Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... VI TECHNIQUE Technique--I dislike the word but can find no precise equivalent for it--is that element of the art of painting which has the least reliance upon the observation of nature. The subject of a picture may be some place or event actually seen by the artist; the design may be suggested by something in nature or may even be wholly copied from some felicitous natural arrangement; the drawing, the light and shade, the coloring, however modified by the artistic intention, must be more or less imitative or representative. Nature may decide for the artist what he shall paint, but she has no voice in determining how he shall paint it. The means at the artist's disposal, the tools he uses and his methods of employing them, are decided by the history and traditions of his art. On the purely technical side a piece of painting is good or bad as any other piece of craftsmanship is good or bad, according as it employs its tools and materials to the best advantage and for the intrinsic beauty of the material result, making a skin of oil paint as beautiful as it can be made. But modern art has almost entirely lost the feeling for beautiful workmanship, as well as the knowledge of how to produce it. Of all the traditions of painting which were destroyed by the pseudo-classic revolution the technical tradition was the most thoroughly annihilated; and the modern artist has had to experiment and guess in the effort to rediscover the admirable methods of the older masters, or to muddle through without any method at all, relying upon the closeness of his observation of nature to take the place of any mastery of his materials. We have even so far forgotten what real technical beauty is, that if any man paints with a big brush and a certain swagger of...