CHAPTER XVI
DRAWING
Drawing is basic to painting. Good painting cannot exist without it. I do not mean that there must be always the outline felt or seen, but that the understanding of relative position, size, and form must be felt; and that is drawing. Drawing is not merely form, but implies these other things, and painting is not legible without them. They go to the completeness of expression. Movement, and action, as well as composition and all that it implies or includes, depend upon drawing, and they are vital to a painting.
Importance of Drawing.—Much has been said and written of drawing as being the most important thing in a picture; so much so, as to excuse all sorts of shortcomings in other directions. This is a mistake. Drawing is essential because you cannot lay on color to express anything without the colors taking shape, and this is drawing. But still the color itself, and other characteristics which are not strictly a part of drawing, are quite as important to painting, simply because the thing without them could not be a painting at all: it would be a drawing.
All painters fall into two classes,—those who are most sensitive to the refinements of form, and those most sensitive to refinements of color and tone. But the great colorists, the painters par excellence, the workers in pigment before everything else, those who find their sentiment mainly there, these are the men who have made painting what it is, and who have brought out its possibilities. And looking at painting from their point of view, drawing cannot be more important than other qualities.
Neglect of Drawing.—Great artists have sometimes not been perfect draughtsmen. They have been careless of exactness of form. But they have always been strong in the great essentials of drawing, and they have made up for such deficiencies as they showed, by their greatness in other directions. Delacroix, for instance, sometimes let his temperament run him into carelessness of form in his hurry to express his temperamental richness of color. These things are superficial to the greater ends he had in view, but we have to distinctly forgive it in accepting the picture. And a great colorist may be so forgiven; he makes up for his fault by other things. But there is no forgiveness for the student or the painter who is simply a poor draughtsman.
The effect of neglect of drawing is to make a weak picture. A painter, who was also an exceptionally fine draughtsman, once spoke of work weak in drawing as resembling "boned turkey." Lack of firmness, indecision, characterize the painter who cannot draw. Those firm, simple, but effective touches which are evident somewhere in the work of all good painters, are impossible without draughtsmanship. They mean precision. Precision means position. Position means drawing.
Proportions.—All good work is from the general to the particular, from the mass to the detail. Keep that in mind as a fundamental principle in good work, whatever the kind. You should never place a detail till you have placed your larger masses. The relative importance of things depends on the consideration of those most important first. Let this be your first rule in drawing.