Author: Aubrey

Of the two qualities Speed recommends (movement and authenticity), I would argue that authenticity is by far the more important. Movement is a skill that can be learned, but slavish imitation of another artist’s style is far more damaging both to an artist’s development and to their motivation. Personal style is best developed organically, without a lot of striving and searching, by following personal inclination and experimenting – with materials and theme and whatever else appeals – with enthusiasm and sincerity.

“Originality is more concerned with sincerity than with peculiarly.”

Although originality is often sincerely sought after and the result of this search is a kind of vitality, it’s a shallow vitality that isn’t anchored to a solid foundation of vision or concept and is liable to change suddenly or abruptly as new fads take the artist’s fancy. For art to be a thing of substance, it must consist of more than novelty. Striving to do better will lead to originality and bring with it a solid foundation of authenticity on which to build great things.

“All [the artist] can do is to be sincere and try to find out the things that really move him and that he really likes.”

While originality should not be sought for its own sake, it is equally futile to attempt to recreate past successes – the moment, once passed, can never be recaptured. For Speed, this means that copying the style of the old masters is an exercise in futility; their style is inextricably linked to their era, culture and history.

“It is only by scrupulously sincere and truthful attitude of mind that the new and original circumstances in which we find ourselves can be taken advantage of for the production of original work and self-consciously seeking after peculiarly only stops the natural evolution and produces abortions.”

In some cases, conventions are necessary. Materials have physical limitations that the artist has to work within (or around!). Never lose sight of the medium you’re working with, Speed says, and confine yourself to the qualities best expressed by the medium at hand.

The academic and the conventional

A strict education has the unfortunate habit of leaving students’ work flat and lifeless and Speed puts the blame for this squarely at the foot of schools that fail to allow teachers time to practice their art or, worse, teachers who aren’t practising artists art all. The flip side of that coin is schools who invite a series of visiting artists in for a month or two, and risk confusing less able students by overwhelming them with methods and techniques.

The biggest mistake art educators make is to teach students to copy instead of to observe. Although ‘painstaking accuracy’ should be the goal of any student serious about their art, conflating technical studies and artistic expression, and rewarding and encouraging the former at the expense of the latter is as harmful to the student as the complete neglect of the former. To counter this, Speed suggests educators give awards and recognition for artistic expression as well as technical merit.

It is difficult to explain what is wrong with an academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and a fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine —the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.—it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; “dither” is, I believe, the Scotch word for it. The piston must be allowed some play in the opening of the cylinder through which it passes, or it will not be able to move and show any life. And the axles of the wheels in their sockets, and, in fact, all parts of the machine where life and movement are to occur, must have this play, this “dither.” It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount of this “dither” be.

It’s this ‘dither’ that creates an artist’s personal style and the ineffable vitality in any well-executed picture. Any drawing done from life and with feeling can’t help but exhibit this dither because the artist can’t not put themselves into their work when they work with feeling. That said, reworked pictures often lose their spark and even master artists struggle to transfer the initial feeling from the sketch to the final image without the impression given by live observation.

Unfortunately, only the technical aspect of creation can be taught. The character of a subject must be observed by the student; all the master can do is encourage it when they see it and, at the risk of repeating myself repeating Speed, “the test [of a quality drawing] is whether it has life and conveys genuine feeling.”With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the best way forward is for the artist to eschew all stylisation, aesthetic movement or convention and paint strictly what they see and, in doing so, choosing realism which is itself a convention, and a difficult target to aim for.
In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Edwards says that this is a common stage in drawing development and often the precursor to young artists quitting drawing altogether as the quality they strive for seems impossible to reach and their work seems to get less pleasing as it gets more realistic.

“After a certain point, the nearer you picture approaches the actual illusion of natural appearance, the further you are from the expression of life.”

This is, more or less, the textbook definition of the uncanny valley (a phase coined by roboticist Mashahiro Moti, and connected to  Jentsch’s ‘Uncanny’ (On the Psychology of the Uncanny, 1906) and Freud’s expansion thereupon (The Uncanny, 1919). The effect is enhanced by the realistic rendering of exaggerated features.

To minimise this effect, Speed recommends movement – “the nearer you approach the actual in all its completeness, the more evident is the lack of that movement which always accompanies life” – but also authenticity – “however abstract and unrealistic the manner adopted, if it had been truly felt by the artist as the right means of expressing his emotional idea, it will have life […]. It is only when a painter consciously chooses a manner not his own […] that his picture its ridiculous and conventional in the dead sense.”

Mass drawing

According to Speed, mass drawing is “based on the consideration of flat appearances on the retina, with the knowledge of the felt shapes of objects for the time being forgotten”, and is ‘the natural means of expression when a brush full of paint is in your hands’.

If line drawing is a collection of objects in space, mass drawing is purely the visual appearance on the picture plane.

