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THE PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF DRAWING

I

INTRODUCTION

The best things in an artist's work are so much a matter of intuition,
that there is much to be said for the point of view that would
altogether discourage intellectual inquiry into artistic phenomena on
the part of the artist. Intuitions are shy things and apt to disappear
if looked into too closely. And there is undoubtedly a danger that too
much knowledge and training may supplant the natural intuitive feeling
of a student, leaving only a cold knowledge of the means of expression
in its place. For the artist, if he has the right stuff in him, has a
consciousness, in doing his best work, of something, as Ruskin has said,
"not in him but through him." He has been, as it were, but the agent
through which it has found expression.

Talent can be described as "that which we have," and Genius as "that
which has us." Now, although we may have little control over this power
that "has us," and although it may be as well to abandon oneself
unreservedly to its influence, there can be little doubt as to its being
the business of the artist to see to it that his talent be so developed,
that he may prove a fit instrument for the expression of whatever it
may be given him to express; while it must be left to his individual
temperament to decide how far it is advisable to pursue any intellectual
analysis of the elusive things that are the true matter of art.

Provided the student realises this, and that art training can only deal
with the perfecting of a means of expression and that the real matter of
art lies above this and is beyond the scope of teaching, he cannot have
too much of it. For although he must ever be a child before the
influence that moves him, if it is not with the knowledge of the grown
man that he takes off his coat and approaches the craft of painting or
drawing, he will be poorly equipped to make them a means of conveying to
others in adequate form the things he may wish to express. Great things
are only done in art when the creative instinct of the artist has a
well-organised executive faculty at its disposal.

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Of the two divisions into which the technical study of painting can be
divided, namely Form and Colour, we are concerned in this book with Form
alone. But before proceeding to our immediate subject something should
be said as to the nature of art generally, not with the ambition of