It is not easy to be objective about painting when one is a painter oneself. It is impossible to look at something you care passionately about and yet remain detached, and I do not propose even to try. What I shall say about oil painting in this series of articles will therefore be biased, but it will be just as well if I explain my point of view and how I come to hold it.

A critic recently wrote that photography freed painters from enslavement to the visible world, an opinion commonly held by the avant-gardes, especially those who are not painters themselves, showing a fundamental misconception of the nature of painting.

Far from being enslaved by visible appearances, most European painters since Giotto – not to mention Egyptian, Syrian, Etruscan, Greek or Roman artists – have obviously delighted in the visible world of man and nature. The whole tendency of the Florentines, for example, was for each painter to develop his research into the nature of appearances beyond that of his immediate predecessors. Each succeeding generation added a greater knowledge of perspective, aerial perspective, anatomy, human proportion, movement, or expression, to the basic store. They took positive delight in the scientific studies which led to a greater and deeper understanding of the visible world.

Of course we know that painters were not striving after what we would now call photographic naturalness. No painter of any worth ever has. Had the camera existed in Michelangelo’s day – the camera obscura actually did exist – are we to believe that this supreme painter and sculptor would have given up his interest in the expressive movement of the human body and become some kind of abstract artist? In my view, good painting is expression of feeling or knowledge by means of line and colour, balance and symmetry. In other words, the artist reacts to life and expresses his reaction. This the impersonal machine of the camera cannot do. The artist expresses the camera records.

Self-Portrait, oil, (20x26") by Leonard Greaves

It is obviously absurd to suggest that because the camera reproduces visible appearances with more or less accuracy (either in black and white or colour) the original painter must no longer concern himself with the visible world. It should go without saying that we do not want to copy nature in any slavish sense. But see nature we must or we are not artists. We must see, enjoy, and use what we see, but we will selective and choose that aspect of life which most interests us. I believe that some aspects of life have a universal interest, and the bloom on a grape, sunlight on a tree, the twist of a body or the human face itself, have an interest which will continue to attract painters, and other people to their paintings.

The possible forms of nature are so various that it is difficult to conceive that the artist cannot find in them something suitable to the expression of his own point of view, and I would add the point of view of the society in which he lives. So, at any rate, it has been in the past. Even now, the abstract artist or the one who does not use representational forms must get his images from somewhere. In the last resort these images or forms must be studied from nature. If they are not, then the imagination is not fed, dries up and monotonous repetition will result.

But before discussing abstract art, I must mention the last really great movement of research into natural appearances. I mean impressionism. When you look at the pictures of the great leaders of this movement, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Manet, Degas and Renoir, you find one of the tenderest and most appreciative attitudes to nature that the history of art has yet seen. So much has been written about the influence of scientific theories of light upon the impressionists that I do not propose to discuss it here. What has affected me more is that these French painters showed us for the first time the loveliness of the enveloping light and atmosphere in nature on the one hand, and the absorbing interest of everyday things on the other. Furthermore, the freed painting from a too cramped and niggling technique and, under the influence of Japanese art, they showed the possibilities of a new kind of composition – asymmetrical as opposed to the formal or classical kind of composition which European artists had used for so long.

I would add that in the expressive use and handling of pigment, what the French call matière, the impressionists reached a climax in European painting. What immense variety the movement embraced; magnificent draughtsmanship, composition and portraiture in Degas; light and atmosphere in Monet; form, weight and mass in Renoir and Cézanne; bitter and satirical comment in the witty line and astringent colour of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Two roots of impressionism lay in England, in the work of Constable and Turner. Whistler, Sickert and Steer, the great English impressionists, returned the tradition to the country of its origin. To this tradition I feel myself to belong. It is a virile one, and I believe it is capable if extension. But of course the crux of the matter is that I paint what I love and, looking back, I find the greatest encouragement in the painters and the tradition I have discussed.

Self-Portrait, oil, by Leonard Greaves
(At the time of printing in March 1949, this painting was in the collection of Noel Catto, Esq., Montreal)

This raises a point of great importance to every artist. He must take as a starting point those things and that aspect of life which he loves. Failure to do so means insecurity, and lack of conviction. You cannot do better than to choose as your subject something which you really love, however humble it may be, or however odd your choice may appear to other people. A painting done from this standpoint will, whatever its shortcomings, communicate something of the artists conviction to the spectator. Do not fear to resemble your masters or imagine that at all costs you must be original. If you can make a small contribution to a tradition, your originality is assured. After all, the early Leonardo is almost indistinguishable from his master, Verrochio, the early Degas akin to Ingres, and even the vastly inventive Picasso was at an early stage a close imitator of Toulouse-Lautrec. In any case, just as your handwriting is different from that of those who taught you to write, so your paintings will inevitably bear a personal mark and differ that much from those of your teachers. Great originality of vision can certainly not be forced. It must come from a natural originality of mind, and if it does not come naturally it cannot be forced into existence. Many modest but valuable talents have been spoiled in recent years by just this feverish search for originality.

At the same time let your study of the masters range as wide as possible, especially at the beginning. Art is sometimes a greater instructor than life. Great paintings teach us to see what we could not see before. No one seems to have observed the reflected colour in shadows before the impressionists taught that they are not black. And for my part I must confess that my love of nature – particularly landscape – was simulated in the first place not by a love of countryside, but by a love of Turner and Constable.

So far I have talked about what the artist sees with his physical eye – what he sees outwardly. But there are those who find the reality within themselves more interesting than the reality without. These, the visionary or subjective artists, are certainly as justified as those following a contrary path. Blake was perhaps the perfect type of visionary artist, and many romantic artists, such as the pre Raphaelites, were essentially of this kind. Present day surrealists and neo-romantics also follow in this tradition. Surrealism, and to a certain extent of the new romanticism, is largely an art of fantasy, and its subject matter is taken not so much from the visible world as we see it when we are awake, as rather from that other world of dreams which the surrealists believe to contain certain truths more real (sur-real) than those of the waking world.

For a consideration of abstract painting let us go back for a moment to the impressionists. Two of their number, while recognising the importance of light and atmosphere, wished to recover some of the structure and solidity of classical art – Renoir and Cézanne of whom Cézanne has had the most influence on modern developments. It was upon one of his statements describing the fundamental forms common to all life as the cube, the sphere and the cylinder, that the cubists built their theory and practice. Picasso, Gris, and Braque, believing that they must return to these fundamentals, and believing that the most important aspect of a picture is its formal one, developed an austere monochromatic art in which object were broken down in their basic solids – hence the name cubism. Later on colour crept in, various schools of abstraction developed, and these went further still in breaking up nature into abstract shapes. I said previously that painters expressed their feelings by line and colour. The abstract artists merely carried this concept to its logical conclusion. They believed that too great an emphasis on representing visible things, or what they would have called the literary element, obscured the basic nature of art. Without discussing the truth or falsehood of this belief, I should say that if only because of the carefully planned way in which abstract painters and cubists compose their pictures, there is much to be learned from them about the art of picture making.

I hope I have made it clear where my own sympathies lie, but I think we should recognise the importance of other views – of which I have had space space for only a few – and I think they may well have much to teach us, for it is impossible to be too catholic in studying the views and works of other artists. A wise person learns to appreciate the finest qualities in all forms of art rather than advocate one from as supreme value.

This article is taken from the March 1949 issue of The Artist.
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