Friday, December 13, 2013

III. Water-Colors 11 That I have personally refused...

That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle—I am now referring entirely to their technic—is due to my having painted all my life out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective, and that the staining of paper with washes of transparent color does not and cannot give themcheap oil paintings
Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping light—a glint of the sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky—ever be achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of paper—the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.
Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it, should it be the only dab of opaque white in the composition. The result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion of distance is accordingly lost. art oil paintings online

But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque colorforms part of the whole, the two systems blending each with the other. To illustrate, my own experience has taught me that in nature whatever the sun shines upon is opaque. The façade of a cathedral, for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large and small into which sink the blue reflections of the sky or the reflected lights from near-by objects, are invariably transparent. art oil painting reproduction

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