The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 24

Inarticulate Touches

An artist's touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.

Detail

One reason why it is as well not to give very much detail is that, no matter how much is given, the eye will always want more; it will know very well that it is not being paid in full. On the other hand, no matter how little one gives, the eye will generally compromise by wanting only a little more. In either case the eye will want more, so one may as well stop sooner or later. Sensible painting, like sensible law, sensible writing, or sensible anything else, consists as much in knowing what to omit as what to insist upon. It consists in the tact that tells the painter where to stop.

Painting and a.s.sociation

Painting is only possible by reason of a.s.sociation's not sticking to the letter of its bond, so that we jump to conclusions.

The Credulous Eye

Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ--very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of a.s.sertion.

Truths from Nature

We must take as many as we can, but the difficulty is that it is often so hard to know what the truths of nature are.

Accuracy

After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate.

Herbert Spencer

He is like nature to Fuseli--he puts me out.

Shade Colour and Reputation

When a thing is near and in light, colour and form are important; when far and in shadow, they are unimportant. Form and colour are like reputations which when they become shady are much of a muchness.

Money and Technique

Money is very like technique (or vice versa). We see that both musicians or painters with great command of technique seldom know what to do with it, while those who have little often know how to use what they have.

Action and Study

These things are antagonistic. The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other.

Sacred and Profane Statues

I have never seen statues of Jove, Neptune, Apollo or any of the pagan G.o.ds that are not as great failures as the statues of Christ and the Apostles.

Seeing

If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.

Quickness in seeing as in everything else comes from long sustained effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes from effort after quickness.

Improvement in Art

Painting depends upon seeing; seeing depends upon looking for this or that, at least in great part it does so.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy.

If you look at it to admire it you are lost.

Any man, as old Heatherley used to say, will go on improving as long as he is bona fide dissatisfied with his work.

Improvement in one's painting depends upon how we look at our work.

If we look at it to see where it is wrong, we shall see this and make it righter. If we look at it to see where it is right, we shall see this and shall not make it righter. We cannot see it both wrong and right at the same time.

Light and Shade

Tell the young artist that he wants a black piece here or there, when he sees no such black piece in nature, and that he must continue this or that shadow thus, and break this light into this or that other, when in nature he sees none of these things, and you will puzzle him very much. He is trying to put down what he sees; he does not care two straws about composition or light and shade; if he sees two tones of such and such relative intensity in nature, he will give them as near as he can the same relative intensity in his picture, and to tell him that he is perhaps exactly to reverse the natural order in deference to some canon of the academicians, and that at the same time he is drawing from nature, is what he cannot understand.

I am very doubtful how far people do not arrange their light and shade too much with the result with which we are familiar in drawing- masters' copies; it may be right or it may not, I don't know--I am afraid I ought to know, but I don't; but I do know that those pictures please me best which were painted without the slightest regard to any of these rules.

I suppose the justification of those who talk as above lies in the fact that, as we cannot give all nature, we lie by suppressio veri whether we like it or no, and that you sometimes lie less by putting in something which does not exist at the moment, but which easily might exist and which gives a lot of facts which you otherwise could not give at all, than by giving so much as you can alone give if you adhere rigidly to the facts. If this is so the young painter would understand the matter, if it were thus explained to him, better than he is likely to do if he is merely given it as a canon.

At the same time, I admit it to be true that one never sees light but it has got dark in it, nor vice versa, and that this comes to saying that if you are to be true to nature you must break your lights into your shadows and vice versa; and so usual is this that, if there happens here or there to be an exception, the painter had better say nothing about it, for it is more true to nature's general practice not to have it so than to have it.