SCHOOLS OF ART.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19485, 5 December 1928, Page 16

SCHOOLS OF ART.

DAVID LOW DEPENDS HIMSELF. TO THE RJITOB OT THB JOTSS. Sir, —A Press Agency has sent me a copy of The Press for August 24th last, containing an article headed "Art Schools" which is based upon a cabled paragraph from a short autobiography of mine in "T.P.'s Weekly." Since this paragraph seems to hay.e aroused some rather personal comment in the town of my youth, I ask your permission to use a little of your space to reply. I am quoted thus: "I attended the Canterbury College School of Art till I found that it was doing me more harm than good as a black and white artist. Art schools have a tendency to strip you of your original approach, and to substitute a reverence for conventional technique, for which reason, amongst others, I would never advise a journalist-artist to stop long at any one of them." It must be obvious that I was referring to journalistic black-and-white artists, particularly caricaturists and cartoonists. I should have thought it obvious, also, that the term "original approach" was used in an intellectual sense. Surely only a simpleton could understand it as.implying a set of bTan new technical tricks, because, of course, there can be no such thing. Technically all Art is derived, and it is only in the application and development of accumulated knowledge that the opportunity for originality arises. Technical instruction in drawing, therefore, is not superfluous, even to caricaturists or cartoonists. On the contrary, it is necessary to them. But I think that the kind.of technical instruction useful to them was not to be gained at the Canterbury College School of Art twenty years ago.

For example: my "original approach" is in the vein of caricature and cartoon. Igo to the School of Art for development. I am put to making studies of "cubes," blocks of wood, carefully shading them up in charcoal. When I am considered sufliciently expert in that, I go to the "Cast Eoom," where, surrounded by a fearsome array of white expressionless busts and severed hands and feet, I apply the knowledge that I have learned from the wood blocks to shade up plaster heads of Homer and Clytie. When I have toned up their dead eyes with Chinese meticulousness to the appearance of petrified blankness, I proceed to the "Life" Class, where I makemore studies from a model whose "life" is only apparent when she is not on the job. When "working" it is her duty to imitate rigor mortis. I shade her up carefully also, after the manner of the wood blocks. Since I am to draw with the pen, I attend a pen-and-ink class, where someone comes around every now and then to pull together

and tighten up in technique my own sketchy efforts until the finished drawing is brought to the requisite family likeness to the wood blocks. This, it seems; is the regular routine. One gathers that the same kind of instruction which goes to develop precise draughtsmen and painters also goes to develop caricaturists and cartoonists. This, of course, is a complete misconception. The journalist-artist's business is not elaborate exact representation, but the rendering of impressions, the capture of life on the wing. He needs primarily a working knowledge of essential characteristics, so that he may be able to render an impression of anything, at any angle, without hesitation. Knowing the characteristic wrinkles formed in a sleeve by half bending it, and by fully bending it, is of more practical use to him than the shading of ten tons of busts. If there must be busts, he should see a series of, say, twelve busts of Homer sitting in a row, naturally coloured, each wearing a different expression, so that he could study the characteristic disturbance of features in the acts of laughing, crying, sneezing, and so on. He needs a real Life class with moving i

! model, so that he can closely observe just what happens when one walks, and just what one can, and what one can not, do with arms and legs; a class for drawing from memory, at whicn he can crystallise Ms impressions; a class for the analysis of character, at which he can discover precisely in line such things as what makes old people look old and young people look young, and what it is that makes a given person look different from all other persons, and how that difference—personalitymay be most emphatically rendered. In twenty years I have found no use for anything I learned from the School of Art, because, while I was interested in the Quick, what I did there belongs rather to the Dead. Very Still-life, anyway. While I do not suggest that the Canterbury College School of Art had a lower standard of efficiency than other Schools of Art in following the traditional lines of Art school instrue-

tion, I think I was justified in concluding that much of it would do me more harm than good. I know too many artists who can "draw" but cannot express anything. So I left early. (Incidentally, Mr Booth is wrong in crediting me with having written that I was never at a School of Art in my life.

' I have never said or written anything of the sort.) That was twenty years ago. Things may be different now. But we have Mr Booth saying that "Black-and-white art is the most conventional art there is." I know Mr Booth and his work, and I have a high estimation of both. I recognise that the limitations implied here are the limitations of his own outlook, and not of black-and-white art. His own black-and-white work is evidence. And we have Mr Wallwork, whom from his remarks I suspect of holding that infantile misconception of Caricature as a frivolous perversion of form not the exercise of an art but the exercise of a native "cleverness" proceeding from something called "The | Gift." He talks of "luck." The High ' Priest of the local Temple, who has to j account for everything, explains some- j thing he does not understand as an i "Act of God."

•Now, what would happen to a budding Gillray who presented himself at the Canterbury College School of Art to-day?— Yours, etc., DAVID LOW. 25 Helenslea avenue, Golders Green, N.W.11. f Although Mr Low is entitled to have his letter printed as it left his hand, it is proper to point out that Mr Wallwbrk made a further comment in The Pbess of A uglls t 25th whicb would probably, if Mr Low had seen it, have made a difference to his closing paragraph. —Ed.. The Pbess.]