The first western image painted exclusively with this technique was probably Las Menenas by Velázquez, which emulates the eye’s field of vision by making the figures furthest from the focal point significantly more less detailed than the Infanta at the focal point.

By painting exactly what he saw, Velázquez removes the boundaries between the viewer and the scene but in doing so, argues Speed, Las Meninas loses its emotional significance (something I find debatable, given Wikipedia’s assertion that it’s one of, if not the most-discussed paintings in western art history).

The final destination of Velázquez’s path is the Impressionist movement: “emancipated from the objective world, [the Impressionists] no longer dissected the object to see what was inside it, but studied rather the anatomy of the light refracted from it to their eyes.”

But the assumption that we see only with the eye is wrong – we see with our mind as well. The lasting impression any scene leaves on a viewer is not caused by scenery alone, but by the emotions the scene creates. A good painting is one that provides the same simulation and, by painting exactly what they saw rather than exercising design and painting only what moved them, the Impressionists were doomed to fail. Despite this, the Impressionists opened up new avenues of subject matter and it’s not possible to understate their influence on the art world.

Speed then compares the idealised make form of Michelangelo with Degas’ ballerinas, pointing out the difference in the way the two artists treat their subjects; Michelangelo’s lack identifying features and are heavy and stylised, while Degas’ ballerinas are clearly individuals, suggesting that this is a result of mass drawing being able to show the world-as-seen whilst Michelangelo was still labouring under the rule of line and spacial form and all its limitations.

Line drawing

Line drawing is the oldest and most common style of art and, whether the line is drawn, painted, incised or raised, it has been part of art since prehistory. That said, it wasn’t until the renaissance that artists were able to transcend the line into representation of mass (Speed credits Leonardo da Vinci with developing perception sufficiently of overcome the ‘colouring between the lines’ of earlier artists, including masters like Botticelli).

As Speed explained in the last chapter, using line to show the boundaries of mass is the first expression of our understanding of the world, and this is why many beginning artists struggle to depict lost edges and why many pictures that rely heavily on imagination are predominantly line-based.

“Most artists whose work makes a large appeal to the imagination are strong on the value of line. Blake, whose visual knowledge was such a negligible quantity, but whose mental perceptions were so magnificent, was always insisting on its value. And his designs are splendid examples of its powerful appeal to the imagination.”

Perhaps this is why many artists who draw from imagination sketch with line, regardless how the choose to render the final piece. Taking a line for a walk allows you to explore an idea in a way that blocking in masses doesn’t permit for.

When da Vinci said “the first object of a painter is to make a simple flat surface appear like a relievo, and some of its parts detached from the ground; he who excels all others in that part of the art deserves the most praise,” ‘relief illustration’ was novel and, although the artists of the time were beginning to move away from the outline and colour model, it wasn’t until Velázquez that the idea of a painting being ‘objects in space’ (as opposed to images of a plane) was challenged or vision was used as more than an aid to some mental model.

Here, Speed suggests that art has, in some ways, suffered for the move away from line. In accordance with his theory that line suggests an innocence or primitive quality, he feels that later works lack the freshness of a Botticelli, and highlights one of the dangers of an overly natural approach: that the viewer becomes distracted; looking not at the painting, but at the landscape it represents, applying the same information-gathering thought processes they would if confronted with the scene in real life.

For this reason, the artist must be disciplined in their approach to detail – “the accumulation of the details of visual observation in art is liable eventually to obscure the main idea and disturb the large sense of design on which so much of the imaginative appeal of a work of art depends.”

The key traits of line are simplicity, purity, imagination and design; excessive detail and visual fidelity is a detriment to the benefits of linework.

In Speed’s opinion, the highest pinnacle of art is “when to the primitive strength of early at are agreed the infinite refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the sublimity of the expression”.

In Speed’s opinion, the refinement and graces of culture for painters are an increasingly faithful adherence to the appearance of nature. The height of this refinement was in the mid-nineteenth century and, by the time Speed wrote TPaSoD, he felt that art had become ‘misdirected’ by influences from distant countries and artists’ response to  technology (Japanese ukiyo-e prints came to Europe in the 1860s and the daguerreotype camera was released in 1839). Artists, most notably the Impressionists, rebelled against photorealism and argued that it was impossible or undesirable to beat the camera at depicting reality; others, characterised by the Japonism movement, drew on the style and influence of non-Western cultures and began to paint in increasingly stylistic fashions.
I’m not sold on this theory of the decline of art, to be honest. It seems too much like every generation lamenting the decline of the young people of today. Although the early Impressionists don’t do much for me, I see it as the start of painting finding an identity and a purpose once it’s primary function (that of documenting reality) is performed better, faster and cheaper by something else. The start of art’s turbulent teenage years, or it’s mid-life crisis?

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Images from Wikimedia Commons.