What, it may be asked, is this principle or law? Briefly it is the law of spiral growth and progression traceable in all natural phenomena. It is a law which actuates human nature at its best and which shapes all work done in the finer way. If we wish to see how it operates we cannot do better than symbolize it in the form of a motion-curve starting from a point in space and expanding in ever-widening curves. Thus:
This law may be found completely applied to one picture or it may be traced running through a succession of pictures, each a part of a creative unity, the whole manifesting the growth and development curve of the artist. In the first case the picture would have an organic unity of its own. In it the fluid motion would be seen coming to fruition from the initial point of feeling to its fullest statement as vision at the highest pressure of fluid expression. Thus:
In the second case, each period of the artist’s work represent a section of the development-curve. By placing the sections together it is possible to view his work as a whole and to construct the course of development which he has undergone. And we can tell by the widest sweep of the curve precisely where he stands and how much he has detached himself from the world of solids. Thus:
Needless to say, this motion-curve may be applied as a standard of art-criticism. Indeed it is the business of art critics to experience this curve in themselves and to apply it to all works of art. So far as I know it has never been applied. When it is it will transform art criticism. For it will enable the critic to judge whether a work is an inevitable growth of a movement inherent in the artist,—and to value it rightly and fully in its relation to this movement,—or whether it is merely a bit of clever brain juggling.
I have not time nor space to illustrate in minute detail the truth and importance of the application of this law to art-forms. But I may take one concrete instance of its existence and inevitableness, and of the growth and progress that result whenever the artist happens to work under its guidance. I have within recent months seen the existence of this law and traced the course of its working in the studies of a new and comparatively unknown comer in the world of painting. Here is a painter, Clarence E. King by name, who is undoubtedly working out his high destiny in terms of Art, at the bidding of a force to whose direction he is willing to surrender himself. And he surrenders himself not because he has no judgment, no discriminating sense of his own, but because he believes that the true artist works without volition. I know very little about Mr. King’s first experiences, but I can quite imagine that art-expression came to him as a bewildered dream. Perhaps he felt instinctively it was but an imaginary magician’s wand and the effect it ever sought to produce was far above the limited measure of the artist’s dead materials. It was an effect that could only be attained in one way, not by stone, wood, or canvas, but by direct surrender to its livingness. I remember once receiving a letter from Mr. King in which he hinted at some such transcendental vision of Art and indicated its difficulties—both aesthetic and economic. The latter will be seen to be very real when I say that Mr. King is a poor man, that he has to engage in a mechanical form of occupation which constantly opposes him with the dread of losing guidance and his real purpose, and of falling under the subjection of aims and methods entirely opposed to his own. From the letter I learned that he began with a longing to attain the maximum intensity of expression and he has ever since been impelled irresistibly towards this end. But the path was not easy, for it seems he became aware at an early period of the small measure of expression in the painter’s dead materials. He relates how one day he took his colors into the sun so that they should rival its livingness. But when he looked at them (in the light of the sun) they were dead. Then he bought the most expensive paint, he kept his palette clean, he slept in the open, watched the sunrise, absorbed its magic, and prepared himself and his materials in every way, as he thought, to express the fluid character of the experience flowing through him. He grappled with powerful feelings and sought to fix them in form. To no purpose. Apparently there was a point beyond which paint, like words, could not go. The fault, however, was not altogether in the materials. The artist too was to blame. He was a boy strenuously striving to transcend representative forms. But in doing so he neglected one thing. He made no attempt to escape from the illusion of volume and solidity contained in solid space. In other words he tried to transcend solids by the process of merely copying solids. He tried to express the eternal livingness of a tree by painting an ephemeral tree. This is the meaning underlying the earliest example of his work. It accounts for the expression of representative forms very slightly raised above actuality. In the second example the next upward sweep of the curve is apparent. The pursuit of the maximum intensity of expression is maintained, with the result that there is a further escape into fluid motion. And actuality becomes very much exaggerated as by a hand that feels the stimulating impulse which the steadily increasing growth of an unknown power brings with it. Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of the second example is the attainment of a greater freedom of expression. There is in consequence an increase of intensity, and as intensity is the source of rhythm,—rhythm being but the natural characteristic of what we call intensity—a greater manifestation of rhythm. This rhythmic ascent, if I may call it so, marking the growth and development of intense expression, is continued in the third example. The illusion of volume and solidity to be found in the other two examples is still noticeable. But the flow is at a far higher pressure than in actuality, and if the painter is not yet fully afloat on fluid motion, he is certainly moving in the desired direction. He is in fact true to his widening curve.
It is too early to predict what degree of intensity of effect Mr. King will ultimately attain. He is still a young man with an enviable future before him. And he approximates more and more towards an unconscious method of expression. He applies the natural law of growth and progression because he must. A time may come when he will take up his pencil and trace a picture as in a trance simply at the bidding of the inner flow called inner necessity. It is certainly hopeful that he has remained up to the present a fairly pure medium, having escaped the pollution of conventional art education. He turned to painting at the urge of inner necessity and expressed himself in intense form and color because such form and color were in him to express. The technical characteristics of his work are really a part of himself. He expresses everything with simplicity and freedom because they are characteristics of his own nature. It should be said that he does not aim to produce the so-called automatic work of art. There is nothing automatic in a fluid force organizing itself by uniting itself to a medium that is really a part of its own livingness. If the artist’s hands are guided by a mysterious agency it is not a mechanical process any more than the guiding of a plant into leaves, blossom, and fruit is one. The artist is really guided by that which is a part of his higher self. He surrenders himself to the guidance of a spirit which is his own, the spirit of Art. And in doing so he achieves his highest destiny. For in the complete surrender to Art lies the affirmation of Art.