Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink by Donald Maxwell

Author:Donald Maxwell [Maxwell, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486834283
Publisher: Courier Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

(Cavendish)

ROCHESTER CASTLE

How is all this to be shown in one small drawing? It is a problem but not an insoluble one. Remember that more battles have been lost by want of good generalship than by want of bravery. What we must do is to manoeuvre for position.

Unless the printing of a subject like this is very good there will be difficulty in showing a delicate and complicated distance in contrast to a vigorous foreground. The lines of the distant work will tend to coarseness by inking and pressure if they are in an isolated position on the paper. However, if these distant lines are intersected by strong foreground objects, such as tree trunks cutting across them, their delicacy will be saved. The heavy lines of the tree work will take the weight of the cylinder and thus the fine lines will not be over-inked or over-impressed.

I walked miles up and down hill and viewed Burston from every conceivable angle before I settled down to the view I have depicted. By getting the oast-houses so that they overtopped the horizon on the left and by using an apple tree to advantage on the right, I protected the delicate distance and thus maintained some of the effect of recession in the vast campagne that Kipling would call "the blue goodness of the Weald." You may think, possibly, that I have over-laboured the point about indifferent printings, and that bitter experience has developed in me what psychologists call a complex. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have often worked for publishers who see to it that the printing they do is quite perfect. However, I recognize that the experience I have obtained in negotiating the difficulties of bad printing have stood me in good stead even when the reproduction is excellent. It is difficult to say why exactly; I suppose it is that dodging difficulties and pitfalls teaches the artist never to draw without thinking. Drawing without thinking has been the downfall of many a clever penman who at last develops a facile technique of which the public soon tires.

I remember once having a pupil who developed this fatal facility. He found a ready and effective way of expressing tiled roofs and old brick walls. Everything that had any likeness to masonry or venerable architecture came off quite well, but he began to take the easy road of using this technique for trees and grass and clouds, and worse still, for waves of the sea. Anything more painful than the effect of a strong south-westerly wind churning the channel into ridges of bricks and mortar it would be difficult to imagine, and this was just the effect of his sea pieces.

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