The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin (acx book reading .TXT) 📖

152. My dear Reader,—If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in color, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or blue, or gray. You ought to love color, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to color because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may color well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in color, unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to color well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is increased—not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more—by the addition of color to your work. For the chances are more than a thousand to one against your being right both in form and color with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased,—and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, color is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter color in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colorist.

153. But though you cannot produce finished colored drawings of any value, you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other people, by occasionally sketching with a view to color only; and preserving distinct statements of certain color facts—as that the harvest moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by clouds of such and such a rosy gray; that the mountains at evening were in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for color; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy color.

154. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your subject as your attention to its color will admit of, remember that the whole value of what you are about depends, in a colored sketch, on the color merely. If the color is wrong, everything is wrong: just as, if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you color at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the slightest part of the color: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind though your houses are all tumbling down,—though your clouds are mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences,—so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon, are of the right colors. Of course, the discipline you have gone through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its color, and be sure you have it, and not a spurious, treacherous, half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong, and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of considering the colored work merely as supplementary to your other studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a colored memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however, bears chiefly on large and distant subjects: in foregrounds and near studies, the color cannot be had without a good deal of definition of form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you will not have the right quantity of color in each bit of moss pattern, and then none of the colors will look right; but it always simplifies the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied, when necessary, to fail of all but that.

155. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting coloring, which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope, at present, to set you pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your reach;—and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.

156. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, not moist colors: grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning, keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors to be used in broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be able always to get good and pure color when you need it; and force yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[41] afford us, I am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice. Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colors have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again. William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, is very neat in his practice; so, I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the more particular you are about your colors the more you will get into a deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in coloring comes of this deliberation.

157. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors in order to pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to shape your masses more quietly, and play the colors about with more ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.

158. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, constitutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-color is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of atmosphere without tenfold labor. And if you hear it said that the body-color looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent color, those glows and glooms are not the noblest aim of art. After many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[42] and to enjoy, in general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been reached in dead color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.

159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (quite accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can ever be.

160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is no vehicle or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good color in oil, water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may have to ground with one color; to touch it with fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to re-enforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go straight