the individual artist himself,
and nobody can help him much here. He must ever be on the look out for
those visions his imagination stirs within him, and endeavour, however
haltingly at first, to give them some sincere expression. Try always
when your mind is filled with some pictorial idea to get something put
down, a mere fumbled expression possibly, but it may contain the germ.
Later on the same idea may occur to you again, only it will be less
vague this time, and a process of development will have taken place. It
may be years before it takes sufficiently definite shape to justify a
picture; the process of germination in the mind is a slow one. But try
and acquire the habit of making some record of what pictorial ideas pass
in the mind, and don't wait until you can draw and paint well to begin.
Qualities of drawing and painting don't matter a bit here, it is the
sensation, the feeling for the picture, that is everything.

If knowledge of the rhythmic properties of lines and masses will not
enable you to compose a fine picture, you may well ask what is their
use? There may be those to whom they are of no use. Their artistic
instincts are sufficiently strong to need no direction. But such natures
are rare, and it is doubtful if they ever go far, while many a painter
might be saved a lot of worry over something in his picture that "won't
come" did he but know more of the principle of pictorial design his work
is transgressing. I feel certain that the old painters, like the
Venetians, were far more systematic and had far more hard and fast
principles of design than ourselves. They knew the science of their
craft so well that they did not so often have to call upon their
artistic instinct to get them out of difficulties. Their artistic
instinct was free to attend to higher things, their knowledge of the
science of picture-making keeping them from many petty mistakes that a
modern artist falls into. The desire of so many artists in these days to
cut loose from tradition and start all over again puts a very severe
strain upon their intuitive faculties, and keeps them occupied
correcting things that more knowledge of some of the fundamental
principles that don't really alter and that are the same in all schools
would have saved them. Knowledge in art is like a railway built behind
the pioneers who have gone before; it offers a point of departure for
those who come after, further on into the unknown country of nature's
secre