Landscape is a good subject for notan‐composition, to be treated at first
as a design, afterward as a picture. Its irregular spacings contrast well
with the symmetries of pattern, and when tones are played over them the
effects are new and strange, stimulating to further research into the
mysteries of tone. Such an exercise leads to the appreciation of landscape
pictures, and is an introduction to pencil and charcoal sketching from
nature, to monotypes and etching.
Notan in landscape, a harmony of tone‐relations, must not be mistaken for
light‐and‐shadow which is only one effect or accident. Like all other
facts of external nature, light‐and‐shadow must be expressed in art‐form.
The student under the spell of the academic dictum “Paint what you see and
as you see it” feels that he must put down every accidental shadow “just
as it is in nature” or be false to himself and false to art. He finds
later that accurate record is good and right in studies or sketches but
may be wrong in a picture or illustration. No accidents enter into
pictures, but every line, light, and dark must be part of a deliberate
design.
Light‐and‐shade is a term referring to modelling or imitation of solidity;
the study of it by drawing white casts and still life tends to put
attention upon facts rather than upon experience in structure. It does not
help one to appreciate tone‐values in pictures. Such drawing is worth
while as pure representation and the discipline of it contributes to
mastery of technique, but it is absurd to prescribe this or life drawing
as a training for the landscape painter. Its influence is only indirect,
for modeling is of secondary importance in Painting, the art of two
dimensions.
When a painter works for roundness and solidity he enters the province of
his brother the sculptor. In typical paintings, like Giotto’s frescoes at
Assisi, Masaccio’s “Tribute Money,” Piero della Francesca’s work at
Arezzo, the compositions of the Vivarini, the Bellini and Titian, and even
the Strozzi portrait by Raphael, the modelling is subordinate to the
greater elements of proportion and dark‐and‐light.
In a mural painting extreme roundness is a fatal defect, as illustrated in
the Pantheon at Paris, where Puvis de Chavannes and his contemporaries
have put pictorial designs upon the walls. Puvis created a mosaic of
colored spaces intended to beautify the wall; charm of color and tone,
poetry and illusion of landscape possess the beholder long before he even
thinks of the special subjects. The other painters made their figures
stand out in solid modelling, replacing composition with sculpturesque
realities. From these you turn away unsatisfied. I am not arguing for the
entire omission of shadows and modelling—they have their place—but am
insisting that flat relations of tone and color are of first importance;
they are the structural frame, while gradation and shading are the finish.
To begin with rounding up forms in light and shade, especially in
landscape, is to reverse the natural order, ignore structure, and confuse
the mind. The academic system has adopted the word “decorate” for flat
tone relations and non‐sculpturesque effects, as if everything not
standing out in full relief must belong to decoration. This use of the
word is misleading to the student; we do not speak of music and poetry as
“decorative”. Lines, tones and colors may be used to decorate something,
but they may be simply beautiful in themselves, in which case they are no
more decorative than music. This word should be dropped from the art
vocabulary.