shape of a bracket, a scheme of colour, have power to affect us, in a
degree, in just the same way music does, and, with awe let us realise
it, even as Nature herself does. And I would have every craftsman and
every practiser of the arts as deeply impressed with the dignity this
places upon him, and the responsibilities it brings with it, as he can
possibly be. I would have him feel this truth, that in his degree he
is instrumental in either forwarding or retarding his fellow men in
their highest and truest education; that in just so far as his art is
true or false, real and vital, or feeble and insincere, he is advancing
or hindering this great work; that true art is the grandest work of
which humanity is capable, and that through it alone can man advance to
higher things than those of which he is now capable.
We can none of us know, and certainly none of us are in any danger
of over-estimating, the good influence of a beautiful building upon
all those who pass and repass it daily; and the smallest and most
insignificant article in our daily use has, in its own degree, like
power to help or hinder our development.
Wherein truth in art consists, none but the artist can know, and he
cannot tell to another what he knows of it himself; he has learned it,
first from an inborn instinct and gift, and second, by that education
which true art only can promote, and others can only come to a
knowledge of it in the same way.
The whole spirit and trend, all the outside circumstances, influences,
and conditions of modern life, are against the artist and true art.
The present individualistic and competitive basis of society makes
a _living_ art almost an impossibility, but I do not propose we
should concern ourselves now with questions which are not within the
designer’s power, but only with those things which he can and must see
that he personally rightly understands and practises.
No good work in any field of art was ever yet done in a hurry; it maybe
done quickly, with the utmost energy, this will probably only give it
vitality, but all outside pressure means death to art.
All true art work must always be done under the very keenest stress of
mental effort; it cannot be slovenly, careless, or interestless in its
smallest detail, but must be wrought with every faculty alert with an
absorption and concentration amounting to abandon, and it must be done,
_can_ only be done for the love of it. Other motives there may be, and
in greater or less degree there _will_ be, but this must be first and
paramount, or true art is impossible.
A very fruitful cause of failure is the effort to be original. In
the loathsome distortions of fashion we see daily the result of this
attempt to originate new forms, simply for the sake of novelty,
without the slightest reference to any feeling for beauty or fitness.
Originality has no value other than a purely commercial one, unless the
original thing has advantages over the commonplace. Most of the things
which we have about us show unmistakably that their designers went to
work in the wrong spirit from the very first. We see at a glance that
the position taken up was this. The designer has said to himself “This
is generally done so and so, in such and such a manner; now how can I
modify this to make it in some degree original: where can I introduce a
little novelty?”
No good result was ever yet arrived at by any one who took up this
position. No: the way to go to work is, to get clearly into your mind
the functions, duties, requirements and limitations of the thing to
be designed, then choose the material or materials which will enable
it best to fulfil its functions, duties, and requirements, and keep
within its limitations. Afterwards, with a full knowledge and candid
recognition of the properties and characteristics of your materials and
the best way of using them, set to work to evolve the form which will,
in the simplest and most direct & at the same time most beautiful and
decorative manner, fulfil the requirements, and the result will bear
the impress of your own personality, it will have your own feeling,
and will probably also have something of true originality.
You may if you like, with all this clearly in your mind, pass in review
the customary forms employed to fulfil the conditions, retaining such
characteristics as you see are valuable either because they advance the
objects, or add to the comeliness, but this must come second not first.
I would like you to notice in passing that this right and true method
of going to work in design is entirely inapplicable to all things
having no functions to fulfil, by such a throng of which we are now
surrounded.
The whole trend of modern civilisation would make the outlook for the
artist one of blank hopelessness, were it not that there are signs of a
reaction, due to the efforts of great men who have fought hard that art
may not die.
We call the present the “Machine Age.” Now the influence of machinery
on art is one of the most degrading we have to contend with, for every
advance made by machinery must mean a corresponding retreat on the part
of art.
When I have expressed the keen sense of pleasure given me by the
beautiful variety of surface, the light and shade, the crisp, clean
adze cuts, the vital human interest, of some old beam, the commercial
mind has said to me “If the workman who wrought it had possessed the
tools with which to get it up to a _better surface_, he would not
have left it as it is.” This is probably true, but it does not affect
the question of the relative beauty of the two beams, the absolutely
square, smooth, machine planed one, and the irregular rough hewn one
so full of character and interest. The artistic value of each is a
question quite apart from such considerations. To-day, if we require a
beam in our building, we take every bit of natural character out of it,
and bring it, by mechanical processes, to as dead and flat, as lifeless
and monotonous a state as possible, then we stupidly try to replace
some of the natural and characteristic beauty we have been at so much
trouble to get rid of, by some form of applied ornament, moulding, or
what not, which probably has only this one result, that it obscures the
one trace of natural beauty which has been able to survive the previous
processes, that is the grain and figure of the wood. Afterwards we
stand and look at it, with a sort of feeling that there is something
wrong, and wonder why it was so much more beautiful before.
