International studio (58.1916)

The Romance of a Painter s Mind


COURT OF ROMANCE

BY AUGUSTUS VINCENT TACK

The romance of a painter’s
MIND
BY DUNCAN PHILLIPS
Painting for Augustus Vincent
Tack is not merely a profession—it is an act of
creation, a solemn and splendid miracle to be
performed with reverence and joy. A good many
men who practise art as a profession put on their
art like an old coat and remove it at the end of
the day’s work to leave it hanging on a nail in
the studio. Now the making of one’s art a thing
apart from one’s life may seem, at first thought,
the proper attitude. And yet, in the work which
we call art, every true artist knows that his gift
of expression is not really something which he
puts on and takes off according to his humour,
but the really vital part of him, or at least the
outward and visible sign of the soul in his body.
It is because Tack has a reverence for his art
and persists in refusing to regard it as a profes-
sion that he employs his remarkably versatile
talent in the creation not of any one subject in
any one style for the pleasure of any one section
of the public, but to the expression of his remark-
ably varied interest both in the visible world and
in the world of dreams. For Tack’s conception
of art is sincerely mystical, but his perception of
life is spontaneously natural and his many-sided
work reveals attractively a many-sided person-
ality. There are two big thoughts pervading the
existence both of the artist and of the man, the
mystery of beauty and the beauty of mystery.

Many artists are interested only in what they
can see and in what they can explain, and so for
them the beauty of mystery does not exist.
But all true artists have been charmed—and a
little troubled—and forever curious about the
mystery of beauty. They cannot rest content
with the mere perception that a thing is beautiful.
They must know the reason why. There is a
cause for every effect, and since art is primarily
concerned with effects it is the business of art to
capture the cause. The artist is conscious of
being a knight in quest of beauty. But he need
not travel far. A fruit-stand on the street corner
which he passes on his way to the studio in the
morning will give him a new idea about the
sensations of colour. A faded Flemish tapestry
of the middle ages in a shop window or a smoke-
stained Japanese print, will start him wondering
how such quintessences of beauty might be trans-
lated into the living language of his own art.
Augustus Tack seeks to understand the quality
of beauty in everything. His mind is a richly
illuminated chronicle of mysterious beauties
desired, and sought for, and brought back, on
many an occasion, in captivity. He is always
pondering some fresh adventure in search of the
beautiful. Sometimes it is over the question of
selection that he ponders, happy over a delightful
point of view, intellectual or visual, or over a
melody of colours which he wishes to weave into
a harmony of pattern. Or, perhaps, it will be a
matter of symphonic construction, for here again
music is often the inspiration of his painting.

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