CHANGE IN ART.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 49, 27 July 1908, Page 8

CHANGE IN ART.

The art is not in the message, but in its delivery. Fine thoughts do not’ make fine pictures, nor the best morals the best literature. The “real test" of a medium is not its pliability, for its very stubbornness often produces accidental beauties at which the artist never thought to aim. I would rather say that one of the “real tests" of the artist is his ability to take advantage of the accidents vouchsafed by his material. Who that has painted in watercolqurs has not known in his experience a quite unintentional blot lead to a result finer than the artist had ever conceived ?

The truth is that a work of art is something of a miracle. It may grow without anterior conception. Take the case of a monotype. One of the favourite ways of using this medium requires no picture tq be formed beforehand in the artists mind Without having the ghost of a notion whether he is going to produce a figure, a landscape or a seapiece, the artist smears a metal plate with paint, and as'he works it round and round covering the surface, suddenly he finds a picture suggested by his idle movements. With brush, with finger-tips, a wooden match—with anything that comes handy—he develops vwhat he has seen till it is ready for, a print to be pulled. The work of art has grown, but if conceived it was not in thd painter’s mind.

I know of at least qne among the most promising of our young artists who frequently adopts similar procedure when painting with oil rollours. With care he sets liis palette with glowing colours, he ranges them with harmony, and then he attacks the canvas, laying on slabs of lusrcious paint in decorative balance till at last the medium itself forms the picture which the artsit has only to disentangle and develop. I will not assert that he has no notion of trees and fields in his head when he mixes greens on his palette, but no picture is formed in his mind. He cannot say beforehand whether there will be figures at all, or how many there will be, or \yhat they will be doing. And I believe him the more readily, because I am convinced that the divine colourist Monticelli must often have worked on a similar system —or want of system, if you like.— Frank Rutter, in the “Academy."