing you can achieve in water color is more precise; outlines play a more im­portant part in so far as they can be more delicate. With the denser medium of thick oil pigment, outlines are coarser and are usually given by a meeting of one patch of color against another, rather than by actual lines. So do not look for outlines in the same way as when you are painting with water color, look rather for the mass of things: the amounts of space that the various patches of color occupy in your picture composition.

Imagine yourself out in a landscape—that is, out in the fields—all is quiet, no obtrusive people pass to put you off your stroke. You feel that there is beauty all around and that there must be a good picture to be found or conceived amid so much that definitely ap­peals to your emotions. But the question arises, what to select from all that lies in front of you? That is the main task, to select just the right position, the right angle, before you begin to take out your paints and brushes and erect your easel. Be guided by your center of interest—see where the lines of hills and trees, of brook or stream, lead your eye. There must be a convergence of the lines toward a given center, and if that focal point has enough pictorial interest—that is, enough pleasing shapes of color to make it a live and satisfying center for the eye and mind to dwell upon —then you have the theme of your composition; see Figure 19.

figure 19. A landscape plan.

The next thing to decide upon is your horizon line. Hold a long pencil, a rule, or a paint brush at arm's length in front of you, keeping it both horizontal and level with your eyes, whether you are standing or sit­ting. And if you are looking at a distant landscape which is fairly flat, it will coincide with the furthest boundary of land you can see—it will literally be your horizon line. Parallel lines above this will converge down, and those below will converge up, toward the vanishing point. This fixes the basis for the perspective of your picture, and you have only to move your position to left or right to find the most suitable viewpoint from which to take in the subject before you. Keep thinking of the big shapes, the masses of trees as they group to­gether. Maybe at one moment the trees are all ablaze with light greenish gold and then a cloud shadow comes over and they become deep, dense, blue-brown. You must decide whether these masses of trees, so important in your picture, will be in light or in shadow and try not to be put off by the fluctuations of nature. Wait and select and get the scheme of your whole picture well in your mind, before you begin to paint. And do not keep altering your first conception as the day progresses. It is a good idea to have one canvas for the morning and one for the afternoon, for the direction of the light and the positions and shapes of the shadows change so much that only the most experienced can carry on with the same picture throughout the whole day.

Another point to decide upon before starting to work is what proportions of your picture space the fore­ground, middle distance, and sky should occupy. Do not make these spaces equal in proportion—either your sky must be predominant, or your land. Foregrounds are always a difficulty, because they can be so uninteresting —often just a field of green or a hedge. Never undertake a landscape unless the foreground has a definite inter­est. Foregrounds have spoiled many otherwise satisfac­tory paintings because they are so often neglected by the painter. Your foreground should have shape and it should have the most vital color and energetic pattern, for it is, after all, the forefront of the picture—all other tones and colors decrease in intensity as they recede to the far distance.

You are in the country, in the fields, you are searching for a picture. Again I say that you must almost shut your eyes—look with almost closed eyes for the big masses of trees and hills and fields, as patches of color. That is the only way. If you see too much detail you will make a bad start from the outset.

The next thing to discover is the depth of color—that is the "tone" of things. Weight, in reference to color, has, perhaps, no meaning to other people, but to the painter, it is very important. It is the heaviness of the color, the depth of its intensity. If you have no sense of the "weight" of color, the feeling for tone, you will find it more difficult to become a painter; as with the ap­preciation of harmony and counterpoint in music, a sense of tone must be there, inherent in the person, for it cannot be taught or instilled. But tonality is essential to good painting. The way to get experience in judging tone is to almost close one's eyes and note the depth and density of the colors and not the details. Some people think this closing of the eyes is only a subterfuge. This is nonsense, for the very act of translating nature, which is immense, into terms of a small canvas means a great sacrifice of some things, so I think the half-shut eyes are essential.

THE PICTURE PLANE

A great thing to bear in mind is that you are working in a specific and defined space or shape. You have, not in­finity to deal with, but a canvas, measuring so many inches wide by so many deep. Into this given space, this little world, you are going to put your whole conception of the landscape before you. So something must go, something must be overlooked or done away with. That is the point that so many people, who do not understand the technique of painting, overlook. They expect the whole gamut of the things they see to be transferred to the canvas, whereas only a very few of the things can be given.

Remember, therefore, that your canvas space is your own world and not the world of actuality. You are going to create in this world, this small confined space, a pic­ture of something you have clearly visualized from the great world of facts and fancies, which lies outside you. To do this you must condense, you must emphasize, you must suppress and you must exaggerate. So the artist does not faithfully follow the actual facts, but he creates a new thing by adapting and translating the facts into the terms of the medium he has chosen. An object lesson is provided by Cezanne in Illustrations 6 and 7.

