Quickness in seeing as in everything else comes from long sustained
effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes from
effort after quickness.
Improvement in Art
Painting depends upon seeing; seeing depends upon looking for this or
that, at least in great part it does so.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy.
If you look at it to admire it you are lost.
Any man, as old Heatherley used to say, will go on improving as long
as he is bona fide dissatisfied with his work.
Improvement in one's painting depends upon how we look at our work.
If we look at it to see where it is wrong, we shall see this and make
it righter. If we look at it to see where it is right, we shall see
this and shall not make it righter. We cannot see it both wrong and
right at the same time.
Light and Shade
Tell the young artist that he wants a black piece here or there, when
he sees no such black piece in nature, and that he must continue this
or that shadow thus, and break this light into this or that other,
when in nature he sees none of these things, and you will puzzle him
very much. He is trying to put down what he sees; he does not care
two straws about composition or light and shade; if he sees two tones
of such and such relative intensity in nature, he will give them as
near as he can the same relative intensity in his picture, and to
tell him that he is perhaps exactly to reverse the natural order in
deference to some canon of the academicians, and that at the same
time he is drawing from nature, is what he cannot understand.
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