Then study the bit of Turner work

§ 14. Then study the bit of Turner work: note first its quietness, unattractiveness, apparent carelessness whether you look at it or not; next note the subtle curvatures within the narrowest limits, and, when it branches, the unexpected, out of the way things it does,cheap oil paintings, just what nobody could have thought of its doing; shooting out like a letter Y, with a nearly straight branch, and then correcting its stiffness with a zigzag behind, so that the boughs, ugly individually, are beautiful in unison. (In what I have hereafter to say about trees, I shall need to dwell much on this character of unexpectedness. A bough is never drawn rightly if it is not wayward, so that although, as just now said, quiet at first, not caring to be looked at, the moment it is looked at, it seems bent on astonishing you, and doing the last things you expect it to do.) But our present purpose is only to note the finish of the Turner curves, which, though they seem straight and stiff at first, are, when you look long, seen to be all tremulous, perpetually wavering along every edge into endless melody of change. This is finish in line, in exactly the same sense that a fine melody is finished in the association of its notes. original oil paintings

5. Good and Bad Tree-Drawing.

§ 15. And now, farther, let us take a little bit of the Turnerian tree in light and shade. I said above I would better the drawing of that pine trunk, which, though it has incipient shade, and muscular action, has no texture, nor local color. Now, I take about an inch and a half of Turner's ash trunks (one of the nearer ones) in this same drawing of Bolton Abbey (fig. 3. Plate 5.), and this I cannot better; this is perfectly finished; it is not possible to add more truth to it on that scale. Texture of bark,art oil paintings online, anatomy of muscle beneath, reflected lights in recessed hollows, stains of dark moss, and flickering shadows from the foliage above, all are there, as clearly as the human hand can mark them. I place a bit of trunk by Constable (fig. 5.), from another plate in Leslie's Life of him (a dell in Helmingham Park, Suffolk), for the sake of the same comparison in shade that we have above in contour. You see Constable does not know whether he is drawing moss or shadow: those dark touches in the middle are confused in his mind between the dark stains on the trunk and its dark side; there is no anatomy, no cast shadow, nothing but idle sweeps of the brush, vaguely circular. The thing is much darker than Turner's, but it is not, therefore, finished; it is only blackened. And "to blacken" is indeed the proper word for all attempts at finish without knowledge. All true finish is added fact; and Turner's word for finishing a picture was always this significant one, "carry forward." But labor without added knowledge can only blacken or stain a picture, it cannot finish it. art oil painting reproduction