xpress you do not learn; you grow to that. But you must
learn how to use all possible means; all the facts of visible nature,
and all the characteristics of pigments. All qualities, color and form
and texture, are but the means of your expression, and you must know
how they may be used. Your perception and appreciation must be
trained, and your mind stored with facts and relativities. Then you
are ready to recognize and to convey the true inwardness you find in
conditions commonplace to others.

You are to see where others see not; for it is marvellous how little
the average eye sees of the really interesting things, how little of
the visual facts, and how rarely it sees the picture before it is
painted. All is material to the painter. It is not that "everything
that is, is beautiful," but that everything that is has qualities and
possibilities of beauty; and these, when expressed, make the picture,
in spite of the superficial or obvious ugliness. In one sense nothing
is commonplace, for everything exists visibly by means of light and
color, and light and color are of the fundamental beauties. So arrange
or look upon the commonplace that light and color are the most obvious
qualities, and the commonplace sinks into the background--is lost.
There is nothing like painting to make life fascinating; for there is
nothing which brings so many charming combinations into your
perception, as the habit of looking to find the possibilities of
beauty in everything that comes within your view.

You must form the habit of looking always from the painter's point of
view. The painter deals primarily with pigment, and what can be
represented with pigment; chiefly color and light in the broadest
sense, including form and composition, as things which give bodily
presence and action to the possibilities of pigment. Shade, or shadow,
of course, is an actuality in painting, because it is the foil of
light and color, and furnishes the element of relation.

=Methods.=--Two general methods are at the command of the student from
the first,--to study at once from nature, or to copy. I think I may
safely claim to speak for the great body of teachers who are also
professional artists, in saying that copying is a means of study
rather for the advanced student than for the beginner. You cannot
begin too soon to study nature with your own eyes, and to accumulate
your own facts and observations and deductions. The use of copying is
not to find out h