This is only one illustration, it would be easy to give hundreds. For
beauty of texture and surface are nothing to the machine producer or
the commercial spirit of to-day.
When I say I want a piece of copper just hammered out to the size and
shape I require without that grinding and polishing by which all trace
of the hammer & human hand is lost in mere smoothness and mechanical
finish, the workman tells me it will be injurious to his credit, people
will see nothing in it but bad workmanship and inability to finish. He
would prefer to efface the sympathetic surface and natural beauties of
the beaten metal as completely as possible, then he would put it in a
press and stamp some meaningless pattern on it, but the result would be
entirely uninteresting to him, and he would have no satisfaction in it,
unless sheer commercialism had utterly killed every grain of everything
higher than itself in his nature.
Think of the beauty of leaded glass compared with the lifeless hard
mechanical perfection of polished plate. This beauty has nothing to do
with its old-fashioned look, with romantic associations, or quaintness
of effect; it is simply an inherent property of all leaded glazing,
due to the wonderful and never ending charm of the play of light and
shade on the different panes, each one catching the light slightly
differently from any other, some glistening brightly, others dead and
sombre, and the rest occupying every tone between the two. One sheet of
glass with the leading laid upon it would be more ugly and meaningless
than the plate glass. Many would-be artistic people think that it
is an essential characteristic of the artistic that it should be in
some degree eccentric or unusual. This is as great a delusion as any
one could well labour under. That it is the case at the present time
cannot be denied; but it is because we have sunk to such depths of
degradation, that the artistic has become the eccentric and unusual,
not that to be different from the ordinary is the property of the
artistic. There was a time when the exact reverse was the case, when
simple natural beauty was the rule in all things and ugliness the
exception, and the unusual and eccentric was then the inartistic.
So also many would-be artistic people think that things derive an
artistic value simply from being old or old-fashioned. This again is
entirely untrue except of such things as undergo a modification and
change for the better in themselves at the hands of old Father Time.
But this too is an error easily accounted for, as at the present time,
as regards the common things of daily life, the standard of design is
so debased that it would be almost impossible to bring out of the past
(at any rate of centuries before the last), forms for these which would
not surpass in beauty those now current among us. If art in our homes
were living and progressive the old and old-fashioned would be the ugly
and inartistic.
A perfectly frank recognition of construction and an honest compliance
with its demands is an absolute essential of all good designs; any
attempt to disguise or thwart, or failure to acknowledge, the necessary
characteristics and features of construction, must result in artistic
disaster and is indeed a very fruitful cause of it. So also is that
kindred error, the adoption of a less perfect construction to get the
form wanted. It is not necessary I should dwell upon this now, for it
is recognised by all art teachers, though by very few of those who
practise the applied arts, and illustrations of the truth of it meet us
in abundance on every hand and will occur to all.
Neither is it necessary (and for the same reasons) that I should say
much about imitations & shams; wood made to simulate stone or marble;
iron cast in forms suited only to wood; wood worked into forms suited
only to stone, or in imitation of stone, as in tracery and groining.
The evil of all this is too well known, and I have had to pass over it
for the sake of what is less recognised and not so often brought before
us. To put the right thing in the right place; to give it its most
appropriate form, and above all things the form which will best enable
it to fulfil its functions and uses, and withal the simplest, most
direct, and the most perfect in construction; this is the first duty of
every designer, and in doing this he will generally find he gets the
maximum of beauty.
The conscious effort to be original will always produce abortions and
painful results; the only originality worth anything is arrived at in
trying to do something _better_ not something new; and the true artist
shows himself in giving beauty of form, of colour, and design to the
necessary and useful, and adding that higher usefulness belonging to
a work of art. But may we not have ornament, pure ornament which has
no other definite use? Certainly we may, but let us at the very outset
apply this test to it. It does not, we say, fulfil any useful purpose
on the physical plane, does it fulfil any purpose on that higher
plane of which I have spoken? Is its educational influence good? If
so we will welcome it. If not let it go. And I fear, when this test
is applied, it will be found that there is but little of the enormous
profusion of the (so-called) ornament spread over everything about us,
which would not have to go.
Most of us would do well to change it all for one or two good pictures,
a bit of really beautiful metal work, carving, or embroidery, done by
an artist with his own hand, and possessing something of that dignity
of true art I have tried to show.
BARRY PARKER.
OUR EDUCATION IN ART.