COMPOSING A PICTURE

Now, can I help you to compose a picture? All I can say is, feel the general rhythm, place your masses in a rela­tionship one to the other but not in set proportions. Get the "swing" of the landscape, the trend, the essential un­derlying structure. Exaggerate as hard as you can, dance round your canvas, let your arm be moving from its whole length, and step back constantly, so that you are not close up and just nervously putting on little dabs of paint. Let your brush be full of paint, full to overflow­ing, don't work with niggardly little dabs of color.

Please do not get set in your notions. Do not on any account be hidebound. Let your imagination have full rein. If you see a tree as "a man walking"—then let your tree be as a man stepping out. Do not be obsessed by ac­curacy, for that is the end of all creation. You can leave out anything that is not of sufficient interest to hold your thought or your feeling. The necessity for elimina­tion of extraneous detail is one of the great discoveries you must make. Your medium cannot possibly translate all the detail of nature, and therefore you should try al­ways to make a synthesis, a summary of the things before your eyes. A wall of a building can be without all its window spaces—you can see it as a shape and leave out all the little details of the doors and windows—that does not mean that you are "faking" the subject: you are making a synthesis which can better explain your whole conception than by putting in all the details, which would only end by distracting interest from your main theme. Painting a picture in oils is like telling a story, you must make your point, but you must not get lost in a multitude of unnecessary facts and overpowering details.

LIGHTING

It is as well before starting to take careful note of the source of light—in other words, the position of the sun —when painting out of doors. If the sun is behind your back, you will be seeing more form and color in all the objects you are looking at than if you face it. If the sun is in front, you will be looking directly toward the source of light, and all the colors will be merged and the forms indistinct, with dark intense tones in the shadows. It is extremely tricky to paint looking into the source of light, but now and again you get good vivid tone effects by do­ing so. Of course, on gray days, when the sun is hidden behind clouds, you can paint facing any way you wish, for all the landscape will be diffused with a similar gray light. This uniformity of light often brings out the sub­tle coloring. In sunlight the colors and shadows are very brilliant and intense, but they are not as subtle in their range as on gray days.

If you are painting in sunshine, notice the direction of the shadows and how long they are. As the afternoon progresses so the shadows lengthen; also they are totally different in length during the various seasons of the year. It is seldom wise to have two different sources of light in the one outdoor picture, and it is almost always necessary to hide the source of light itself. The full in­tensity of the sun, and for that matter, of any artificial light, is usually too strong to reproduce in the picture, as all other tones and colors have to be correspondingly subordinated. Great artists have put the sun itself in their pictures and also the naked electric light bulb. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. If you are to carry on the same subject during morning and after­noon it is a good idea to select beforehand a part of the landscape that will not be too much affected by the change in the direction and angle of the rays of light, the constant change that is going on all the time, but is more conspicuous after the sun has reached its maximum height and then descends to the horizon.

THE PICTURE SPACE: THE PICTURE PLANE

Your canvas is your world in which you can create what you will. You need not take account of the ordinary laws of perspective unless you wish, but you must have order and relationship. As I have explained, you are perform­ing an enormous reducing act: reducing acres of land-even miles perhaps, onto a few inches of canvas; there­fore a great deal must be omitted, or simplified, or condensed. As the landscape before you recedes into the distance, so your planes alter, and each plane has its dif­fering scheme of color to denote its "further-awayness" in space. (This is called "aerial perspective.")

If you visualize a series of lines on your canvas gradu­ally nearing one another as they approach your eye-line, you will realize that your various groups of trees or buildings are based on these lines, in recession, and the placing of these things in their space relationship is im­portant. Do not hesitate to put a "straight-edge" up horizontally at arm's length from your eyes—a taut piece of string is admirable for this. Then you can keep judg- ing how far into your picture space certain things are in position. There is a sort of architecture in a picture, a building up of the design in the given space you have before you, to be covered with colored pigment.

Remember to notice the angles of things which come into the picture on left and right of you, as you stand in position in front of your chosen subject. These angles will help you to define the front planes and the side planes of objects. These planes will have differing colors, according to the source of light, and it is these different colored planes which help to give solidity to your picture.

