Studio: international art (40.1907)

James Charles

“GIRL AT THE WELL—CAPRl”

painter works in a wonderful luminous world : it is
not easy for him to make his art full of charming
conceits if he is true in facing the ever-baffling and
but lately understood problems of atmosphere and
sunlight. All the objects under the sun seem to
be mirrors for each other. The artist has to deal
with an impalpable world, a counterpart of the
world that is already known to art—a world of
reflections and transparent shadows, everywhere
a ghost-like presence of colour between the
artist’s eyes and that part of nature he has chosen
for his subject. This art is spiritual in its careful
separation of unessential facts from essential illu-
sion. Nature is hidden behind a veil of colour,
patterned out in different tones. No art can get
any nearer to a picture of nature than an accurate
copying of those tones. The sensitive appreciation
of the less obvious tones is the test of fine painting.

In this respect, as in others,
great art approaches “ to
the condition of music,”
and the great painter takes
pleasure for his eyes, as a
great musician for his ear,
beyond the point where
even the most cultivated
can immediately follow him.
It is for this reason that
all good art is educative,
never leaving us as it found
us. Henceforward we look
for further revelation — we
train our perceptions.

It has happened often
that artists have forgotten
Nature, so beautiful has
been her veil, and in the
pre-occupation of painting
they have forgotten that
pantheism which is the re-
ligion of Art. The tech-
nique of Mr. Charles was
an individual one, it had
grown expressive with his
experience. There was
something miraculous in
the precision of the brush
mark conveying the exact
tone with a certain quantity
of paint, and this in obedi-
ence to impulse, to the mood
in which he was working.
For such sympathetic paint-
ing is not done like carpen-
try, in cold blood ; it is done whilst the artist’s mind
is tense and his nerves tuned to a pitch. A real
work of art is always wrought out of a mood ; it is
always self-expression; it is more than “ a clever
rendering” of this or that. In the finest art we forget
art; it is a symbol, and we forget the symbol.
What is a symbol if we do not forget it and pass
to all that it indicates? We pass in Mr. Charles’s
work away from any memory of paints and frames
and exhibitions. He brings us near to Nature;
we listen at the lips of whispering Nature. We are
listening, as well as looking, before these blowing
trees. But we always have to come back to the
precise science of tone laid within tone. Art is
built only out of an unavoidable science. Has
music any freedom, though it only follows wander-
ing thought ? Its freedom can be explained away
by the unavoidable science. And in painting, the

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BY JAMES CHARLES

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