The Crown of Wild Olive
village. If you have not time to draw thus carefully, do not draw at
all--you are merely wasting your work and spoiling your taste. When you
have had four or five years' practice you may be able to make useful
memoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet; except sometimes of light and
shade, in a way of which I will tell you presently. And this use of
outline, note farther, is wholly confined to objects which have _edges_
or _limits_. You can outline line a tree or a stone, when it rises
against another tree or stone; but you cannot outline folds in drapery,
or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at all it must be by
some sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no good drawing can
consist throughout of pure outline remains absolute. You see, in that
woodcut of Durer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much to
outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he may
leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark sky
and the dark village spire; and the scene becomes real and sunny only by
the addition of these shades.
Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go back to
our question about tree drawing left unanswered at page 60.
We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, it
is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but the
difficulty is to keep organisation in the midst of mystery. And you will
never succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side,
and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through all
your early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your first
step must be to conditions like Figs. 14. and 15., which are careful
facsimiles of two portions of a beautiful woodcut of Durer's, the Flight
into Egypt. Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a time, but
thoroughly; then trace the Durer, and apply it to your drawing, and do
not be content till the one fits the other, else your eye is not true
enough to carry you safely through meshes of real leaves. And in the
course of doing this, you will find that not a line nor dot of Durer's
can be displaced without harm; that all add to the effect, and either
express something, or illumine something, or relieve something. If,
afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree drawing, of which
so many rich examples are given constantly in our cheap illustrated
periodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last year's _Illustrated
News_ or _Times_ are full of them), you will see that, though good and
forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by
thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way
as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together
a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little
careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the
same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any
fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will
imitate so much as one leaf of Durer's. Yet there is considerable
intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine
leaves of his, as well as of the grass.
When you have got familiarised to this firm manner, you may draw from
Nature as much as you like in the same way, and when you are tired of
the intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more easy
massing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10. p. 66. This is facsimiled from an
engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in manner,
the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough model
for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even so far
as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig. 16.,[219]
taking care always to have thorough command over your hand; that is, not
to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran glibly over the
paper, but because in nature it has actually a free and noble shape, and
you have faithfully followed the same.
And now that we have come to questions of _noble_ shape, as well as true
shape, and that we are going to draw from nature at our pleasure, other
considerations enter into the business, which are by no means confined
to _first_ practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letter
is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting of
correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only to
excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable from
directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, even
though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work.
Very faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[199] (N. B. This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous or
curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willing
to take the statement in the text on trust.)
The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We
_see_ nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of
experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the
dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the
object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of
painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence of
the eye_; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat
stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain
directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat
dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly
endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the
sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a
dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there
were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was
another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try
to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the
grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses;
and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was
really the cause of the colour in the one,--not in the other. We go
through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and
having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain
colours, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and have
hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned
to interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass is
yellow.
Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly
as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours of
nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in the
sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form
its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish
green barred with gold.
Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great fact
about sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience and touch
to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white, variously
gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience you
know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variously
darkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art of Painting consists
merely in perceiving the shape and depth of these patches of colour, and
putting patches of the same size, depth, and shape on canvas. The only
obstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real colours
are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must put
darker ones to represent them.
[200] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicate
drawing, than India-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paper
less: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides, you
waste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not for a
long while be worth the crumbs. So use India-rubber very lightly; or, if
heavily pressing it only, not passing it over the paper, and leave what
pencil marks that will not come away so, without minding them. In a
finished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often serviceable, helping
the general tone, and enabling you to take out little bright lights.
[201] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" is
the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is
so thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can let it fly
as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master
at real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is under perfect
government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause within a hair's
breadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest touches; and follow,
within a hair's breadth, the previously intended curve. You must never,
therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it
should be free, but that it should be _right_: in time you will be able
to do right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense;
but there is no merit in doing _wrong_ easily.
These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading,
which, it will be remembered, are to be made as _quickly_ as possible.
The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter it
is at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other lines,
and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to conceal
the lines as much as possible.
And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness of
hand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines in
Nature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if he
draws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you find
mistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present if
you find your hand gaining command over the curves.
[202] If you can get any pieces of _dead_ white porcelain, not glazed,
they will be useful models.
[203] Artists who glance at this book may be surprised at this
permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that the
pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations of
curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than that
he should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though I
am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw a
straight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw a
line without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Prout
could draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, nor
Tintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw every
line _but_ a straight one.
[204] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quick
touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigs
round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them.
[205] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in colour, a narrow
gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as with
the pen, to make the gradation go _far_.
[206] Of course, all the columns of colour are to be of equal length.
[207] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour is
always indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box.
[208] The figure _a_, Fig. 5., is very dark, but this is to give an
example of all kinds of depth of tint, without repeated figures.