Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of
figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired, although the
crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings over and again upon the
figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a word) of the different points of
the figure during the different hours of the day and the different days of the
week deep into the canvas, may be necessary. decorative painting
I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours, at most,
either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized. In this four hours
nature keeps comparatively still long enough for you to caress her with your
brush, and if you would truly express what you see, your work must be finished
in that time. I can quite understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing
statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think that we shall
all see that if it were possible for a human hand to obey us as precisely as a
human eye detects,paintings for sale, the results on the canvas would be infinitely more valuable,
first, because the sun never stands still and the shadows of one hour are not
the shadows of the next; and second, because this moving of the sun is affecting
not only the mass but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings
being in light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also
affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight illumining and
graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening the force of positive
shadows scattered through the composition. Of course, to be really exact, there
is only one moment in any one of the hours of the day in which any one aspect of
nature remains the same, but since we are all finite we must do the best we can,
and four hours, in
my experience, is all that a man can be sure of. oil painting reproductions for sale
We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the landscape has
changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen that softened the sky
light was, under the northwest wind of yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and
the sun shining through it made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a
neutral blue; to-day the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer
clouds, tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws its
reflected light on every object over which they float. The half you painted
yesterday,reproduction oil paintings for sale, therefore, will not match the half you must paint to-day, and so if
you will persist in working on your same canvas you go on making an almanac of
your picture, so apparent to an expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday,
and Wednesday as you daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under
Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the same, the
skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might think under such
influence it would be possible for you to perform the great almanac trick
successfully in your sketch. But how about yourself? Are you the same man to-day
that you were yesterday? If so, perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly
the same frame of mind that existed when your sketch was half finished. But
would you guarantee that you would be the same man for a week? oil painting on canvas
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