International studio (48.1913)

Charles John Collings

is new. Indeed, this matter of quality in method
is, to artists especially, one of the most remarkable
features of Mr. Collings’s art. That after all the
experiments of generations of workers with colour
on paper a man should in our day show us an
absolutely new effect and quality obtainable with
these materials verges on the incredible, and few
artists indeed can be found to accept the fact save
from the evidence of their own eyes. And how
perfectly his method lends itself to the rendering
of the crystalline air, the unsmirched snows, the
pure light and colour of these mountain solitudes !
But this art goes further than any mere happy and
dexterous rendering of the outward physical beauty
of lake or mountain, for there is a “ spirituality ” in
these drawings which nothing surpasses within my
knowledge of landscape art. Standing before these
few square inches of framed paper, we feel the awe
of great sanctuaries where abide Presences. Here
Silence broods for ever on that far off peak, and
the spirit of Solitude dwells untroubled by man and
his works amid the unsullied snow and ice. On
that pinnacle of white piercing the heavens light
inaccessible has for ever a resting-place. By what
magic of selection and rendering, by what subtlety
of drawing or colour, such emotions and imagina-
tions are evolved in our souls it is difficult, in fact
impossible, to analyse. All that can with certainty
be said is that only an emotional ecstasy of vision
could so transfuse peak and ravine, lake and sky, that
all material substance, water, rock, and tree, becomes
lucent, so that while we see only the essence of
things we yet know them for what they are, lake
and cloud and mountain.
An analysis of the technique and craftsmanship
of these water-colours reveals characteristics both
interesting and instructive. The drawing is instinc-
tive, it creates as well as records; nevertheless the
localities depicted are recognisable by all who
know them. This innate sense of form enables
the artist so to dispose and pattern his colour and
tones as to give with truth the configuration of
mountain and valley and plain; indeed, only a
phonetic summary of the drawing could present
within such restricted compass these panoramic
glimpses of the Rocky Mountains. We find no
meticulous topographic detail in these bold con-
structive lines and angles and curves, yet what have
they missed that matters ?
The composition of a picture can proceed from
two principles, which, while to a certain extent
mutually inclusive, yet contain essential differences.
In one—and the more generally adopted—the
main principle is the recession from the spectator in

perspective, and consequent diminution, in pictorial
dimensions, of the objects forming the subject,
accompanied by a corresponding gradation, espe-
cially in landscape, of their local tones and colours
towards vanishing-point. Turner’s Crossing the
Brook will serve as an example, showing also to
what a pinnacle of beauty this method can attain.
Nevertheless artists in our day have elected to
consider that form of pictorial composition higher
which depends on the juxtaposition of objects,
tones, and colour decoratively designed together
like the pattern of a carpet or of a bird’s wing.
Perspective, linear and aerial, must not change the
decorative effect into a mere opening in the wall or
an outlook through a window. Brangwyn in our
day, the Primitives in earlier times, conform to this
latter method, as does Mr. Collings. His drawings
never suggest examples in a text-book of perspective;
they are as purely decorative as a piece of inlay ;
yet though he disdains the conventional and easier
methods he rivals them by the ease with which he
gives us space, height and mass, distance and air.
Of the feast of colour displayed in this exhibition
it is difficult to speak in terms which do not savour
of exaggeration. Over all of them, even those
nearest approaching the prismatic, there is a delicate
veil, a sensitive withdrawing, as in an opal. Grey—
for him the word means an underworld of colour
shrinking as it were from the light of day—amethyst,
ruby, sapphire, and pearl in ever-varying degrees,
tint after tint, yet never the same, never repeated, at
times—in a measure arbitrary—the creation of the
mood and the moment. It would be hopeless to
attempt to enumerate or describe a tenth of the
fresh and fascinating tints and their combinations
to be descried in these drawings. Most of us
have had at times the feeling that snow is not
always white. We are conscious occasionally of a
yellow tone, more frequently perhaps of a blue.
But Mr. Collings shows what a gamut of colour its
surface can convey to the sensitive eye, for snow
and sky and sea are Nature’s changeful opals, the
treasure-houses of her fairest iridescences. In the
drawing On the Shuswap Lake (here reproduced)
see how the changes are rung on the lovely note of
vivid blue of the mountains on the left, through
varying gradations, green, grey, and black, till it is
finally lost in the sober tones of the white sheen of
the sun-glint down the mountain-side.
[In a later number we propose to reproduce in
colour another of Mr. Collings's drawings. Our
readers will readily understand from the remarks of
Mr. Davis our reason for not reproducing any of
them in monochrome.—Editor.]

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