OUTLINES AND CONTOURS

It is often desirable to give a good firm outline to your shapes as a means of emphasizing the design element in your composition. Van Gogh used the thick outline a great deal without making it too posterish—but this method is only a very summary one, as, of course, there is no such thing as an outline in nature. A firmly drawn outline does help to make one think in terms of large masses of color, but used too often it may become too facile and obvious a method. To the artist the real out­line of an object is where it comes into contact with the other things behind it—and in nature often one tone or color merges almost imperceptibly into another—being "lost and found," as it is often expressed by painters. So if your vision is decorative and your emphasis is on de­sign you can use the outlining method, but if you wish to render more unobtrusive effects, you will not push the outline too far, but will "lose and find" your edges, one against another.

5. Thames at vauxhall by R. O. Dunlop, R.A. Palette Knife treatment in this oil painting is broad and juicy in "effect" and does not give minute details. Note the contrast in strokes be­tween the sweeping sky and the horizontal lines of water.

6. Photograph of the scene from which Cezanne painted melted snow at fontainebleau reproduced opposite.

7. See what he makes of the scene. All the fussiness is gone. The twigs and branches against the sky have been unified, simplified. A com­plete whole has been made from a seeming chaos of nature.

8. still life with flowers: Pastel by R. G. Holloway. Even in this monochrome reduction something of the breadth of treatment can be guessed—the cross-hatching of colors rather than smudging; the use of darks to bring out the contours of the shapes. The main group is distinct, yet backed-up by the remaining objects in the collection.

Contours as distinct from outlines are a far more im­portant thing for the oil painter. Outlines are a more or less simple matter, but to follow the contours of objects as they touch one another is an essential part of the tech­nique of good painting. It is an almost invariable rule that where a light patch of color meets another, and darker, patch, the color immediately behind the light color seems even darker—much darker usually, in order to throw out into relief the light color in front. The re­verse holds good also, for where a dark tint comes against a light one, the light tone appears to be heightened, giv­ing again that sense of contrast, of showing up the dark shape. This constant fluctuation of the contours round all objects or shapes in a picture, gives accent to the whole composition and prevents it from becoming flat and dull. So watch carefully your contours—your shapes, as one object touches another, the edges of things, as, they meet, in terms of patches of color: try always to be extremely sensitive in observing these dark-light, light-dark, contrasts.

Let us for a moment go from the fields and landscape to the room at home and examine "still-life" painting, as it is called. You can put together a group of things you like the look and shape of—or a group of fruit or flowers—and the more natural your arrangement the better. It is so much easier to study the contours of things in still-life painting, for there is not nearly as much fluctuation of light and shade as there is out of doors. Also the appearance of the shapes remains more constant and can be examined more closely than when one is fighting against all the difficulties of nature in landscape. To paint many still-life studies helps tre­mendously in all other painting, for you can master this intricate matter of the contours of objects. Follow round the outline of each object and see the altering color of the background—where light meets dark or half-dark, where darks meet lighter colors, and so on, em­phasis being given here and relaxed there. Do not put in solid patches of meaningless color as a background, but strive for the feeling of fluctuating contours all through the picture space, making it vital and alive. In painting flowers, for instance, notice each petal as its shape meets what is behind it, do not just paint in any background round the flowers and hope for the best. The back­ground must be full of vibrating color and interest, not just a dropcloth of plain color. Note again the direction of the light and the pools of shadow which do so much to bind up the whole picture into a unity.

CUBE, CONE, SPHERE, AND CYLINDER

Cezanne has been reported as saying that the whole range of natural forms can be resolved by the artist into the cube, the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder. And this is almost true. See Figure 20. From a tendency to emphasize the third-dimensional aspect of natural forms—the solid aspect, as objects standing in space—a great deal of the modern exaggeration of the solid struc­ture of things has sprung. Many have, no doubt, over­emphasized the cone and the cube and the cylinder; and

The Cone, Sphere & Cube in Nature —

figure 20. Cone, sphere, and cube.

"Cubism," as a movement, made the search for the "box" effect in all things its chief motif. But there is no doubt that this cubistic view of things is helpful to the painter in oils. If you can visualize a tree as a sphere sur­rounded by air and light and a tree trunk as a cylinder, a fir tree as a cone and a building as a cube, you are on the way to seeing the solid structure of things and giving them depth and construction in your picture.

This new emphasis on solidity was a reaction from the weakness of the impressionistic vision, where form be­came almost lost in the shimmering effect of sunlight, and vagueness of form was a frequent by-product. But the good impressionistic painters always retained a grip on their forms and shapes and never became so involved in the sunshine as to lose the compact design of their pic­tures. This criticism of impressionists has been much overdone by critics of the modern school and there is still a tendency to decry the work of these wonderful masters of landscape painting, who brought light, air, color, and freshness, to contrast with the dark brown landscapes of their predecessors.

