IV. Charcoal 07 Courage, too, is a component part

Courage, too, is a component part—not to be afraid to strike hard and fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent, beating nature into shape.
As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the repoussé around a goblet. oil paintings for sale
Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours—three at the outside—the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark. It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next supplementary light and dark. flower oil paintings on canvas
Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you have done by repetition or finish. Let it alone. You may not have covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert, Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great, cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek. oil paintings for sale uk
Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable, not its point.

As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat, everything. That there are some subjects better than others, I will admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first, especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks glisten under its silver-gray sky,wall art oil paintings, little rivulets of molten silver escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background—and I always do—of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab, expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English churches—and I say it deliberately—St. Bartholomew's the Great, over in Smithfield. reproduction oil paintings uk