Dunn Class Notes, Continued
I’d rather wind up in the nuthouse for having tried something than be a soda jerker all my life. Of course, we must have limitations. When an editor gives me some work and gives me no limitations, and then finally adds that the price is of no account, he places me in competition with all the greatest men the world has produced. But, if he sets down very positive limitations he arouses and tests my ingenuity—and I’ll think, “By God, I’ll give him something really swell. Something he never expected."
When I was in Chicago recently, I went into a class, a sort of club where seven or eight men were painting and doing good student work. Some of them had been studying for forty years thinking that someday they would become artists. You will never become an artist until you think you are one. Up to that time you are just a student and I think everyone here would rather be a poor artist than a good student.
There are hundreds of excellent draftsmen in this country. You’ve never heard of them and you never will. They are content to do nothing but demonstrate their facility for drawing. They have nothing to say. The only thing that will see you through this business is the first idea and urge you had when you came to school. All the training, drawing, composition, “isms,” and laws of painting will be just so many obstacles to trip over. By experience I have found that no amount of training and study will do it. It’s that first impulse that will drive you through. So hark back to what you are. Go down in your cellar and see what you can find, then take that which is yours, which you have found, and base your pictures on it. Be yourself. When a man has found out what he’s always wanted to do and he’s driven by an idea, he can’t help but put down something pictorial.
By all this I do not mean this is a license for poor drawing. You must be a superb draftsman. If it calls on you to draw badly, draw badly with infinite care. Then it is for a purpose and is no longer bad but very good drawing. It will not be anatomically correct but it will be good drawing.
Howard Pyle stood in front of seven or eight of us and with hands stretched out and tears running down his old cheeks begging us not to be the failure he was. He thought he should have been turning out really excellent pictures. I believe he was wrong. He was doing superb work but was too close to it to know. But life is short. Get going now and do something important. This is your life’s work. Think of that. You are going to spend every day of your life painting. Don’t waste any of that valuable time. A man who has an idea and paints it, knows whether or not he has or has not failed. He does not have to ask anyone. When a man asks me that, I wonder if anything is going on inside him. Only the man with the idea knows how he succeeded or failed. It’s a very delicate operation to criticize a man’s work. You can see when he’s got something from an idea, and you can see if no idea has preceded his work.
As I go around the room I find too many of you doing what brought you here. You had some small success in school. Everyone said it was lovely and here you are practicing that. You should give it up entirely. Get away from it. If that was adequate you would not be here. I think of this classroom as a hospital. Here you’ll get your theories extracted and you may not learn anything except what is useless. Too many are plodding along doing the same old thing. I wish you would do something wrong, not because you don’t know any better, but just to be violent on your canvas and do a lot of awfully crude things before you get down to doing something really fine.
Sometimes I feel quite discouraged because I am not able to pep you up and carry you along on a wave of enthusiasm. I’m getting old and have more to do in class than you have and I was kind of hoping you fellows would carry me along. I’m sort of like the thumb tourist. There are too many here who are standing on the art road thumbing a ride. You know if they started out to walk around how much ground they would cover and they might get a ride.
There are some fellows here with whom I’m not at all discouraged but they’re not powerful enough. They are not doing the strong, powerful things they should be doing. I remember telling one of the fellows the other night that paintings a picture is like a grab bag. Of course you know what you want, what you hope to get—but you never get it. You’ve got to be content with second best. If something happens on your canvas that was not intentional, thank God and keep it. I feel that you work a little, then divine providence supplies a little, then you work some more and pretty soon you feel that the picture is carried as far as you and providence can carry it. You ought to be able to take your oath on a picture. Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God. Almost all of us know that anything in light is lighter than anything in shadow but how many care to prove it? They say, “Oh the hell with that.”
You know I like that school out in Chicago very much because we would be in that drawing class not a sound except the scratch, scratch, scratch of charcoal on paper. Then somebody would cough and then scratch, scratch, scratch again. After a long while, I would grab a chair, lift it over my head, and smash it on the floor. The school seemed to realize we had to blow off steam because no one ever charged us for the stuff. The janitor would merely come around a pick up the pieces.
I was talking to my wife today. She was down in Wilmington and she said, What happened to you? You sound so different and so cheery.” I said I had just finished one set of pictures, and I had just started a new one which was going swell.
I was talking to a publisher today and he was saying how much he liked my picture—so simple, so strong, such swell character. He showed me a proof and said of course it wasn’t a finished proof and that the engravers had not worked on it. I said it’s an excellent proof and for Lord’s sake don’t let the engravers on it. Just then one of the engravers walked in. I told him he would probably get a raise the better the reproductions, and if he could get a better reproduction with less work on the proof so much the better. He said he felt as though he had walked through a window and was out in that grand country and knew those swell people.
So you see there are publishers today who want strong, simple, good work. This same publisher said it was such a relief to se my pictures. He said when these fellows today get something they think is dramatic it smacks of the movies and Hollywood and falls apart because it is not at all true.
I am not at all conscious of craft. It seems that when a thing is painted well we become too conscious of brush strokes, paint, etc., rather than the picture and the feeling we are trying to convey. If we merely notice the means and not the end we have failed our purpose.
Without pictorial conception you have nothing. It has nothing to do with composition, drawing, or natural phenomena although the composition should be good and so should the drawing, and the picture should not be contrary to natural phenomena. You’ve painted a hillside dotted with daisies—no hillside looks like that. You say it’s a dogwood tree and it does not look like any I ever saw. What you’ve put down for people I know are people, but they don’t look the way people do. But you perceived a pictorial idea and were on the way to a pictorial conception of it. It’s not just a picture of a fellow and a girl under a dogwood tree in a green hillside studded with daisies—it is more than that; it’s a conception of spring when these people are in the springtime of their lives. They are blossoming like the trees. In your picture you have selected a certain value of green to represent the field so that the rest of the picture, the blossoms and the people, would be important and vital.
Unless you come to realize a pictorial concept you are floundering around in a morass and you’ll never get anywhere. When I say “realize” I mean the same thing as a man who realizes a profit—cash in hand. When you realize a pictorial concept and you grasp it, know then that no picture is a picture without it and won’t be started without it. You relate your pictorial concept to natural phenomena to make it understandable.
A great deal of modern art which is pictorially conceived is not readily understandable because it is unrelated to nature; you can never finish a picture that is not started correctly and the only start is with a pictorial concept. With this knowledge an artist knows how to finish a picture.
THE END
