CHAPTER XI
TRADITION AND INDIVIDUALITY
A picture is made up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of mental vision without words. This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the means by which the ideal is brought into the picture.
Line, Mass, and Color.—Such are the qualities of line, dissociated from representation; of mass, not as representing external forms; and color, considered as a quality, not as yet expressed visibly in pigment, nor representing the color of any thing. When these elements are combined they may make up such conceptions as proportion, rhythm, repetition, and balance, with all the modifications that may come from still further combination.
It is because these elements are qualities in themselves beautiful that actual objects not beautiful may be made so in a painting, by being treated as color or line or mass, and so given place on the canvas, rather than as being of themselves interesting. A face, for instance, may be ugly as a face, yet be beautiful as color or light and shade in the picture. These qualities, I say, do not represent—they do not necessarily even exist, except in the mind to which they are the terms of its thought. Nevertheless, they are the soul of the picture. For whatever the subject, or the objects chosen for representation, it is by working out combinations of these elements, through and by means of those objects, that the picture really is made.
The picture, as a work of art, is not the representation of objects making up a subject, but a fabric woven of color, line, and mass; of form, proportion, balance, rhythm, and movement, expressed through those actual objects in the picture which give it visible form.
I do not purpose to go deeply into these matters here. Elsewhere, as they bear practically on the subject in hand, as in the chapters on "Composition" and on "Color," I shall speak of them more fully. But I wish here to call attention to this abstract side of painting in order to show the relation between the two classes of things, the one abstract and the other concrete, which together are needed to make up a picture.
The concrete, or material, part of a picture includes all those things which you can look at or feel on the canvas; and by seeing which you can also see the abstract qualities, which do not visibly exist until made visible through the disposition of these tangible things, on the canvas.
Beyond this is included all the technical qualities of expression; form, as drawing; all representations of objects; the pigment by means of which color is seen; and all those technical processes which produce the various kinds of surface in the putting on of paint, and bring about the different effects of light and shade and color, form or accent.
In learning to paint, it is with these concrete things that you should concern yourself mainly. The science of painting consists in the knowledge of how to be the master of all the practical means of the craft. For it is with these that you must work, with these you must express yourself. These are the tools of your trade. They are the words of your art language—the language itself being the abstract elements—and the thoughts, the combinations which you may conceive in your brain by means of these abstract elements.