EXAGGERATION AND EMPHASIS

To give an extra twirl or twist to a line or shape, for the purpose of exaggerating your point, is quite legitimate in all forms of art. It is an extraordinary thing that, in painting, any form of exaggeration is thought, by some, to be absurd, while these very same critics will accept such exaggerations in poetry or the short story as quite legitimate. Fortunately, artists today have all the free­dom of the poets and writers, to give distortion of shape or color, if, by doing so, they are making their point more accurately in accordance with their conception. As I have said before, one cannot really exaggerate easily —it is usual to underestimate the curve of a line or the sweep of a mass—timidity is much more to be fought than boldness. Therefore be guided by your emotions and let your brush or palette knife give all the emphasis it can, for, by the time your picture is completed you will have toned down your initial impulses and modi­fied your supposed exaggerations. That is a natural tendency for most painters, however experienced they may be.

PAINTING TREES

I am a little averse from giving definite hints as to how to paint this or that object, whether in still-life or in landscape, but perhaps a few remarks about the snags one encounters in painting some of the fundamental things in nature may not be amiss. Trees are so much a part of all landscape that they must be taken first. Trees are not easy to paint. They can ruin a landscape very quickly. Trees decorate the sky and vary from the poeti­cal birch, willow, and ash, to the sturdy oak. Look first of all for the masses of foliage—or, in winter, for the shapes of the groups of twigs. See where the trunk grows out of the ground and diminishes in girth, getting thin­ner and thinner as it meets the sky. Follow the growth, follow the masses, and forget all the details of the in­dividual leaves. You need to half-shut your eyes, when painting trees, even more so than for painting anything else. You must get rid of the little spots of light that filter through the foliage and not make them jump out as white blobs of paint to disturb the whole relationship of the tones and colors of the tree itself. It is a fairly safe rule that any tone of sky seen within the framework of the foliage of the tree is darker in tone than the sky itself outside the radius of the tree. Observe carefully the con­tours, where the edges of the foliage of twigs, in small masses, meet the sky or meet the other items of the land­scape that are behind. This is always an example of the silhouetting of light against dark or dark against light; and this emphasis gives the "relief" or modeling of the tree.

PAINTING SKY

Painting the sky is a fairly easy matter and does not give the same headache as painting trees. One feels that it does not matter much anyway what degree of form or shape one gives the sky—it is only a light patch of color against which things stand—and that feeling of not minding makes you do a much better job than if you get all hot and bothered. There are one or two things worth bearing in mind about sky painting. The first is to re­member that the sky resembles an inverted bowl and not just a flat drop-curtain as in a theater set. You dis­cover by observation that the colors over your head, or at the top edge of the canvas space in your picture, are strongest and deepest, and those at the horizon are more tender and subtle. The cloud shapes have perspective and get smaller as they recede to the horizon except, of course, when there are big cumulus clouds massed on the horizon. There is light and shade giving form to big clouds, but usually the general atmosphere and light­ness of the sky is more important than the actual shape of the clouds.

There are some marvelous stormy days when the sky is darker in tone than the landscape and the trees stand out bright against the menacing electric blue of the sky, but usually the sky tone is light with all the brightness radiated from the sun, so, again, you must half-close the eyes to register just the degree of lightness, making it neither too dark nor too light. Some of the great land­scape painters have made numerous studies of clouds and the constantly varying effects under all conditions of light and weather. Probably water colors are the best medium for these cloud studies. As regards the oil colors to use in skies, never use a blue deeper than cobalt; and except when painting brilliant sunsets the yellows are never deeper or more powerful than yellow ocher and Naples yellow. Viridian green mixed with white and a very little rose madder or yellow ocher is ideal for the distant tints.

PAINTING LAND

The colors in the foreground are more intense than any others—it is a sort of reverse process from the sky. The part of the picture near your feet is seen in detail and the little shapes of tufts of grass, or weeds, should be acutely observed. As the land recedes, the colors be­come mixed with gray, and the feel of distance becomes mixed in with it until, in the far distance, the blue and the purple and the gray become almost the colors of the objects and "local" colors, the intense colors of the things themselves, are lost in the atmosphere that sur­rounds them.

There is a firmness about the land that gives it solidi­ty. This means that the treatment should be more solid and less lyrical than in the other parts of the picture. The lie of the land, the movement of the fields and hedgerows should be noted, in order to give recession of line, as well as the altering colors. Things grow out of the land, and are rooted in it. It has rightly been called "mother earth," and the landscape painter should try to convey its importance in this sense. The main colors to use are the rich deep colors such as sienna browns and umber and red and yellow ocher—the earthy colors.

