John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing Essay John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing Please read the 2 page essay and answer the questions. John Ruskin The Elemen

John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing Essay John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing Please read the 2 page essay and answer the questions. John Ruskin
The Elements of Drawing
Part I
Everything that you can see, in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes only as an
arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded. [footno1-e:1 The perception of
solid Form is entirely a matter of experience.
We see nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a
stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that
the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our
recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye: that is to say, of a sort of childish
perception of these fiat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain directions, it is turned from
green into a peculiar and somewhat dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were
suddenly endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the sun, it would
appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of
primroses); and, if there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was
another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try to gather some of them,
and then find that the colour went away from the grass when we stood between it and the sun,
but not from the primroses; and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was
really the cause of the colour in the one – not in the other. We go through such processes of
experiment unconsciously in childhood; and having once come to conclusions touching the
signification of certain colours, we always suppose that we see what we only know, and have
hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret. Very few
people have any idea that sunlighted grass is yellow.
Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this
condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours of nature exactly as they are, and therefore
perceives at once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form
its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish green barred with gold.
Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great fact about sight. This, in your
hand, which you know by experience and touch to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch
of white, variously gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience you
know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined; and so
on; and the whole art of Painting consists merely in perceiving the shape and depth of these
patches of colour, and putting patches of the same size, depth and shape on canvas. The only
obstacle to the success of painting is that many of the real colours are brighter and paler than it is
possible to put on canvas: we must put darker ones to represent them.
Part II
ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION ; BY JOHN RUSKIN
For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely
such things as are beautiful in colour, you had not longed to paint them. You OUGHT to love
colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its
own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think painting a finer thing than
drawing, there is some chance that you may colour well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever
to produce anything more than pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in
colour, unless you mean wholly to be an artist. You may, in the time which other vocations leave
at your disposal, produced finished, beautiful, and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to
colour well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is
increased not twofold or threefold, but a thousandfold, and more– by the addition of colour to
your work. For the chances of your being right both in form and colour with a given touch are
more than a thousand to one; it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only;
but when you have to attend, at the same moment , to a much more subtle thing than form, the
difficulty is strangely increased — and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that while
form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or
wrong, colour is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that
you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put
a hotter colour in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant
as you set other colours beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect
at the time , but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be
done being previously considered.
You may give yourself pleasure, and be of great use to other people, by occasionally
sketching with a view to colour only, and preserving distinct statements of certain colour facts —
as that the harvest moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by clouds of
such a rosy grey; —that the mountains at evening were in truth so deep in purple; and the
waves by the boat’s side were indeed of that incredible green. This only observe, if you have an
eye for colour; but you may presume that you have it, if you enjoy colour.
And, though, of course you should always give as much form to your subject as your attention
to its colour will admit of, remember that the whole value of what you are about depends in a
coloured sketch on the colour merely. If the colour is wrong, everything is wrong, just as, if you
are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the words are. If you sing at all,
you must sing sweetly; and if you colour at all you must colour rightly. GIVE UP ALL THE
FORM, rather than the slightest part of the colour; just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a false
note, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note.
Never mind though your houses are all tumbling, down — though your clouds are mere blobs,
and your trees are knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences — so only that the
trees, clouds, houses, sun or moon, are all of the right colours. Of course, whatever skill you
have in drawing will enable you to hint at something of the form, even in the fastest sweep of the
brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least when you begin to make
coloured memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want
the colour, take its colour, and be sure you have it, and not a spurious, treacherous, halfmeasured piece of mutual concession, with the colours all wrong , and the forms still anything
but right. It is best to get into the habit of considering the coloured work merely as
supplementary to your other studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then
a coloured memoranda separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in hue, and entirely
minding its own business.
Mix your colours on the palette to exactly the right hue, and apply them thinly but opaquely.
Such use of the paint, called body-colour, will teach the use of colour better than working with
merely transparent colour or with colours mixed on the painting itself.
Devote a portion of your time to experimenting with your paints, quite apart from the business
of making a picture or even of making the colour sketches for it. Mix each of your tube colours
with every other one. That is the least of the experiments you should carry out. If you are
venturesome, and if you are young and a student, you should be venturesome on both those
accounts, you will no doubt eagerly design and execute many experiments with your paints.
Because the power of recollection is frequently found to be faulty, keep an orderly and accurate
record of your experiments.
As you have tried your subject with the cardboard slit, you must have observed how many
changes of hue took place over small spaces. In filling up your work, try to educate your eye to
perceive these differences of hue without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately,
like a mosaic-worker, as separate colours, preparing each carefully on your palette, and laying it
as if it were a patch of coloured cloth, cut out, to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so
the fault of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched, bed-cover look, as if it
had all been cut out with scissors. Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first
begin to paint in this way, and before you have learned the skills for modifying it; but never
mind; it is of the greatest possible importance that you should practice this separate laying on of
the hues, for all good colouring depends on it.
When you lay on a mass of colour, be sure that however large it may be, or however small, it
shall be gradated. No colour exists in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If
you do not see this, is the fault of your inexperience; you will see it in time, if you practice
enough. Gradation is to colour what curvature is to line, both being felt to be beautiful by the
pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types, expressing the law of gradual
change and progress in the human soul itself. I have profound dislike of anything like HABIT of
hand, and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to get into the habit:
of never touching paint to canvas without securing a gradation.
Lastly, notice that nearly all good compound colours are odd colours. You shall look at a hue
in a good painter’s work ten minutes before you know what to call it.
Due: 9/24/19
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Response”
Name:
1. What is the difference between form and color? Are they related? If so how?
2. According to Ruskin, how should you mix and apply your colors? What is this technique
called? What comparisons or analogies does Ruskin make between this technique and
other artistic endeavors?
3. How does Ruskin describe our perception of color? What does he propose that we do in
order to deepen our perceptual awareness of color?
4. What colors are “good” colors?
5. According to Ruskin, what other characteristic should all colors applied to the painting
exhibit?

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