Charles Hawthorne on Landscapes

Landscape by Charles Hawthorne

"The weight and value of a work of art depends wholly on its big simplicity. We begin and end with the careful study of the great spots in relation one to another. Do the simple thing and do it well. Try to see large simple spots - do the obvious first. When you go out to paint and things mean only spots of color to you, you have your painter's eye with you. Make a house a note of color, make the blinds and windows a note of color, make the trees a note, the grass a note, the shadows also and make the sky keep away from it.

See if you can't simply put down spots of color and let the results take care of themselves. You have got to be able to see these spots come together without outline and let the outline come after. Look to the center of color spots and don't be so particular about where the edges come together.

Don't depend upon outline to make dark against light - it's all a matter of silhouettes. To paint a tree look at the sky in comparison. See the tree in relation to the sky, the house, the road. 

Don't see so many little things. Refuse to see details. You don't have to draw the whole town if you paint. Better put it down so that it sits in air than to make a better drawing without the vitality. Have a large general vision so you can discriminate. However, one has to be very careful what one says about drawing, for it isn't that I don't want you to bother with drawing but that I don't want you to do it at the expense of the other thing.

If you will only put a spot of color in the right relation to other spots, you will see how little drawing it takes to make form. Let color make form, do not make form and color it. Work with your color as if you were creating mass, like a sculptor with his clay. Interest yourself in the relation of one color to another. In this way your color rather than drawing creates form. The values rather than the drawing make a boat stay behind the piles of a wharf.

How many people pass this place every day and never see it! Once it is seen, painted, and put into a frame everyone will come to look at it. It's the artist's business,the painter's job to point out to the public the beauties of nature."

 

To be continued

 

(Excerpts from "Hawthorne on Painting" by Charles Webster Hawthorne.)