PAINTING WATER

Water, like the sky, is easy to paint if you have the "feel" of it in your mind, for there is no form, or definite shape, to worry you. Water is an emotional element and those who respond to its appeal can give the effect of its "watery" quality quite simply. Water does not curve, al though there is a slight curve on the sea, as it recedes to the horizon, corresponding with the curve of the earth's surface. But usually water is flat and has to be portrayed in a series of horizontal lines or patches of color, in per­spective. The reflections of things seen in water are most interesting to the painter. Usually the colors of the re­flected objects are a slight degree darker in tone than the objects themselves. In very many ways the colors, as reflected in water, are more interesting than the colors out of the water—they have a certain tonality, as though looked at through slightly tinted glasses. There is con­stant movement always on the surface of water: the sky is reflected on its surface, the wind ruffles it and makes interesting patterns. If you are portraying boats on water, see that they lie flat on the water and give the feel­ing of having a keel down in the water and are not just bobbing corks on the surface.

After reading this general advice on the painting of natural objects you might go back and read Chapter 3 again, of which this is to some extent (and deliberately) a repetition.

PAINTING IN THE STUDIO

Of course any room in the house can be your studio; it doesn't matter at all about skylights and light from the north and all the old conceptions of what a studio should be. But it is as well to keep to the same room where you can be free to leave things in a glorious mud­dle and put your pictures round the walls. The best place to put a picture so that it can be clearly and easily seen is on the floor, either propped up against a chair, as straight as possible, or against the wall. If a picture slopes, its oil pigment surface shines and you cannot get a good view of it, so keep the canvas as upright as you can. If you enjoy painting people and wish to paint por­traits and figure subjects, you will be up against a tough proposition, but there is no reason to be disheartened. Ask any friend who will undertake the thankless task, to sit for you; and keep him or her alive by talking—do not get too settled and set in your task, always remember the human element, and do not bother too much about getting a strict likeness. Give your feeling and imagina­tion full play. Self-consciousness is the curse of portrait painting. Eliminate the personal element as far as pos­sible—forget what you imagine the person sitting for you thinks (or hopes) he is like—for this will put you right off your stroke if you let it impinge upon your mind while working. Remember to concentrate on pro­portions—the amount of forehead to the rest of the face, the width and depth of the eyes, the length of nose, and again the width of the mouth in relation to the rest of the features. Also bear in mind the set of the whole head on the neck, usually at a slight angle, and the position of the ears and jaw. If you get the proportions of the face anywhere near those of your sitter you will very rapidly obtain a "likeness." It is a good idea to practice on one self. To keep on painting self-portraits is the best of all studies, for you know yourself and can take up the re­quired pose at any time and you avoid all the interplay of one personality upon another, which makes portrait painting such a complicated business. Do not treat the background of a portrait in a casual manner, for the whole picture is the thing that matters most—so many portraits are all face and no picture. That is why you should consider very carefully the whole composition, before you begin, observing just what lines and shapes and colors are behind your sitter and noting how these fit in with and are knit into a general whole, that has design, in both line and color. See Plate 4.

In making pictures of groups of people, you need plenty of sketches—notebooks kept full of studies of every type of person seen in relation to those near them, in groups—with pencil notes as to colors and a definite drawn eye-line, in order to gauge the perspective. Do not put your figures isolated on the page, but give al­ways some indication of the background against which they are placed. Arrows can denote the direction of the light and give an indication of the shadows. It is as well, when enlarging up your sketches to the size of a picture, to keep to quite a small size at first. If you splash out on a large canvas you will find so many parts of the picture that you have not fully visualized in terms of shape and color that you will have spaces of empty paint which mean nothing and only spoil the effect. So start off mod­estly with quite small pictures and gradually increase the size when your powers of visual memory are de­veloped further by practice. Always simplify the folds in the clothes of your sitter. The main points from which the folds radiate are at the elbows or the knees, or any point from which the clothes hang and are stretched, such as the shoulders or the hips. Do not put in all the little folds and creases but try to pick out those main ones that give an indication of the form and movement of the body or limbs. Always endeavor to look past the obvious and give the underlying structure. It is much better to be quite simple in your statements, rather than over-elaborate. The simplicity of the child, when draw­ing, is a rare gift that is too often lost when the grown-up becomes self-conscious. But this simple outlook is the one to try to retain when painting any subject.

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