Studio: international art (36.1906)

D. V. Cameron

from the difficulty that besets most painters of that
camp, the incapacity to do anything except in one
lick of paint all wet together from end to end of
the canvas. This is, in fact, one of his great
merits as a painter—that his painting is always
planned in a series of processes reinforcing but
not obliterating one another. In candour, let it
be added that his choice of subject to some extent
facilitates this workmanlike ordering of his design.
He is usually careful to avoid over-complexity of
structure or colour too broken and tormented, and
here it is difficult to assign the proportion between
Scotch caution and a natural severity of taste
which makes the very act of observation almost
an act of design in the eschewing from the first of
incomprehensible elements.

Here we have a primal fact of Mr. Cameron’s
temperament. It is n-ot natural for him to essay
what is beyond his powers. This trait has enabled
him to resist the temptations to over-production
that picture-dealers have offered him. It also
forbids his grappling with material too abundant
for him to marshal, throwing off inventions too
rapidly for proper execution. For myself, when I
watch this most level-headed Scot in his persistent
progress, refusing to be hurried or tempted into
premature ambitions, exhibiting so much yet never
making an exhibition of himself, I am moved to an
admiration, sufficiently tinged with envy, to make
me class this trait in his intellectual outfit not
entirely as a virtue. I see it as a positive demerit
sometimes in his water-colour work (an art which,
for so many years, has been given up to the doing
of easy things), and, in his art generally, while

obliged to admit that it makes for complete
achievement, one feels it must cramp his ultimate
development.

And yet, looking back on Mr. Cameron’s career
as a whole, one cannot but be struck by the fact that,
so far from showing any sign of being so cramped,
his talent has grown to proportions which could hardly
have been expected at the outset. Nor has this gain
been merely one of economy such as usually comes
with years, and consists in the better placing, so to
speak, of the force behind the blow. The aim is
loftier, guided by a finer intelligence, and the body
of force at the artist’s disposal seems to be greater,
though not so great—and this is an important
point—as quite to account for the attention which
Mr. Cameron’s work commands, and deservedly
commands. In the interests of my readers who
wish to know “ how it is done,” this point is worth
elaborating.

There have been artists whose genius has been
so universal as to touch at one time or another
almost every phase of human character, who are
genial and delicate and gay and severe by turns;
and it is natural that such artists (of whom Shake-
speare is the typical example) should be universally
appreciated. It would be ridiculous to pretend
that Mr. Cameron belongs to this category, and,
indeed, his merit is of the very opposite kind.
Your universal artist is hardly guilty of anything
so narrow as a personal preference ; he mirrors
the world, but hardly tries to direct it. There is
another type of artist, and hardly a less useful one,
whose personality is as clearly displayed in what he
does not do as by what he does do; who shows of