Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist – Heaven forgive them – but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips.
Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction.
Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.
A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others.
Many of the old masters of watercolour painted from notes, with enthusiasm either unabated or renewed. It is hard to assume the same degree of concentration in the studio, but not impossible.
It is remarkable how very individual technique becomes in watercolour. Every man of personality finally arrives at a method peculiarly his own, as unique as his own fingerprint.
Many rules for the creation of colour schemes have been published in recent years, but, while they are popular in commercial studies, I know of no creative artist who employs them. They are, per se, restrictive; their use precludes any chance of adventuring in this interesting field.
However exquisite the contours or the colours of clouds, trees, rivers or hills, may be in themselves, they must be sacrificed if they do not conform with the general plan.
Beauty, pleasure, and the good things of life are intensified, and perhaps only exist, by reason of contrast.
There must be a judicious arrangement of all the parts. Considered conversely, the artist’s task is to fill his panel with a design that conforms to its shape and is beautiful in itself.
Appreciation is the breath of life to the creative artist, and in spite of modern conditions, there is enough abroad to sustain him. But his name is now legion; he competes with the dead as well as the living; and the rewards and honours seem attenuated by division.
The play of sunlight is amusement enough for a lazy man...
Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.
Drawing is the representation of form – the graphic expression of a visual experience.
In most natural scenes there is a prevailing colour, which the landscape painter must learn to identify, and which must prevail also in a slightly exaggerated form, in his painting, for the sake of truth, harmony and unity.
The student’s ambition should be to become a painter’s painter, rather than a popular painter. The approbation of fellow artists based on sympathy and understanding is manifestly better than the fickle or fast homage of the greater public.
When spring is here the sketcher begins to look over his equipment and relishes in anticipation the soothing hours he will spend in the open, warmed by the sun, fanned by the breeze, charmed by the manifold delights of nature.
The syllogism art for art’s sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.
The artist reserves the right to remove a blot on the landscape, to change positions of things, to suit his composition, providing only that he does not transgress the laws of probability.
A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.