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Living beings are characterized by movement and expression, but since the human eye does not have the same capacity for instantaneous registration as objective photography, it is unable to perceive distinctly the successive moments in a movement. An instantaneous photograph of a horse galloping, however accurate, would never give the idea of a gallop, because movement itself, as Robin said, is a gradual transition from one attitude to another. In order to, give the impression of an entire movement, as the eye perceives it, the artist must choose the most characteristic partial positions, even though they may not all belong to the same moment of action. This principle holds good for figure drawing or painting where skillful selection will give the impression of life, while instantaneous representation will only produce a frozen posture. Take a human face for example. It is animated with eyes and lips which have mobile expression. The way to make this face appear alive on paper, Or On canvas, is not to show the features at one given moment in this motion, but to seize the maximum expression of several moments and to put these together intelligibly. It is not possible for the artist to reproduce his visual impression in its entirety, nor is it his aim to do so. On the contrary he must try to interpret nature by showing the distinguishing characteristics of the forms he sees. Here again he has to make a choice. The leaves of a tree, the hair of a model, the undulations of the ground--these cannot all be exactly repeated. They must be portrayed through selection and simplification. The principal parts must be emphasized and what is incidental must be subordinated or left out. It is by his own selection and interpretation through an expressive style that the artist demonstrates his originality. It is the problem of the draughtsman to represent on a plane--his Paper, the multiple three dimensional appearances of nature, conveying the impression of light, depth and movement, as well as the texture of materials, by the sole means of the gradations and modeling in the grays as they go from the white of his paper to the darkest value of his drawing instrument. |