My subject is “Our Education in Art,” & I approach it with a sense of
trepidation, feeling that the task I have set myself is one of very
great difficulty, and being, as I am, so fully alive to the tremendous
issues involved in our holding right or wrong views upon art education.
The place in our lives which Art must fill is so exalted that it is
with reverence I would consider the way in which we should teach or be
taught to express ourselves in art, or learn to read the meaning of
others expressed through that medium. Those who have come to realize
that only by the employment of Art can the highest truths which we
are capable of receiving be conveyed from one man to another, must
feel that the method of preparing ourselves to wield so great a power,
or render ourselves receptive of such an influence, should be most
earnestly considered. I have taken “Our Education in Art” as my title,
instead of “The Education of an Artist” or any other title which would
have fixed more definitely the limitations within which I should
confine myself, because I want what I am about to say to have a much
wider application than it would if simply taken as addressed to those
who propose to practise an art. For, to train all to an appreciation
of what is good, true, and beautiful, in Art, is hardly less important
than to train artists capable of expressing what is good, true, and
beautiful.
All have not vouchsafed to them the power to express themselves in an
art, but all are in some degree influenced by the artistic qualities of
the things by which they are surrounded, and I wish to suggest a way of
learning to _appreciate_ what is good and true and beautiful in art,
even more than a way of learning to _create_ such art. That there shall
be those who can _appreciate_ good art is necessary to its life. That
we should have those who can create it is not enough; this is the work
of the few; the work of the many is to make an atmosphere in which it
can live. I would impress as gravely as possible upon those who aspire
to the practice of an art, not only the dignity belonging to what they
would undertake, but the tremendous responsibility attaching to it.
The first thing that must go to the making of an artist is that he
should have that within him which craves for expression, and which can
only be expressed through the medium of an art. This first essential is
given to many to whom the power to express it is not given, but without
it the facility to express will be a power for harm not for good: it is
the presence of great qualities, not the absence of bad, which makes a
work of art.
The artist’s great responsibility lies in this: every time he creates
anything capable of bearing the impress of the true art instinct, he
brings into existence that which will have an influence upon all who
see it, and will quicken or deaden in them this high instinct. The
thought that, if he create not something better than would have been
created by others, had he left it to them, he is doing harm in the
world, not good, is one that should come home to him very solemnly.
To the art worker belongs this privilege--that his art can be a great
power for good; and this responsibility--that he must of necessity
have done either harm or good by his work, and that unless he has done
something which is beyond and above the conception of the general run
(nay, of the great majority) of his fellow-creatures, something they
feel to have a little more in it, and to be a little more than they
can grasp, he is not merely harmless, he is a failure. For as in life
generally, so in the artistic life, he who merely does what no one can
attach blame to, and has not done better than others would have done in
his stead, has lived to no purpose. Virtue is not a negative quality in
art or in life; it does not consist in keeping the Ten Commandments.
“All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?” This
man 1900 years ago had grasped the truth of what I have said above
better than most of us have to-day.
I will herein confine myself to speaking of those arts which depend
upon our eyes for their means of appealing to us; and as I wish that
these suggestions may be of real practical value, to all who desire to
appreciate what is artistically good and true, I must leave out of our
consideration, for the moment, all the greater qualities which belong
to art; and confine myself to showing how we must first learn to _see_,
and to what I may call the purely technical side of learning to _see_
and represent. For simplicity I will take the art of portraying Nature,
as seen in her landscapes, as my example of how to learn both to see
and to draw; for the process is the same in either case.
Now when first one attempts to paint a landscape, one is over-whelmed
by the tremendous number of different things one sees in it and has
to take into consideration at the same time. There is the form and
drawing, the light and shade, the atmosphere and its effect upon
the local tints or real colours of each individual object in the
landscape, the overpowering profusion of detail, the reflected lights
and reflected colours, the relative value of objects, the texture, and
character of surfaces, the composition, what we call the accidental
effects; and last but not least, the teaching and meaning, the
particular message Nature has to convey in the whole scene. And only by
long and patient study of each of these _separately_, can we acquire
the power to grasp them all together in the way which is necessary when
painting.
