The vine that trailed down stucco and over stone gave purpose to the wall: that its angles and firmness should some day be overcome. All that is born, dies; all things made are unmade; yet there is time, God willing, to capture not just its image but also a thing’s urge to be.
Within time, we make our histories to defeat time, which cannot be defeated
except, maybe, in our acceptance of death.
You must be sure
that the scene within the frame you have chosen is complete, no color or shade, no figure’s gesture missing or partial. And yet — at times the heart of living seems to recede from the moment:
the wall along the road is as untouchable as a sky, or the luster of grapes on the table before you dulls, but as though out of cunning.
Thus your prudence must be a quality of hand as much as of eye; remember that your subject is just out of sight.
In high green summer
matchless trees and hummocked clouds challenge the function of sight — that is, comprehension, which is a gathering. We gather, that we may imitate; we imitate, in light and color, that we might learn. And why learn?
Well, why is there light?
The diminution of bodies occurs by slow escape;
in distance, as in time, the alteration may be subtle, until all of a sudden only one object inhabits the foreground; the true eye, however, will note every change.
Circumscription Our guides to peopling a space must tend toward the invisible.
Once the palace is finished, why leave the scaffold?
You may employ a shadow or a veil, but only if you draw it aside.
Since it is all but impossible to convey the turbid quality of air, you must use other figures, instead.
If on the cathedral’s chevet there stands an angel and a kestrel often perches on the flute of its trumpet, do not simply illustrate a bird peering down, but capture it at the moment when, talons asplay and wings beating, every feather forces itself upon flight’s unseen and potent medium:
show that there is effort in the act of coming to rest.
Think also how you might show, in that gesture, whether the day is cold or warm.
We all have been struck by lightning:
roots of power leap throughout the body, the air goes limpid and richly bright, you taste every breath down to your fingertips. — The task is to retain a modicum of this transcendent moment and transmit it from your blood out through your hands and onto the canvas, there to be received by every pair of eyes that is willing to be illumed by that which it has taken within.
Distance breeds degradation,
a thing’s true form less and less clear the farther you become. Make it a metaphor, if you like, to discuss the nature of God or the fickleness of lovers. Meditate upon it a while, and see if it isn’t true that your only real loves have been near to hand, that all your lusting after hidden things, the occult and out-of-reach, has been no more than the sad groping of your small sad heart to find the impossible: itself. The fact remains, despite you, that you can’t very well see things that are far away.
Compelled by the heart and its voracity, the eye casts forward to draw forth the soul into possibilities, falsehoods, wishes that return to burn inside the flesh.
The hand and the brush leech this burning from the body, yet it always returns while life and passion last. Only to a few is it granted to look upon the world without hope or expectation, the heart within quenched and calm. In training your eye to pure receptivity, you train your heart not to lead; hand and brush become vessels, not instruments, and the world they bear is made known.
Yours is not
the rattling incoherence of a world without names. From hearing the poets, you may learn to paint gods with divine majesty; from assembling syllables, you know to make words, and from words, stories that instruct and enlighten and disclose to the mind, to its delight, the beauties dispersed throughout the world. Give every care to learning beauty, which is rare, and rarely perfect, but must be discovered by searching and meditation, by study and by daring. Fools look only within, so that their canvases show only their presumption: to find beauty without effort or example, or to do away with beauty altogether— which has fled them, who never searched it out.
Brick and plaster, sponge-like, absorb the histories they have contained;
the purview you describe — interior, exterior, the walls that divide them — must exhibit such patience as only the diligent ever shall capture; or nature will revolt, livingness abhor, against the freedom that has no past, no body, no movement, only glib parroting of craft bred from live bone.
Reception Though each body and its planes may have their specific hues, one cannot thus suppose that there are as many colors as there are things:
the pallet cannot devise uniqueness the eye cannot hold.
One learns to cleave: ever closer to nature; ever farther from the horrid and obscure. Nothing seen is dark; if when a thing grows lighter, another part must darken, the thing, its image, yet remains. Night, therefore, true night, may be called the death of the eye; what is hidden, is not; what disappears in light, has never been.
You cannot hope to capture the precise sheen of sap that bubbles and drips from kindling to flame that is white golden blue; nevertheless, you are tasked to show that flame, sap,
color, and wood
were in this confluence for however brief a time. Impossibility is no excuse.
Your discipline, like any other, is easy in the summing up but in no other respect.
To say it takes only words: you must learn to behold the world through the medium of your hand. Ancillary is this maxim: never forget that your eye is flesh, and flesh the eye’s meaning and sum.
Composition From the example of virtuous old men we learn that decay of the body does not mean decay of the soul, though it is through the movements of the former that the movements of the latter are made known. Whether the things you display are new and unformed or ancient and crumbling (or, as is more natural, both, and in between), you must place them in a relation with each other that will disclose their several natures harmonizing in single purport: if an arrow stands from a bare, bent throat, the eye will seek the bow, string now slack, from which it sprang.
You cannot let the ocean speak for itself:
it has nothing to say.
Without us, the ocean would roll on,
dumb, insensate,
all its meaning contained in the brute and wondrous fact, to which we can add not a thing, that it is.
The bud you paint is not as one arrested by late frost; you must convince that under a new and careful eye it will one day open.
If it never happened
that the wave and twine of your beloved’s hair in the wind caught you up unawares and cast you helpless upon the threshold of a great and fearsome mystery —then you have never seen what plain sight could disclose to you, let alone loved.
It is not simply that you must accept that there exists a correspondence between the lines you observe and those you describe; it is demonstrable, a fact of geometry, that the eye accepts rather than creates. —Or state the problem thus: it is not in disputations on natural things that we must rely on faith.
In morning, the falcon. In evening, the hawk.
In each time, the sun, low at your back, drawing your shadow long before, showing the angle at which its light strikes the earth. In between, time enough, maybe, to set lines on paper; time enough, maybe, to learn when and how to say good-bye.