Charles Hawthorne: Concluding Thoughts

"Three Women of Provincetown" by Charles Hawthorne

"Art is a necessity, beauty we must have in the world. Painting and sculpture and music and literature are all of the same piece as civilization, which is the art of making it possible for human beings to live together. When I speak of art I mean painting, architecture, music, the art of literature, sculpture, the theatre, in fact everything that's creative - anything that makes a thought, an idea, or a thing grow where nothing grew before; or a fundamental truth expand and show some new angle of beauty which calls special attention to its being a fundamental truth. All these things and many more come under the category of beauty which is a better name for art than the word itself."

"The most important thing is to have something to say - it's so simple as to be almost idiotic. Look at nature as a silhouette and tell how beautiful it is. You cannot begin too early to practice this, for a painter's job is to see a tone more beautifully than others do. If a man lives a lifetime and seriously and humbly studies these things about nature - the beauty of the spots of color made by objects as they come together - it cannot but react on him as a man, and, by the time he has painted for forty years or so, he'll begin to have a glimmer of what beauty is. If he has sufficient humility he may become eligible to help other people."

"You'll have to draw one of these days. No matter how much ability one is born with, training of the eye is necessary. Drawing you will struggle to do until you are ninety. We first learn academic drawing; how to put a nose in the middle of a face and so on. Then we begin to develop a sign language, more and more a convention of drawing from the point of view of selection, eliminating the small forms and getting the ones that express best the thing that we have to do. We make a convention for a nose and everyone recognizes that nose. But, if a man is humble enough, every time he does a nose it is as if that were the first nose he had ever seen. Each time, he develops himself, not the nose. Thus we never learn to draw. One can spend one's whole life and never really know. If we are lucky we do so spend it, for beauty of design and line is the final expression..." 

"This is my final word to you: See the way things come together. It's only a beginning but I believe it is a beginning. From it you have all the world ahead of you. If you believe as I do, that you have to draw, go ahead and learn; learn how to make use of all these things."

"As long as one is simple and childlike and humble, one progresses. Keep this point of view and there is no limit."

"The spirit that moved the greatest master is the spirit that moves us. He may do it more beautifully, but he approaches it in the same way."

To be continued

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