Were I to teach, I should make my pupils go through a long and patient
study of each of these _separately_, devoting much thought to each in
turn, quite apart from the use of pencil or brush; for it is impossible
to _represent_ one without the others, but not impossible to _study_
one without the others. And that we should be able to first dissociate
one from another in our minds, and then see the influence of one upon
another, is absolutely necessary to a true portraiture of Nature in
landscape. I would then begin with the simplest of the things in my
category, and impart to my pupils a knowledge of form (probably best
done by some simple process of modelling), and I would go on to the
drawing of form without reference to light and shade. Next I would
teach them to see form in masses of light and shade only, leaving
out of consideration at the first (as far as possible) the influence
of reflected light, but eventually giving much time and thought to
enabling them to see the reflected light truly, and to measure its
gradations and degrees accurately. From this they should go on to
represent textures and character of surfaces, and not until all this
had been done would I bring in the use of colour. This should begin
by the accurate matching of local tints, before the representation of
the colour effects produced by atmosphere with its varying degrees
of moisture, of density and transparency or opacity, its power of
diffusing light, and its effect on distance, was attempted. Next I
would allow sketching with reference to composition, grouping, and much
study of the relative values of one object to another in the landscape,
affected as it is by all the foregoing, and difficult of explanation as
it always is, even in view of and with a perfect knowledge of all the
foregoing. Finally, being first able to see and feel, then we would go
on to try to catch & portray the moods and messages of Nature, and the
poetry of the whole.
I would then point out to the accomplished craftsman, that he, upon
sitting down to paint from Nature, must first ask himself what it
is which makes a picture (in the true sense of the word) in what
is before him, and why he has chosen this particular subject: and
he must never for a moment allow himself to lose sight of this.
Much there is he must of necessity leave out, but he must grasp the
essentials and retain these. His study has taught him to see things
as they present themselves to his eye, rather than as he knows them
to be. In a sentence, he has learned to know what he sees, not to see
what he knows: he is aware that yonder hill in the distance, were he
there, would be green, but that seeing it as he does, affected by
the intervening atmosphere & light, it is blue. The painter must by
training, and power of analysing causes of effects, be able to see his
subject somewhat as he would were he suddenly dropped into his seat
from another planet, without any knowledge of the appearance on closer
inspection of the component parts of his subject. May I explain some
of what I have said, with the aid of a simple example, a stone wall
bounding a green field, the wall casting a shadow on the grass. Of
drawing pure and simple there is not much; there is the form of the
stones in the wall, the irregularities of the contour of the field, the
shadow of the wall & the modifications which the rise and fall of the
surface of the field effect in it, presenting it to the eye now more
foreshortened and now less as the angle between the wall and the ground
changes. In the reflected light there is much to note and dissociate
in our minds from the direct lighting. In this we should see that the
shadow on the shade side of the wall is much lighter than the shadow
cast by the wall upon the grass. This results from the fact that the
grass from its horizontal position receives far more diffused light
from the atmosphere and the sky than does the vertical surface of the
wall; therefore it reflects more light upon the wall than the wall can
in its turn reflect on to it. But though the shadow on the shade side
of the wall is lighter than the shadow on the grass, the shade side of
the wall will be darker than the grass within the shadow of the wall;
and this is not due to the local tint, the grey of the stone and the
green of the grass, for probably the horizontal surfaces of the stones
on the top of the wall, show as light as the part of the grass which is
also in the full blaze of the sun; it is due to the different character
of surface or texture of the grass field and the stone wall, and the
different effect upon each of varying degrees of lighting. So observe,
all these, the light and shade, the diffused and the reflected light,
the character of the surfaces, the local tints and the atmosphere &
distance from the observer, all affect the relative value of the tone
of the grass and wall, which value must be _seen_ truly before it can
be painted truly.
As I said, for simplicity, I have herein so far followed out the course
of study as applied in landscape only, but at the right stages I would
have the student, in exactly the same way, study the seeing rightly,
and then drawing rightly, first plants, then animals, then the human
figure; then finally I would let him apply his knowledge and artistic
feeling to design.
Art is at its greatest when applied. If the great picture, while
retaining all its merits as a picture, can at the same time also hold
its own as an element of decoration and lend its aid to producing the
general effect to be made upon us by the whole building, it is by so
much the greater. I would not, until the final stage, encourage the
study of any form of applied art. None of the figures drawn or studied
should be those applied to the decoration of a building, used in flat
design, or in any way conventionally treated or grouped. I would
encourage no study of ornament of any style, period, or nation. Our
need is for a system of education which will strengthen our inborn
perception for what _constitutes_ real beauty. It is comparatively easy
to learn to distinguish a beautiful thing from an ugly thing, but to
know wherein the difference lies is quite another matter. It is our
education in art that must strengthen our power to see what are the
essentially beautiful properties which the one possesses and the other
does not. We, whose work it is to design, frequently find the client
who has best been able to appreciate the difference between the good
and bad design in the finished result, will, when a design is being
worked out for him, be most emphatic in his instructions that one
by one every feature which has contributed to that difference shall
be eliminated: and the bearing upon this of what I have said, about
educating those who are not to practise the arts, but to appreciate,
will be easily seen.