Certainly as regards colour, I never remember to have seen a piece of
one colour without finding a bit of a very similar colour not far
off, but having no connection with it. This holds good in such an
extraordinary way that if it happens to fail the matter should be
passed over in silence.
Colour
The expression "seeing colour" used to puzzle me. I was aware that
some painters made their pictures more pleasing in colour than others
and more like the colour of the actual thing as a whole, still there
were any number of bits of brilliant colour in their work which for
the life of me I could not see in nature. I used to hear people say
of a man who got pleasing and natural colour, "Does he not see colour
well?" and I used to say he did, but, as far as I was concerned, it
would have been more true to say that he put down colour which he did
not see well, or at any rate that he put down colour which I could
not see myself.
In course of time I got to understand that seeing colour does not
mean inventing colour, or exaggerating it, but being on the look out
for it, thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it
the preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the
wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting.
Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of
nature; this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the
question arises which half is to be taken and which made to go? The
colourist will insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who
has no liking for colour, however much else he may sacrifice, will
not be careful to preserve this and, as a natural consequence, he
will not preserve it.
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